Is Society Ready for IT? Or is IT Ready for Society?

Monika Buscher and Birgit Moesl are running a workshop at the now postponed . This is inspired by rapid changes in public safety communications and a need to deal responsibly with the increased volume and mobility of data, and to do so in dialogue with citizens.

Excerpt from preliminary Call for pParticipation:

Public Protection and Disaster Response (PPDR) is changing radically. Three trends are coming together to drive this. Firstly, PPDR practitioners are faced with more frequent and more intense disasters as we enter an era of climate crises. Secondly, a new generation of emergency service professionals is entering the workplaces, and they bring high skills and high expectations for digital augmentation. Thirdly, innovation in digital technologies from Artificial Intelligence to the Internet of Public Safety Things, automation and robotics, and mobile broadband networking is gathering pace. However, as Prefet Guillaume Lambert, Head of the French Public Safety Broadband Network Programme at the French Interior Ministry observed at the last PSCE Conference in Paris, while the technologies might be ready, the public is not ready for these innovations. We need to convince them.��This workshop explores questions of, and approaches to, ‘societal readiness’.

We are developing a critical approach to the concept of ‘Societal Readiness Levels’, acknowledging that ‘convincing the public’ demands sound arguments. Rather than seeing ‘societal readiness’ as a matter of society getting ready to ‘take’ innovations, we are asking what design can do to meet the requirements of society. How ready are our technologies for society? To what extent do they support social and material practices, complex socio-technical systems with histories, cultures, and path dependencies, societal values and civil liberties? How high do our innovations (in technologies, policies, organisational structures, emergency plans and planning processes) score on a scale of ‘Societal readiness Levels’ (SRL)? And what can be done to raise their SRL? This is both a substantive and a methodological question, because designing for society translates into a need for designing with society. As a result, this workshop also asks how we can develop better methods for engaging citizens in innovation in PPDR.

Topics to be discussed at the workshop include (but are not limited to):

• Studies of change in PPDR, e.g. towards net-centric approaches, with a focus on citizens and publics
• Experiences from and studies of implementations of innovations focused on public perceptions and public engagement
• Methodologies for co-design in PPDR that engage citizens
• Studies of public perceptions of PPDR innovation, including NGO, such as civil liberty groups

Contact Monika for more detail.

We’re planning a panel on Applied Mobilities and Mobile Methods at

Im|mobile lives in turbulent times: Methods and Practices of Mobilities Research

The conference takes place 9-10 July 2020, at Northumbria University. More soon here.

For more information about the conference, please see .

Image Source: by Kristen Barry is licensed under

The isITethical team are bringing creative ethical impact into innovation and the Internet of Public Safety Things. ��The Internet of Public Safety Things: Use Cases��Workshop will take place on 4th December 2018.

From the workshop description:

The workshop aims to collaboratively map rhythms of PPDR work, data needs and data flows, practices of sense-making, collaboration, and communication in PPDR and explore innovative responses to ethical, legal, and social opportunities and challenges with attention to three questions:

• How is data about all manner of things currently collected, accessed, kept, shared and repurposed by the actors involved in PPDR and in collaboration amongst them?
• How would capacities for risk assessment, preparedness, response, and recovery transform with more dynamic and fine-grained data and incorporation, privacy preserving techniques, support for trust, accountability, security?
• What are benefits and obstacles in current and speculative use of public safety things in terms of privacy, trust and interoperability?

It will be a creative, interactive workshop. We will showcase available technologies, and use your expertise and experience to discuss current challenges in your work, both in terms of process and technology, as well as the potential and challenges of IoT to support better PPDR in practice.

We will ask ��isITethical? and fold discussion of key ethical issues, such as trust, social sorting, respect, accountability with the participants and drive creative pro-active ethics through design. To find out more about the workshop and register, see here.

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IsITethical has been funded to develop a responsible research and innovation support service for innovation in disaster risk management. Between February and July 2018, we will undertake a series of ‘residencies’ with practitioners in disaster risk management and developers of new technologies to develop this service. For more, please see the isITethical? project website.��Below we describe our motivations.

