Re-imagining stories of technology

Femke Snelting and Seda Gürses were part of the Doing Research Otherwise Seminar Series on June 22nd, 2022, as they gave us a strong and inspiring insight on their work with The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI). The TITiPI is dedicated to a critical understanding of computational infrastructures i.e., the various and pervasive ways in which combinations of mobiles devices and cloud-based data enter our lives.

Our lecturers gave us a first look into their on-going research on Vera2, one of the software that are used by anti-radicalization officers in the Netherlands and Belgium (see figure). This software is designed through the collaboration of social scientists, psychologists, computational scientists, and security officers and is based on risk-assessment logics. Various indicators are collected and weighted into a general score that in turn leads to practical decisions such as reporting or detention.  

Femke and Seda then moved to their work on the COVID safe ticket. After showing how it was implemented outside of common legal regulations (especially via the absence of an impact-report), the TITiPI submitted a bugreport, that is to say a compilation of the various ways in which the system does not work (leading to the system itself becomes a bug).

But their work is not confined in reporting technical errors. By curating various stories (infrables in the langage of the Institute), the TITiPI aims at generating new “vocabularies, imaginaries and methodologies”. Infrables are collected and published into a booklet that exposes the increasing role of technologies in our daily lives and politics, as well as it offers a re-appropriation of stories that are being exchanged from a participant to another.