Design’s Intimacies—Laura Forlano (Illinois Institute of Technology, USA)

How do we imagine, design, use and maintain digital technologies in ways that allow all lives—human and non-human—to flourish? The answer to this question requires new understandings of what it means to be human, new conceptualizations of knowledge and expertise, new inventive methodologies as well as new ethical and political concepts.

Drawing on an autoethnographic account of living with “smart” medical systems that draws on Haraway’s situated and partial knowledge, Laura Forlano develops the concept of the disabled cyborg, which suggests a different set contingencies and processes. Finally, she will illustrate the ways in which a first-person perspective might open up new questions and practices for design futures. How might we create a more generous understanding of human-machine relations?

+++THIS TALK COMES WITH LIVE AUSTRIAN SIGN LANGUAGE INTERPRETATION+++  

Online Event

Registration and participation are free and open to the public.

About the Lecture Series

Technologies invade our everyday lives, take part in constructing our identity, classify (often violently) bodies, and, pushed by recent regulations on social distancing, play an expanding role in connecting families and friends. The effects of this rapid increase of technological dependency, though, further exacerbate existing inequalities, introduce new ones, and lead to previously less apparent pockets of freedom.

In the series “Critical Perspectives on Technology”, the project “Exceptional Norms,” part of the research unit Human Computer Interaction at TU Wien Informatics, invites interested audiences to participate in biweekly talks and critically engage with recent research on technology assessment.

Our speakers are trailblazing scholars and internationally renowned experts from a range of (inter)disciplinary standpoints in conversation with Austrian researchers as hosts.

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