JORDAN KRAEMER
Intelligences
Immersive Ethics: Anticipating Risks and Harms in Virtual and Augmented Reality
Moderator: JILLIAN POWERS, Cognizant
Panelists: JORDAN KRAEMER, Anti-Defamation League; ARWA MICHELLE MBOYA, Magic Leap; JESSICA OUTLAW, The Extended Mind LLC
As new technologies, from AI to immersive experiences, are developed at scale, they raise ethical concerns for research and design. Data-driven systems have repeatedly been shown to entrench social biases along lines of race, gender, and class, from racist algorithms in the criminal justice system to misgendering trans and nonbinary people. Immersive technologies, such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), however, raise separate and thorny questions for ethical design. Immersive technologies create novel experiences of embodiment and reality, not to mention new sources of personal data. These facets create distinctive challenges for ethics, equity, and inclusion, intensifying the potential harms of misinformation, harassment, privacy violations, surveillance, or unequal access. How can ethnographic research anticipate emergent ethical questions specific...
Intelligences
Representation & Representative-ness
Moderator:
DONNA LANCLOS, Anodyne Anthropology LLC
Panelists:
AUTUMN SANDERS FOSTER, Founder, Quire Consulting
AMBER HAMPTON GREENE, Experience Research & Service Design, Cityblock Health
JORDAN KRAEMER, Research Associate, Implosion Labs, LLC
RUCHIKA MUCHHALA, Consultant/Filmmaker, Third Kulture Media
Ethnographers take pride in representing people’s voices with fidelity, empathy, and deep contextual understanding. But our work can end up reinforcing a distinction between people who “have experience” that we study for insights and people who “have expertise” to use, shape, and monetize that experience. We’ll tackle a range of core questions:
As organizations increasingly value representations of “user” or “customer” experience, what responsibilities come with this role? To what extent are we confronting the ways that the anthropologist on the project gets used to distancing people from their own expertise about their everyday lives? When we present our research and recommendations to clients...