Drones affect us humans and our environments in more ways than one. At the year’s WASP-HS AI for Humanity and Society conference: Creating Shared AI Futures, I gave a five-minute lightning talk about my research on the topic. My talk resulted in a fruitful round table discussion. In this blog post I will let you know about some of the key highlights and outtakes.
Our Skies Are Not Just Air
I started my talk by zooming out, and create an imaginary and playful invitation to connect with our own aesthetic and lived experiences of our shared sky. The song “Imagine” by John Lennon filled the room, while a puzzle piece from Yoko Onos artwork “Take a piece of the sky. Know that we are all part of each other”, and a photograph taken from the London eye showing the horizon, were projected on the screen. In the audience, some had to duck, because I also threw planes (made out of a paper fanzine) to remind everyone that the air is not necessarily only filled with just air and clouds. Each plane had a message, describing my research orientation and a design research agenda in the area of robotics and AI, to come beyond design fixations and too narrow problem statements. The fanzine is essentially about applying basic humanistic centered design knowledge in advanced technological research fields, which I refer to as Critical Robotics.
Observing Live Cases of Drone Use
AI technology has great potential to transform our society in many ways, but as Mark Coeckelbergh pointed out in his conference keynote, the transformation is created by specific industry actors and algorithms in play, where the effects are not necessary in favor of democracy, our community and our long-term well-being on this planet. Connecting to Martha Nussbaum, I pointed out how a humanistic starting point should make sure that innovation builds on the needs from real people in real practices, especially those in vulnerable situations and places. It is our responsibility as researchers to zoom out to see a bigger picture as well as zooming in and get close to understand people and their places.
My colleagues and I have conducted research on a real live case of drone services as means for regular transportation needs. An organization has been investigating drones to reduce transportation costs, as an alternative to boat and car transports of smaller items in rural areas. My research team and I have followed the project along when the organization have conducted test flights in collaboration with intended users in wintertime. As researchers we focused primarily on providing grounded and nuanced perspectives of affected peoples’ needs, their existing practices and attitudes, using interviews, observations, and a survey, with contributions from people in different roles and situations. Based on our study we found that even though a majority of people were optimistic about drone use, we found that drone transportation would add contingency, unpredictability, additional costs, stress and safety issues, to an existing practice – in a situation where robustness and predictability is key. Even though our study focused on people rather than the financial aspects, it shed light on the essentials of existing practices and the potential effects of the use of drone services.
Finding Alternatives to Unsuccessful Technical Solutions
After my short presentation at the conference, the roundtable discussion focused on how we can learn from the present to get more insight into the future. We discussed how the future is different and not the same as the present. We also discussed the need to sketch out very different alternative futures and solutions, and prototype these to fail early. It is crucial we do so so that we do not create unsuccessful and expensive technical solutions with high costs and severe negative effects. This is important in sectors such as in healthcare where it is likely to have real consequences for human lives.
The discussion also revolved around the need to both zoom out, and in, on people’s needs from several perspectives to understand existing practices and related needs. Observing real people is not something that AI can be prompted to do, you can only do so by getting close in person, and observe real people and their existing practices. How can we make sure that people, especially those in less flexible situations, are given the opportunity to provide insights – and lead us to better innovation for a desirable future? What is our positionality as researchers? How do we contribute to social, environmental and economical sustainable futures?
More About Social Drones and Critical Robotics
To know more about social drones, feel free to contact Sara Ljungblad, Associate Professor in interaction design at University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology at sara.ljungblad@chalmers.se.
To read more about the project and the project members, see The Rise of Social Drones: A Constructive Design Research Agenda.
