Welcome to a K3 seminar with Jakob Svensson, professor of Media and Communication Studies at K3. The title of his talk is:

Behind the News-Ranking Algorithm. Actors, conflicts and logics when implementing algorithmic automation

The talk will take place on Wednesday, April 17, at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.

Below you will find an abstract for the talk:

This study revolves around on the process of introducing and implementing an algorithm to rank and mix news on the front-page of a leading Scandinavian daily. The focus of this article is what happens to an institution with its’ taken-for-granted norms, rules and imagination, when introduced to algorithmic automation. This is studied through a qualitative methodology mainly consisting of interviews. The aim is to contribute with a sociological approach to researching algorithms with a focus on the actors, conflicts and logics involved behind algorithms. Actors involved can be grouped into traditional news actors (journalists and editors), and tech actors -(programmers, UX designers, data analysts, tech and web developers). The media group, to which the daily adhered, was an actor with its demand for profit, including the advertising and the subscription departments, as well as the newspaper brand and the algorithm itself. The study discerns three different logics, sometimes competing and sometimes intersecting: a market logic with its value of profit, a higher purpose logic of news journalism with its values of democracy, and finally a logic of personalization with its popularity principle and imagination of giving users what they want through an unbiased algorithm. The article concludes that while journalism is not completely taken over by programmers and algorithms, it is apparent that tech actors, with their values of user experience, rules of data-driven development and logic of personalization, are becoming a force to be reckoned with.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Dario Salvo, Associate Senior Lecturer in Interaction Technologies at K3. The title of his talk is:

Hacking for good. Mobile health, assistive technologies and the environment

The talk will take place on Wednesday, April 10, at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.

Below you will find a short abstract for the talk:

I will use the opportunity of this talk to introduce myself, my past research and my interests. I will try to draw a line to connect the rather diversified projects I have been involved in. I have had the luck to apply technology to relevant areas like health, environment and assisting those with special needs. Regardless of the seriousness of some of these topics, I have always tried to keep a playful, Do-It-Yourself approach when learning and using technology. Join this talk to listen to my experience and to discuss ideas for future research collaborations

The K3 seminar with Charlotte Sörensen, planned for April 3, will be held at a later date. Next K3 seminar will be on April 10 with Dario Salvo, new Associate Senior Lecturer in Design at K3. The title of his talk is Technologies for the good: Mobile health and IoT for the environment

The seminar planned with Susan Kozel for March 27 has been postponed until the fall. Next K3 seminar will be on April 3 with Charlotte Sörensen on teaching reflective practices in design education.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Solveig Daugaard, Visiting Comparative Literature Researcher at K3. The title of her talk is:

Media ecologies of literature in a digital age: affective interfaces and alternative infrastructures

The talk will take place on Wednesday, March 20, at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.

Below you will find an abstract for the talk:

At the K3 Seminar, I will present my current postdoctoral research project (titled: Media ecologies of literature in a digital age: affective interfaces and alternative infrastructures) and give a little background upon my previous research on the aesthetic reception of American avant-garde writer and feminist and queer icon Gertrude Stein where I have developed the methodological framework of media ecologies, interfaces and infrastructures that I intend to develop further in the new project.

In a Scandinavian context, my project explores the changed conditions of print literature in an age of digital media. With new materials and media platforms the production, distribution and reception of literary works and the author’s persona as an assemblage of different material elements have challenged the printed page as the primary interface for readers’ engagement with literature. The project approaches this in two different ways: First, it examines examples of innovative writing (Hagen, Börjel, Farrokzad, Aburas) that all criticize this interface, and challenge its illusory naturalization as a direct product of an embodied, empirical author. Second, it analyzes the emergence of new collaborative writing and publishing communities (OEI, Laboratory of Aesthetics and Ecology, Antipyrine) that break the dominance of this authorial interface by establishing independent infrastructures for literature less dependent upon the idea of literature as an autonomous, individually authored art form and attempt to integrate writing and publishing with other social, political/activist or scholarly practices. The project departs from the substantial divide between textual scholarship and the highly affective responses to and political uses of literature that have engaged many writers and readers in recent years. It sets out to update the definitions and terminology of literary scholarship to understand the changed interfaces and infrastructures of literature as consequences of a digital media environment to make literary scholarship better equipped to understand and analyze the affective impact and the socio-political potential of literature in today’s Scandinavian societies.

