Allocentric Design: Critical Practice in the Age of Radical Technological and Environmental Change

While the discourse on the ethical development of artificial intelligence (AI), shaped by international expert panels and institutions such as the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), has largely focused on ensuring that new technologies are human-centered, scholars working in the emergent field of critical design studies have argued against this framework as a relic of the anthropocentric past, lying at the very heart of the contemporary environmental crisis. If many ‘AI ethicists’ based in the Global North seek to establish a universal approach to technology development ‘for Good’ – that translates into products and tools that are intuitive and user-friendly, and that support human wellbeing – critical design theorists and practitioners aim to reimagine design from the standpoint of marginalized groups (both within and outside of the Global North), questioning the field’s roots in the Western conception of modernity, as well as its ties to systemic racism, colonialism, and capitalism – approaching the matters of social justice and environmental sustainability as essentially entangled. By bridging these two, often contradictory, perspectives on ethical technology design, the thesis explores the potential for reconciling human-centric principles with the goals of sustainable and restorative design for a more-than-human world. Confronting the desire to encode critical reflection and ethical deliberation into easily adoptable ‘guidelines’ for practitioners – and recognizing that it is precisely the search for universal solutions that has caused harm in the past – the first two chapters build on approaches including Louise Amoore’s cloud ethics and Anab Jain’s more-than-human politics, to argue for critical practice as a means of accounting for the full complexity of the systems in which design operations take place and the wider network of planetary interdependencies that design affects. While the first part of the thesis thus establishes that, to address the challenges of the Anthropocene, critical design practice must proceed from acknowledging the distribution of agency among human and nonhuman assemblages, the second part introduces design frameworks that, in search of desirable expressions of technology-enabled collective intelligence and interspecies collaboration, build on the relational understanding of existence and depart from the individual-based model of human society – focusing on Neri Oxman’s nature- centric practice and Benjamin Bratton’s conception of terraforming as a means of de-centering the human in geopolitics. If critical design practice in the Anthropocene must abandon the egocentric, anthropocentric perspective, the penultimate chapter investigates how an allocentric framework can embrace the kind of ontological and epistemological pluralism that the advocates of Indigenous and non-Eurocentric design methodologies (such as Arturo Escobar) have called for, while retaining as part of this pluralism the notion of scientific objectivism – a paradigm that remains indispensable to investigating the causes of and acting upon the climate crisis. Finally, the concluding chapter elucidates why the allocentric reorientation in design practice requires that we actively intervene in how technologies are imagined, not merely in how they are assembled; referring to the example of Olga Tokarczuk’s Ex-Centrum Project in Poland, it considers the role that storytelling may play in the process of re-modelling the ‘we’ of design in the age of radical technological and environmental change. By filling the gap between mainstream AI ethics and critical design studies, and drawing on insights from media theory, philosophy of technology, and decolonial and post-development studies, the thesis aims to be a significant contribution to the growing fields of Critical AI Studies and AI Humanities.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Hollanek, Tomasz

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Crowley, Martin

• Artificial Intelligence
• Critical AI Studies
• Design Theory
• Ethics
• Speculative Design
• Sustainable Design

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/06aa5f8c-9040-443c-8d02-8d96085c667b/download
• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.99629

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/353520