Imagine: You’ve just dropped off the kids. As you join the traffic, thinking about your day at work, a loud bang startles you and almost immediately your mobile sounds an emergency alarm. It’s a personalised warning about an explosion at a nearby chemical factory that instructs you to evacuate, plotting an escape route that avoids the potentially toxic cloud. However, instead of sending these instructions via bluetooth to your car’s Satnav, you go back to the school. The doors are locked, and on-site emergency personnel wearing masks advise you that the children have been moved to a shelter. You jump back into your car. Warnings from your emergency services and health insurance have appeared on your mobile. Any injuries incurred as a result of disregarding the initial warning, may not be covered. You acknowledge receipt and are issued with a recalculated escape route.

Disaster risk management and emergency response (DRM) increasingly depend upon IT, including personal data routinely processed as part of everyday life. This generates ambiguous ethical, legal, and social opportunities and challenges. While access to data about people’s movements and communication devices enables more agile, even personalised warnings, it also changes the social contract between citizens, emergency agencies, and related services, such as insurance providers. And it works both ways. If emergency responders – carrying an array of biosensors that monitor their oxygen supply, movements, and stress levels – continue to work beyond allowed thresholds, despite warnings, and make mistakes, they may be liable for negligence.��Image Source:

The isITethical? �ʰ�����𳦳���

Significant investment is underway to develop ICT for disaster risk management. In the UK, a £1.2bn budget has been allocated for the transition of public safety communication technology to broadband. This is heavily criticised by the UK National Audit Office due to the lack of maturity of the technology and the risks associated with acceptance of the technology by public safety practitioners and publics. Many countries are embarking on a similar transition path. France aims at developing new communication capabilities to safeguard the public during the 2024 Paris Olympic games, and across Europe, there will be total investments in new broadband communication capabilities for public safety likely exceeding €100 billion. Africa is currently proposing to ‘leapfrog’ into biometrics.

At the same time, the Public Safety Communications technology business environment is in turmoil. In the past, the combination of specific requirements, limited volume of business, and need for significant R&D investment created high entry barriers, and this created specific technological ecosystems operating outside mainstream telecommunication business. This is changing with broadband as mainstream standardization (3GPP) and mainstream technologies (mobile networks, Apps) are applied. It has opened the market for SME to develop technologies for disaster risk management.

IsITethical? is developing Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) guidance through active collaborations with practitioners, industry and policy-makers in the European context. Our partners and networks agree that a firmer grasp of ELSI opportunities and challenges is needed. The proposed convergence of existing efforts has the potential to embed advanced responsible research and innovation strategies in real world practice and industrial R&D, in concordance with civil and human rights.

There is a myriad (of conflicting) practice codes, legislation and norms, but currently these are restricted to individual sectors, regions or technological contexts e.g. design, management or commercialisation. This neglects the fact that technologies are uses within interconnected��social, economic, political, cultural, organizational��complexities enfolded into it in each stage. ELSI cannot be uniformly defined��for all��situations, and it is not possible to provide strict protocols, codes of conduct,��rules,��or step-by-step instructions.��Instead, the aim��is��to promote creative and circumspective conversations on responsible scientific and technological��innovation,��including foresight into ELSI, specifically focusing on��social justice and human rights. The aim is to foster encounters, open worlds, share meaningful experience, mapping consensus and tensions.

IsITethical? is taking over the challenge in a collaboration between The Centre for Mobilties Research, CeMoRe and , by designing and developing a digital community platform and ethical exercises to foster encounters between the main stakeholders and partners across Europe. Through co-creative methods IsITethical? is edifying ELSI guidances and discussing them in the light of Brexit and the integrations to DRM of other technologies; broadband, IoT, drones and predictive analytics, and AI.

In a domain where timing is critical, IsITethical? is an invitation to take time, and together support creative thinking for the complexity of ELSI challenges and opportunities, making the guidances live, lived and living, to form a strategic community intended to support practices in practice.

IsItethical? the boardgame, offers interactivity offline to instigate conversation and discussions of the guidelines beyond the written document. All the ELSI conundrums that the player encounters are based on cases of the Pan-European��inventory of past critical events��and disasters, and their��consequences and in the field work that the SecInCore researchers did. The game represents the tensions of public and private stakeholders, of responders with international capacities and local or regional responders, and opportunities and challenges that participation of social media and volunteer stakeholders may offer in an emergency response scenario. ELSI cannot be learned by rote or uniformly defined for all situations. What the ethical exercise does, is to build worlds in which to experience ELSI reflecting in diverse situations, confront the different to make the difference.

