Abstract
Emerging technologies—such as autonomous driving (AD) cars, blockchain, robotics, and drones—are increasingly part of popular narratives and industry and policy agendas. They are commonly understood as new digital, data-driven, intelligent, or automated technological innovations in development, or at the cusp of being launched into a market. Thus, the anthropological question of how they might become part of everyday, experiential, possible worlds demands our attention. In this chapter we outline an approach to emerging technologies that is rooted in design anthropology and takes an interventional stance. In doing so we situated design anthropology of emerging technologies within an interdisciplinary field which has tended to be dominated by technologically determinist approaches. Through the example of the notion of trust in AD cars, we show how policy, industry, engineering, and social science approaches configure to provide different and critical understandings. Drawing on our own design ethnographic research, we show how design anthropological attention to people offers an alternative and viable mode of understanding how emerging technologies become part of emerging worlds.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
https://www.technologyreview.com/lists/technologies/2019/. Accessed 8 July 2021.
- 2.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-should-self-driving-cars-choose-who-not-to-kill-442f2a5a1b59. Accessed 8 July 2021.
- 3.
- 4.
https://newsroom.aaa.com/tag/autonomous-vehicles/. Accessed 14 July 2021.
- 5.
https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House/Industry_Innovation_Science_and_Resources/Driverless_vehicles/Report (accessed 14 July 2021) and see, for example, Cohen et al. (2017, p. 28).
- 6.
References
Akama, Y., Pink, S., & Sumartojo, S. (2018). Uncertainty and Possibility. London: Bloomsbury.
AlgorithmWatch. (2019). AUTOMATING SOCIETY—TAKING STOCK OF AUTOMATED DECISION-MAKING IN THE EU. A report by AlgorithmWatch in cooperation with Bertelsmann Stiftung, supported by the Open Society Foundations. Retrieved from https://algorithmwatch.org/en/automating-society/. Accessed 20 November 2020.
Ash, J. (2017). Phase Media: Space, Time and the Politics of Smart Objects. London: Bloomsbury.
Awad, E., Dsouza, S., Kim, R., Schulz, J., Henrifh, J., Shariff, A., Bonnefon, J-F., & Rahwan, I. (2018). The Moral Machine experiment. Nature, 563, 59–64.
Bissell, D. (2018). Automation interrupted: How autonomous vehicle accidents transform the material politics of automation. Political Geography, 65, 57–66.
Bissell, D., Birtchell, T., Elliot, A., & Hsu, E. L. (2018). Autonomous automobilities: The social impacts of driverless vehicles. Current Sociology, 68(1), 116–134.
Calvão, F. (2019) Crypto-miners: Digital labor and the power of blockchain technology. Economic Anthropology, 6, 123–134.
Cefkin, M. (Ed.) (2009). Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter. Reflections on Research in and of Corporations. New York & Oxford: Berghahn.
Clarke, A. (2017). Design Anthropology Object Cultures in Transition. London: Bloomsbury.
Cohen, T., Jones, P., & Cavoli, C. (2017). Social and behavioural questions associated with automated vehicles. Scoping study by UCL Transport Institute. Final report. London: Department for Transport.
Corsin, A. (2011). Trust in anthropology. Anthropological Theory, 11(2), 177–196.
Davila, A., & Nombela, M. (2012). Platooning—Safe and EcoFriendly Mobility. In SAE 2012 World Congress & Exhibition. Detroit, MI.: SAE International.
Deloitte. (2019). Beyond the Digital Frontier. Retrieved from https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/focus/tech-trends/2019/tech-trends-introduction.html. Accessed 20 November 2020.
Douglas, M. (1970). Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations. London: Tavistock Publications.
Dourish, P., & Bell, G. (2011). Divining a digital future: mess and mythology in ubiquitous computing. Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1937). Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fish, A. (2019). Drones at the Edge of Naturecultures. Media Fields Journal, 14. Retrieved from http://www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/en/people/adam-fish(10a5067e-a828-497b-95ae-e35ed07f9ba1).html. Accessed 20 November 2020.
