PROJECT SUMMARY

Trust in ADM: Rethinking the anticipatory modes of technological determinism

Focus Area: News and Media, Transport and Mobility, Health, and Social Services
Research Program: People
Status: Completed

If we are to bring people into the process of ADM technology design then we need to ensure that the conceptual categories that frame theory and practice in innovation account for people.

This project interrogates a suite of anticipatory categories and the arrays of concepts that support them, which are commonly used in innovation narratives, amongst industry and policy stakeholders and in academic disciplines that are complicit with their agenda—such as human-computer interaction research and other computer science and engineering disciplines, and organisation studies.

It identifies the key categories and concepts, analyses how they are mobilised in narratives of innovation, their relationships to solutionist paradigms, how they structure processes of research and how they are actually implied in research and design practice.

The project unpicks the detail of the conceptual frameworks that inform ADM as well as the ways they are engaged in the everyday work practices of developers, designers, businesses and policy makers. It also asks how we might most fruitfully define and engage such categories and concepts, in order to use them to structure interdisciplinary collaboration.

The analysis will include established anticipatory categories common in technology discourses—of trust, barriers, anxiety and acceptance—as well as contemporary (and different types of) categories such as sharing, transparency and others, which are associated with new technologies and automation. Other new and emerging concepts and categories will be identified during the course of the research.

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