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Why we need design sociology
going beyond moralisation and one-dimensional ways of looking in design
“Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.”
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)
In Coded Bias, MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini stresses during the US Congress hearing about possible regulations for the technology industry that AI is a representation of white male society. That is the underlying narrative of the excellent documentary by filmmaker Shalini Kantayya: it is a nuanced view on how technology made by people and institutions with mostly good intentions turns out to amplify what is already wrong in our society.
Coded Bias premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Waag Society in Amsterdam organised a screening and online discussion afterwards. For a Q&A with Kantayya, Waag invited a handful of AI researchers and philosophers to discuss the matter. Although the outcome was nuanced, the conclusion was predictable: maybe social scientists could play a role as advisors after an AI-based product or service has been fabricated in a university lab.
It is disturbing how easy other academic disciplines ignore social science, or just colonise it when they feel like it. Especially when it comes to the way society functions. In public debates, philosophers, psychologists and psychiatrists make statements about the effects of technology on society without any substantiation. Also, in documentaries like The Social Dilemma experts take a moral stance that doesn’t do justice to the complexity of our societal reality.
Let’s be honest: sociology has long been under threat. Especially in the 1990s, the idea that sociology as a discipline wasn’t relevant anymore became a topic for discussion. As Antony Giddens points out in his book In Defence of Sociology (1995): “What do you get when you cross a sociologist with a member of the Mafia? An…