Forbes. (2020). The 7 Biggest Technology Trends In 2020 Everyone Must Get Ready For Now. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2019/09/30/the-7-biggest-technology-trends-in-2020-everyone-must-get-ready-for-now/#778aba672261. Accessed 20 November 2020.
Fortune. (2015). The most hyped emerging technology of 2015. Retrieved from http://fortune.com/2015/08/20/self-driving-car-hype/. Accessed 20 November 2020.
Fredricksen, M. (2016). Divided uncertainty: A phenomenology of trust, risk and confidence. In S. Jagd, L. Fuglsang (Eds.), Trust, Organisations and Social Interaction. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishers.
Geismar, H., & Knox, H. (Eds.) (2021). Digital Ethnography (2nd ed.). Oxford: Routledge.
Gunn, W., & Clausen, C. (2013). Conceptions of Innovation and Practice: Designing Indoor Climate. In W. Gunn, T. Otto, & R. C. Smith (Eds.), Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice (pp. 159–179). London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Gunn, W., Otto, T., & Smith, R.C. (Eds.) (2013). Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Gusterson, H. (2016). Drone: Remote Control Warfare. Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press.
Harper, R. H. R. (2014). Trust, Computing and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ingold, T., & Hallam, E. (2007). Creativity and cultural improvisation: an introduction. In T. Ingold & E. Hallam (Eds.), Creativity and cultural improvisation (pp. 1–24). Berg: Oxford.
Ingold, T. (2013). Making. Oxford: Routledge.
Irving, A. (2017). The art of turning left and right. In J. Salazar, S. Pink, A. Irving, & J. Sjoberg (Eds.), Anthropologies and Futures. London: Bloomsbury.
Jagd, S., & Fuglsang, L. (2016). Studying trust as process within and between organisations. In S. Jagd & L. Fuglsang (Eds.), Trust, Organisations and Social Interaction. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishers.
Kun, A. L., Boll, S., & Schmidt, A. (2016) Shirting gears: User interfaces in the age of autonomous driving. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 15(1), 32–37.
Lanzeni, D. (2016). Smart Global Futures: designing affordable materialities for a better life. In S. Pink, E. Ardevol, & D. Lanzeni (Eds.), Digital Materialities. London: Bloomsbury.
Luhmann, N. (1988). Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations. In D. Gambetta (Ed.), Familiarity, Confidence, Trust: Problems and Alternatives (pp. 94–107). Basil Blackwell: New York.
Marres, N. (2018). What if nothing happens? Street trials of intelligent cars as experiments in participation. In S. Maassen, S. Dickel, & C. H. Schneider (Eds.), TechnoScience in Society, Sociology of Knowledge Yearbook. Niimegen: Springer/Kluwer.
Maurer, B. (2016). Re-risking in Realtime. On Possible Futures for Finance after the Blockchain. BEHEMOTH A Journal on Civilisation, 9(2), 82–96.
Morozov, E. (2013). To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems that Don’t Exist. London: Penguin Books.
Miller, D., & Horst, H. (2012). The Digital and Human: A Prospectus for Digital Anthropology. In H. Horst & D. Miller (Eds.), Digital Anthropology (pp. 3–35). London: Bloomsbury.
Misztal, B. (2011). Trust: Acceptance of, Precaution Against and Cause of Vulnerability. Comparative Sociology, 10(3), 358–379.
Norman, D. (2007). The Design of Future Things. New York: Basic Books.
Özden-Schilling, C. (2015). Economy Electric. Cultural Anthropology, 30(4), 578–88.
Pink, S. (2017). Ethics in a changing world. In S. Pink, V. Fors, & T. O’Dell (Eds.), Theoretical Scholarship and Applied practice. Oxford: Berghahn.
Pink, S., Fors, V., & Glöss, M. (2017). Automated Futures and the Mobile Present: in-car video ethnographies. Ethnography, 20(1), 88–107.