Developing new transport technologies and working better with the senses we already have as humans – Combining the two approaches was considered key to improving how we move in urban transport situations, by the participants of the Dance Your Vehicle: Becoming Sensicle workshop. The workshop was part of the ‘Mobile Utopia Experiments’ in Lancaster in November 2017. In this article,��shares his impressions of the day and those of fellow participant .

The ‘Becoming Sensicle’ workshop, held in Lancaster’s Cornerstone Cafe on November 1st, 2017, from 1 – 5pm, was one of 12 experiments that took place before the ‘Mobile Utopia’ conference at ����APP����. The experiment explored how humans move in traffic situations, by experimenting with how human bodies interact in an indoor walking practice. Abstracting spaces of traffic in this manner, brought to mind models used by traffic engineers to imagine the ways in which vehicles use space: how adding an extra lane moves traffic in certain ways, or how adding extra seconds of red light triggers a traffic jam. Yet, such behaviouralist models of vehicle movement are often as devoid of pedestrians as they are devoid of the sensorial bodies of human beings.

In the workshop, under the guidance of , and with help from Eriketti Servou and myself as members of the , the workshop participants moved and walked to explore pedestrian negotiation and spatial interaction—let’s call it traffic—in a room of about 5x5m2 in the Cornerstone Cafe. Most of us were new to such topics, three even just stepping in from the street, unaware of any mobilities’ theory or understandings of utopia framing the workshop. Doerte’s experiment made us all aware of our senses, and the very ways in which our bodies see, hear and feel, that is—more abstractly—sense others around us when we move.

We did various exploratory exercises. We simply walked around avoiding bumping into one another (it sounds simple but requires attentiveness). We got to pass other persons on the right, which created quite a lot of hustle and bustle, even if we were not that densely packed in the space. We were asked to not just walk, but to describe whatever we saw around us and to do it aloud, so everybody could hear. With this exercise, the room filled with murmurs as we started to talk about the colour of walls, or the events taking place outside the windows. Our pace slowed down and we drifted away from each other, looking constantly around as we were muttering words. It was a strange kind of indoor stroll.

A new task we got—to move backwards—required to look out for each other, which was a complex task for bodies lacking eyes on the back of the head, that is, for all human beings. Walking cautiously, our awareness of others was increased; we had to interact with one another. The social character of the space was even further developed with a task to line up to the right of a certain person whenever one from the group made a signal. With this task, we were transformed into a bound group, and ceased to be just individuals negotiating social and physical space on their own even though we were physically located together.

These exercises were not merely a fun way to move around or to just dance, as the name of the workshop suggested; they provided insights in terms of traffic interactions.

First, they revealed that traffic norms are not just written-down rules but are interactional orders made in the practice of moving. The exercises evoked the works of sociologist Erving Goffman, who was interested in the ways in which people interact on pavements, that is, how they make the mobility system work without constant collisions. He noted how walkers have their heads scanning the space in front while they keep a certain distance from those walking in front of them or on the side, in order to remain distinct “mobile-with”-s. As walkers, we have specific bodily skills such as to partly twist our torso and shoulders as we hastily traverse gaps to negotiate densely filled spaces with other “vehicular units”, as Goffman termed it. Our room was not as packed as a pavement in a large city, but similar orders of movement and spatial negotiation were at play.

Second, the workshop revealed the socialisation of space: inserting novel and diverse activities into the existing rules, transforms the space. For instance, the exercises and their underlying rules differed on the scale on which they required conscious interaction and negotiation of movements, as well as whether we just wanted to walk by others or to interact with them even if that interaction was merely forming a line next to them. So differed the space: it was merely a container to go through or it was formed by social bonds between those taking part in the experiment. Furthermore, whereas collisions in our small exercises were not capable of hurting the same way as collisions between cars and pedestrians—between thick and thin skinned vehicular units, to use the language of Goffman—the collisions of walkers are still socially unacceptable.

