Temacafé: Expanding the Scope – Probing the role of Emerging Technologies in Research, Higher Education and Academia, LU
Drawing on experiences from Digital Cultures and Fashion Studies, this webinar discusses how creative, practice-based approaches, such as probing, can help explore the role of AI and emerging technologies in higher education.
In an ongoing project to understand the role of new technologies within the university world, we use our background in ethnology and cultural analysis together with a method called probing, as developed by Willim. Here, we use probing to further understand AI and emerging technologies, and how these are made ordinary. Probing is an open-ended method, based on creative (artistic) practice mixed with research, involving different kinds of collaborations and processes of making. It is a good way to investigate how new technologies are incessantly made ordinary. Probing is a way to also experiment with new formats and to advocate processes that bridge the different strands within the university, such as research, education and collaboration with external stakeholders. Apart from research about these matters, we have also explored how probing can be utilized within higher education. Foremost through the two educations we are primarily involved in, namely digital cultures and fashion studies. Within the humanities, theory and practice are often taught separately. Our project explores how learning can integrate critical and creative approaches to the application and development of digital tools and AI. It also deals with how technologies and systems relate to different conditions for creativity as well as abilities to critically and independently identify, analyse and assess as part of higher education. With a shared focus on culture, technologies, and creativity, we address the pedagogical challenge of preparing students for a digital future through practice-based, creative learning. One example from Digital Cultures is a course during the first semester of the candidate programme. The course is about idea development and presentation techniques. But within the course, we have broadened the scope to discuss the role of AI and other technological tools and to use the course as an open-ended exploration of the ways in which technologies are made ordinary. We collaborate with AI Lund, and we use artworks as probes. This is one example of experimentation within education, and also how different stakeholders can meet through an open-ended and process-oriented probing approach. Another example is from fashion studies, where we organized a workshop and invited students to experiment with AI-driven fashion design platforms that automatically generate models and outfits. As they worked, glitches appeared in the system’s rendering of bodies, such as distorted figures with extra limbs or absent features. These malfunctions became probes that opened discussion about how technologies encode and reproduce cultural norms of beauty, gender, and ability.
Contributers
Magdalena Petersson McIntyre, Section for Fashion Studies, Dept of Arts and Cultural Sciences
Robert Willim, Digital Cultures, Dept of Arts and Cultural Sciences
Lund University