In my presentation for the seminar I will focus on the first part of the project, concerned with the persona as affective interface, and establish this phenomenon from Gertrude Stein to contemporary Danish authors Lone Aburas and Christina Hagen, and discuss possible connections to ideas of affective infrastructuring.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Li Jönsson, Associate Senior Lecturer in Design, K3. The title of her talk is:

Socioecological Design/experimentations

The talk will take place on Wednesday, March 6, at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.

Below you will find an abstract for the talk:

In this seminar I will dwell on my past and hint towards design research futures as a way to frame and present myself as a rather new team member at K3.

However, to talk about both past and futures requires that I situate myself right now. Hence, this talk will be focused on my main interest and concern, on the ongoing exploration of what a non-anthropocentric framework in design might be, as well as do. This is consistent with the discussions of a wider turn to experimentation and invention in recent nature–society debate – the view that experimentation is necessary to engender new forms of knowing and dwelling in and with human and nonhuman others. Challenging nature-culture dualism as designers enables, or asks us, to practice how to become posthuman-designers. But, how do we go about doing this – what forms of experimentation might we need to create mutually beneficial relationships and more ecological entanglements between and among this sprawling multiverse?

To question not just arrangements between humans, but to open up to an entirely different universe – or multiverse – of actors I have for a while used the figuration of the ‘event’ as a design exploration. This has allowed me to argue for how human and non-humans ‘equally’ come together in a process and allow for things to become different. One of the important arguments here, is that in constructing new types of collective life (and by that, sustainability) and in conceiving new technologies, we must avoid constantly disentangling humans and nonhumans. I will exemplify how I have in my previous design experiments been dealing with these kinds of issues. However, in continuation of previous work, I would like to discuss some ‘ghosts’ in my research. These ghosts have haunted me for a while, and takes the shape of core feminist arguments around corporeality, materiality, embodiment, affectivity and experientiality, and how we might attended to such sensibilities in humble ways as designers.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Temi Odumosu, Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies, K3. The title of her talk is:

The crying baby: On colonial archives, digitisation, and ethics of care in the cultural commons

The talk will take place on Wednesday, February 27, at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.

Below you will find an abstract for the talk:

This seminar sketches key concerns I am engaged with in a new speculative paper I am writing for Current Anthropology on representational ethics and care. In essence I am concerned about attending to the dead in the digital commons. I argue that as museums, archives and other cultural heritage institutions make their colonial collections digitally available online – providing direct public access to troubling and contested materials – unresolved representational issues are magnified and new dangers emerge. If digitised artefacts represent a form of remembrance, ensuring that artefacts are not forgotten in storage (a solution to decay), then what shifts in institutional practices could take place, if we asked questions such as:

• What does it mean for an archive or collection to provide open digital access to materials representing violated subjects who did not necessarily consent to being documented?
• To what extent are institutions taking seriously non-European perspectives on looking at, or engaging with, ancestor remains?
• How can we better understand the effects of unmediated, screen-based engagement with the material outcomes of biased and racist value systems?
• And, how can we extend concepts of caretaking and custodianship beyond the institutionally directed ethical guidelines, currently provided by professional advocacy institutions?

Exploring what an ethics of care and/or custodianship might look like when engaging with such questions, this seminar seeks to provoke critical dialogue about the delicacies of caretaking colonial histories both on and offline – histories rife with carelessness. At the same time, I explore reparatory artistic engagements with such digitised images, and further describe how metadata might be rethought as a cataloguing space with the potential to alter the imbalances of historical power.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Tobias Olsson, Vice Dean and Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the Faculty of Education and Society, Malmö University . The title of the talk is:

Warm experts for elderly users: Who are they and what do they do?

