Tiwánee van der Horst, Anja Overdiek, and Maaike Harbers
Throughout society, dialogues about Artificial Intelligence (AI) are dominated by a range of technophobic or techno-solutionist narratives. Both these narratives share a technological focus. To develop responsible AI, however, it is important to look at the systemic ecological and societal underpinnings and repercussions of this technology. These underpinnings easily go unnoticed by decision-makers because of their invisible and intangible character. In addition, a narrow focus on technology distracts from the humans who are responsible for designing AI systems and the power these AI systems have over both humans and the more-than-human. Hence, one challenge in developing AI responsibly is moving from current narratives towards relational ‘power narratives’ by reframing dialogues in a multi-stakeholder setting. Systemic Design and the research-through-design practice offer several methods for this purpose. One of them is to work with a physical boundary object (PBO). This paper describes the design and use of the PBO ‘Who pulls the strings’. The PBO was used in a quadruple-helix co-creative setting. Through intra-action, participants became aware of the influence of each stakeholder within the power system and were able to have an ongoing dialogue about existing power relations and ways to reshape these collaboratively. The contributions of this paper include creating novel insights about what design principles can be used to design a PBO when employing entanglement theory and how a PBO can invite dialogue about the invisible and intangible power relations behind AI systems.
KEYWORDS: AI ethics, AI, power, narrative, boundary object, physicality, social design, New Materialism, entanglement
RSD TOPIC(S): Methods & Methodology, Society & Culture, Sociotechnical Systems