Pink, S. & Salazar, J. F. (2017). Anthropologies and Futures: setting the agenda. In J. Salazar, S. Pink, A. Irving & J. Sjoberg (Eds.), Anthropologies and Futures. Oxford: Bloomsbury.
Pink, S., Fors, V., & Glöss, M. (2018a). The contingent futures of the mobile present: beyond automation as innovation. Mobilities, 13(5), 615–631.
Pink, S., Lanzeni, D. & Horst, H. (2018b). Data Anxieties: finding trust and hope in digital mess. Big Data and Society, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718756685.
Pink, S., Gomes, A., Zilse, R., Lucena, R., Pinto, J., Porto, A., Caminha, C., de Siqueira, G.M., & Duarte de Oliveira, M. (2018c). Automated and Connected?: Smartphones and Automobility through the Global South. Applied Mobilities. https://doi.org/10.1080/23800127.2018.1505263.
Pink, S., Osz, K., Raats, K., Lindgren, T., & Fors, V. (2020). Design Anthropology for Emerging Technologies: trust and sharing in Autonomous Driving futures. Design Studies. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2020.04.002.
Pink, S. (2021). Anthropology in an Uncertain World. In D. Podjed, M. Gorup, P. Borecky, & C. G. Montero (Eds.), Why the World Needs Anthropologists (pp. 56–70). Oxford: Routledge.
Sas, C., & Khairuddin, I. E. (2015). Exploring Trust in Bitcoin Technology: A Framework for HCI Research. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Australian Special Interest Group for Computer Human Interaction (OzCHI ‘15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 338–342. https://doi.org/10.1145/2838739.2838821.
Scientific American. (2019). Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2019: Introduction. Retrieved from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/top-10-emerging-technologies-of-2019-introduction/. Accessed 20 November 2020.
Smith, R. C., & Otto, T. (2016). Cultures of the Future: Emergence and Intervention in Design Anthropology. In R. C. Smith, K. T. Vangkilde, M. G. Kjærsgaard, T. Otto, J. Halse, & T. Binder (Eds.), Design Anthropological Futures (pp 19–36). London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Smith, R. C., Vangkilde, K. T., Kjærsgaard, M. G., Otto, T., Halse, J., & Binder, T. (Eds.) (2016). Design Anthropological Futures (pp 19–36). London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Stilgoe, J. (2018). Seeing like a Tesla—How can we anticipate self-driving worlds? Glocalism, 3. https://doi.org/10.12893/gjcpi.2017.3.2.
Suchman, L. (1998). Human/machine Reconsidered. Cognitive Studies, 5(1), 5–13.
Vinkhuyzen, E., & Cefkin, M. (2016). Developing socially acceptable autonomous vehicles. In Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings, Minneapolis, US, 29 August–1 September 2016, pp. 522–534.
Wasson, C. et al. (2014). The Social Life of the Car. Retrieved from https://www.slideshare.net/ChrisFerrell7/the-social-life-of-the-car-72339802. Accessed 20 November 2020.
Winkle, T. (2016). Safety benefits of Automated Vehicles. In M. Maurer, J. C. Gerdes, B. Lenz, & H. Winner (Eds.), Autonomous Driving. Technical, Legal, and Social Aspects (pp. 335–364). Berlin: Springer.
World Economic Forum. (2019). These are the top 10 emerging technologies of 2019. Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/07/these-are-the-top-10-emerging-technologies-of-2019/. Accessed 20 November 2020.
Acknowledgements
The fieldwork discussed here was undertaken within the ‘Human Expectations and Experiences of Autonomous Driving’ (HEAD) project funded by Vinnova, Sweden, 2016–18, award number: 2016-02515. We thank our research participants, colleagues at Volvo Cars and the HEAD research team for their inspiration and collegiality.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pink, S., Raats, K., Lindgren, T., Osz, K., Fors, V. (2022). An Interventional Design Anthropology of Emerging Technologies: Working Through an Interdisciplinary Field. In: Bruun, M.H., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7084-8_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7084-8_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-16-7083-1
Online ISBN: 978-981-16-7084-8
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)