It will take place on Wednesday, February 13, at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.

Below you will find an abstract for the talk.

Abstract:

This paper examines “warm experts”—that is, nonprofessional persons who help inexperienced users come to terms with digital devices—and their significance for the use of digital media in everyday life by elderly Swedes. We analyze data from a national survey (N = 1264) and from qualitative, semistructured interviews with 18 elderly Swedes (aged 65+). Our data reveal that the warm expert usually is a closely related person, often a child or grandchild, who is strongly involved in nearly every stage of technology domestication, from appropriation (i.e., identifying the need, buying the item, and installing and adjusting it) to incorporation (i.e., choosing and downloading suitable apps, teaching how to use them, and solving technical problems). Although the clear majority of elderly Swedes have been online for more than a decade, the need for continuous assistance from warm experts seems to persist also among experienced users.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Alicia Smedberg, PhD student in Interaction design. The title of the talk is:

Modalities of Agency within Infrastructuring Processes

It will take place on Wednesday, February 6, at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara, and it will be Alicia’s 30 percent PhD seminar. Pelle Ehn, professor emeritus in Interaction design, will function as discussant.

Below you will find an abstract for the talk. If you would like to read Alicia’s text before the seminar, please mail her: alicia.smedberg@mau.se.

Abstract:

This Ph.D. centers around the issue of agency within Participatory Design (PD). While  the issue of agency bares relevance almost anywhere we look – and is inseparable from questions of power and governance; structure and solidarity; and from acting (regardless of how and why we act) – it holds particular bearing to the democratic principles of PD.

Over the past 18 months I have been conducting an inquiry into the particular issues that arise within infrastructuring processes spanning across the public and civic sectors. Through an on-going presence in two long-term projects (Amiralstaden and The Do-Think-Tank), and two fixed-term projects (Livskonceptet, and a case study around wind turbines and landownership in Orkney) I have sought to identify traits of agency. Questions of how and when to act, and of equal importance, when not to act, require strategies that cannot be contained by a universal rule but must be the result of a repertoire of sensitive approaches towards the practitioner’s situation. Within the 30% seminar, as well as within this Ph.D. as a whole, I seek to exemplify, with the support of anecdotes from the case studies, three modalities of agency: illumination, sensitization, and emancipation. While I have taken to the habit of speaking about these three modalities as a journey or a trajectory (to highlight the constant movement they encompass), it is important to note that neither agency nor emancipation is a fixed state that can be reached.

The seminar will provide a summary of the 30% text: In its initial half it attempts to map out the very bedrock of the project: its disciplinary position; its ontology, epistemology and methodology; its methods. In doing so I hope to afford the reader an insight into the how and why I have partaken in my case studies. The case studies will then be elaborated on briefly, followed by a discussion and reflection on future directions.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Åsa Harvard Maare, Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication at K3. The title of the talk is:

Collaborative problem-solving through embodied interaction

It will take place on Wednesday, January 30, at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.

Below you will find an abstract for the talk.

In most scientific studies on collaborative problem-solving, it is framed as an outcome of – mainly – verbal interaction between problem-solvers. Collaborative problem-solving is achieved through negotiation, discussion, comparison. In this paper I want to approach collaborative problem-solving as a mainly embodied activity, regulated by gaze, body position, gesture, imitation etc.

The “problem” to solve is a geometrical problem expressed in visual form. Problem-solvers are 9-year old children working in pairs in the classroom during a mathematics lesson.

The method is interaction analysis. A video camera in the ceiling plus two handheld cameras document how problem-solvers take turns, observe other pairs, talk and interact, and to what extent these activities help them solve the problem.

What I will present during the seminar is the raw material (in spoken/discussed format) of a paper intended for the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, and I look forward to all criticisms and constructive proposals that the participants may come up with.

Keywords: observational learning, motivation, learning design, ethnomethodology, interaction analysis