In this workshop, we became ‘sensicles’, moving-sensing-vehicles to the surrounding space and to each other by dancing traffic. The concluding discussion and drawing session with the participants expanded the tactile experience to imaginations of future mobility and future bodies. Why wouldn’t our bodies and sensorial capacities be greatly improved in the near future to enhance our capacity for and experience of mobility? All the details of how exactly that changes the perception of space, of others and of traffic, are still hard to imagine; sometimes inspiring and sometimes overwhelming. Such experiments, such as the one offered by Doerte, are thus welcome to urge everyone to enhance their imagination of bodies and increased sensorial awareness in future mobilities.

Below are some images of how the workshop developed, thanks to the documentation by Eriketti Servou. Find out more about Doerte’s work at: www.

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What happens when you bring together human bodily intelligence and traffic rules in new ways? This became our leading question for the first ‘Becoming Sensicle’ experiment day at ����APP���� on September 28. During the six-hour workshop, we explored how we can and do move together as an interconnected more-than-human system, and what happens, if we change the rules of moving, or if we augment or diminish the ways we sense our surroundings.��������������������������

First, we used elastic bands to create a material connection with each other. Travelling through the space as this elastically-joined system, we moved through, over or under, interweaving with one another, entangling ourselves, and undoing the knots we got ourselves into. We experimented with how individual and group movement feed into one another, and how our body awareness and sense of system connectedness adapts, when the rules of moving together suddenly change. What happens to a system, if one person insists on always walking backwards? We did these exercises with and without the materially grounded relating through the elastics, and one participant quickly observed how the elastics visualise that ‘we are connected anyway’.

Connecting these exercises to our questions around traffic regulation, we used cardboard boxes to alter and extend our bodies, and to affect and inhibit our senses. The idea with the cardboard was not to functionally represent existing vehicles, but to be creative with our sensorial registers in accessing the complexity of information in any given space. We experimented with leaving the comfort zones of habitual movement by inhibiting one sense to augment others, giving attention to the sensory operations happening anyway when we simply breathe or move in our homes, workspaces or outside environments including traffic situations. Our senses register and immediately filter out many stimuli, and in the workshop, limiting the visual had the most impact.

Monika Büscher experimented with moving as a drone, relating to her surroundings only through the screen on her mobile, whilst her head was inside a huge box. Mary Pearson changed her body’s alignment, by fixing her arms to her legs, and placing her head in a 1m long cardboard box attached to her shoulders. Playing with movement rules and sensing under these changed conditions, evidenced the incredible creativity of our existing bodily intelligence. If we allow ourselves to feel and let go into more of the sensorial connections we share anyway, we can also move through traffic situations in new and safer ways.

Join us to do your own exploring around improved traffic-movement flows during the ‘Mobile Utopia Experiments’ in Lancaster on November 1-2, 2017.

The space immediately above the shared map is for speculative drawings, diagrams and imaginaries of a future drift economy: a mobile utopia in which drift is primary.�� After immersing themselves in drifts, experimenting with drifting devices, and marking drifts and flows on the map of Lancaster, the participants will then speculate with us on what kind of utopia they might invent…

An exciting part of today was a visit to the potential site of the Drift Economy experiment: the Café 21 Terrace at the InfoLab on the University of Lancaster’s campus. There is space out here for participants to launch seeds, leaves, balloons, and other drifting things in order to experience first-hand how they move in the ‘flow zone’ of this atmospheric space.

Below and to the side of the Café 21 Terrace is a relatively open field where we are thinking about launching an Aerocene Explorer sculpture in order to offer this device as a drifting entity par-excellence and as part of a future mobile utopia based around drift.�� It would be a weather dependent event: we can only fly the Aerocene sculpture if it is sunny, and the wind is relatively still.�� This part of the experiment therefore requires an attunement to local weather conditions that we find very informative in our thinking about flows and drifts. However this part of the experiment has not yet been confirmed – we need to liaise with local security, undertake a risk assessment and investigate any impact such an experiment would have on the nearby motorway.

Today was great – a real pleasure to think about so many different forms of #MobileUtopia with the other organisers of the experiments.�� I will be making some offerings to the weather spirits for a calm, sunny and at least dry couple days on the 1^st and 2^nd of November.�� Do get in touch with any further questions or to contribute to our experiment.�� See you soon!

~Sasha