Some of the participants’ discussions and reflections from both phases have been used as inspiration for the development of a series of illustrations.
These are inspired by a recent focus on the portrayals and representations of AI and some important critical efforts to challenge dominant and stereotypical AI representations and, instead, create better images and tell better stories of AI (see for example, Better Images of AI, AI Narratives).
They also keep closely at heart the basic remit of the project’s methodological approach that AI stories and figurations are messy but also open-ended and performative. As such, they present key themes that emerged from our workshop discussions, such as the importance of ‘Opting Out’ and the problematics of consent; the socio-technical nature not only of medical AI technologies but also of the traditional categories of patient/carer/doctor; the ambivalent and productive role of the ‘hype’ that surrounds AI technologies in healthcare and beyond; the acknowledgment that AI technologies in healthcare are only one part of bigger infrastructures where the ethical, technological, organisational and political are not only tightly interlinked but also in tension.
The aim of these countervisualities1 is to act as methodological instruments that can be freely shared and disseminated, and hence to travel far and wide, as a way to reflect on and challenge the dominant AI stories and figurations in healthcare and beyond, and as a further invitation to imagine alternative ones.
[Click on each link below every image to view them]
Illustrations under CC-BY licence. This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust (213622/Z/18/Z).
1 Spektor, F., Rodriguez, E., Shorey, S. and Fox, S., 2021, June. Discarded Labor: Countervisualities for Representing AI Integration in Essential Work. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021 (pp. 406-419).