Slides from my talk at AiTech Agora

1. Embodied Manifestos
and their potential contribution
to responsible AI research
Maria Luce Lupetti

2. Designing (AI)
how things (AI)
should be designed
normative approach

3. how things (AI)
should be designed
normative approach
Designing (AI)

4. The trap of dominant narratives
Museum robot example
Robot as
museum
guide
DN 1: robots =
more efficiency,
better lifestyle
Robot as
tool for
museum
guide
DN 2: robots =
threat for
humans,
replacement
DESIGN &
PROTOTYPING
DESIGN &
PROTOTYPING

5. The trap of dominant narratives
Museum robot example
Robot as
museum
guide
Efficiency
&
naturalness
DN 1: robots =
more efficiency,
better lifestyle
Robot as
tool for
museum
guide
Usability
DN 2: robots =
threat for
humans,
replacement
DESIGN &
PROTOTYPING
DESIGN &
PROTOTYPING
EVALUATION EVALUATION

6. The trap of dominant narratives
Museum robot example
Robot as
museum
guide
Efficiency
&
naturalness
DN 1: robots =
more efficiency,
better lifestyle
Robot as
tool for
museum
guide
Usability
DN 2: robots =
threat for
humans,
replacement
DESIGN &
PROTOTYPING
DESIGN &
PROTOTYPING
EVALUATION EVALUATION

7. Shifting from normative to explorative approaches
E.g. "User Centred Design attempts to
impose order on situations and steer them
in particular directions […] in order to
produce a more humane technology”1
1 _ Garrety, Karin, and Richard Badham. "User-centered design and the normative politics of technology." Science, Technology, & Human
Values 29, no. 2 (2004): 191-212.
How can we investigate narratives and their design implications?
“how things should be designed”

8. Critical design practice […] aims to present and define interrogative,
discursive, and experimental approaches in design and research.
Critical design practice offers a means to use product design as a
medium to focus on concerns both central to the discipline and
beyond normal disciplinary bounds. 2
Critique through design
Of how things should be designed
2 _ Malpass, Matt. Critical design in context: History, theory, and practices. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.
3 _ Elisa Giaccardi (2019). From Prototypes to Data-enabled Artifacts: Histories and Futures of Research through Design.
4 _ James Pierce (2014). On the presentation and production of design research artifacts in HCI.
Design artefacts as critical tools for
Reflecting on the design activity3,4
Establishing critical areas of concern3
Advocating for research agendas and approaches4
Communicating abstract concepts4

9. Three examples from design practice:
Montessori Materials
Archizoom radical furniture
Automato para-products

10. Montessori
Materials
Houses of Children
Dominant perspective:
scientific pedagogy
narratives:
Control
Containment
Error
Punishment
Knowledge transfer
Counter-perspective:
experimental pedagogy
narratives:
Exploration and experience
Freedom
Knowledge construction

11. Montessori
Materials
Questioning current theories through practice and things
Extracting knowledge about child learning and
development through observation of children interaction
with tangible artefacts
Crafting and using tangible artefacts for translating
educational principles into real experiences

12. Archizoom
radical furniture
Dominant perspective:
rationalism and tech-utopia
narratives:
Efficiency
Improvement
Formal rigor
Counter-perspective: radical
design
narratives:
Emotion
Values
Dynamism
Superonda

13. Archizoom
radical furniture
Claiming a theoretical function in everyday objects
through experimentations of forms and materials.
Opposing to rigor, geometry and rationalism through
playfulness, color and decoration.
Use of furniture as a mean for creating synthesis
between thought and language, intuition and reason,
translating philosophies in form.

14. Believe it yourself
Automato
para-products
Dominant perspective: AI
utopia / distopia
narratives:
Efficiency VS diminishment
Objectiveness VS bias
Liberations VS replacement
Counter-perspective: things’
fallacies
narratives:
Dumbness
Mutuality
Sociality

15. Crafting tangible artefacts for translating political
concept in something that can be easily grasped.
Questioning believes about AI/robots abilities and our
relationship with it through things.
Enabling people experience the concepts of things’
perspective and entanglement in a easy but inspirational
way.
Automato
para-products

16. Design artefacts as critical tools
Embodied Manifestos
Theoretically / conceptually loaded
Historically connoted (materials, forms, techniques)
Discussion enablers
Readable
Audience-dependent
Claiming / Translating
Questioning / Opposing
can be used for

17. Artefacts that translate and exemplify abstract concepts
and narratives surrounding a theme (AI) into design ideas5,
that, if used to invite the audience to reflect and act, can
serve as manifesto pieces6.
Embodied Manifestos
5 _ Lim, Y. K., Stolterman, E., & Tenenberg, J. (2008). The anatomy of prototypes: Prototypes as filters, prototypes as manifestations of design
ideas. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 15(2), 7.
6 _ Bowers, J. (2012, June). The logic of annotated portfolios: communicating the value of 'research through design'. In Proceedings of the
Designing Interactive Systems Conference pp. 68-77). ACM.

18. Embodied Manifestos VS Design Manifestos

19. Dunne and Raby, 2007
Technological dreams series: Robots
Oren Zuckerman et al., 2018
The greeting machine.
Embodied Manifestos of AI
Examples from design practice
Narratives
of autonomy
Narratives of
anthropomorphism

20. Pia-Marie Stute, 2017
Accessories of the paranoid
Automato Farm. 2019
Believe it Yourself
Embodied Manifestos of AI
Examples from design practice
Narratives
of privacy
Narratives
of reliability

21. Designing (AI)
Explorative approach through Embodied Manifestos
- Implicit knowledge
- Lack of evaluation
- “gallery” pieces
Artistic interventions?

22. 7 _ Michael Mateas. 2001. Expressive AI: a hybrid art and
science practice. Leonardo, MIT Press.
Mundane
concretisations
Artists are concerned with building artifacts that convey
complex meanings, often layering meanings, playing with
ambiguities and exploring the liminal region between opaque
mystery and interpretability. Thus, the […] concept defining
any particular AI-based artwork will be an interrelated set of
concerns, perhaps not fully explicable without documenting
the functioning of the piece itself.7
EM-AI
negotiation of meaning
through audience
engagement
generation of alternative
viewpoints from which to
redesign AI
enabling experience of
AI-related complex issues
Artistic
abstractions
E-AI
TRANSLATION
THROUGH
METAPHORS
TRANSLATION
THROUGH
ALLEGORIES
Embodied Manifestos of AI VS Artefacts of Expressive AI

23. Research through Embodied Manifestos
Narrative
alternatives
Observation of
EM in action
Production of
knowledge