-: Thank you so much for joining today's session,
designing experiences for safety, intimacy, and delight.
If you're enjoying this webinar series
and are in a position to do so,
please consider making a donation via our Facebook page.
This event is brought to you by the members of AIGA,
the professional association for design.
AIGA is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization,
which advances design as a professional craft,
strategic advantage and vital cultural force.
And now it's my pleasure to introduce Lee-Sean Huang,
host of AIGA's Design Futures Now podcast,
cofounder of the design consultancy Foossa
and design educator at NYU, SBA and Parsons.
Welcome Lee-Sean.
-: Thank you so much, Susan.
Now it is my pleasure
to introduce our special guest speaker today.
Caroline Sinders is a machine learning design researcher
and artist.
And over the last few years,
she has been examining
the intersections of technology's impact
on society, interface design, artificial intelligence,
abuse and politics,
especially in the realms of digital conversational spaces.
Caroline is the founder of Convocation Design and Research,
an agency focusing on these intersections
of machine learning, user research,
designing for the public good.
And she's worked with a variety of organizations
ranging from Amnesty International to Intel, IBM Watson,
the Wikimedia Foundation and others.
And what we have in common too, is that,
Caroline holds a Master's
from New York University's Interactive
Telecommunications Program.
So it's good to see a fellow ITP alum here.
I'll turn it over to Caroline now
and I'll come back to moderate the Q&A later.
-: Hey everyone.
Thank you for having me.
If you have any questions,
I will defer to let Lee-Sean, or Kathleen, I guess,
to share them or Susan or Michelle,
because I won't be able to see them necessarily
while I'm presenting.
Hi, I'm Caroline Sinders.
I'm a design researcher and artist,
and currently based in Europe.
I'm the founder of Convocation Design and Research Agency.
And I'm excited to present some work I've been doing
since early March.
And it really started from this idea
of looking at what does a community need,
especially during this moment
in time of COVID-19.
And then even, I think more especially now,
in a time of really great upheaval
of the Black Lives Matter protest.
And also just even personally,
a lot of the work I do in the human rights
and internet freedom field,
which is currently being threatened
by lack of resourcing and funding
by the Trump administration.
So I look a lot at how people organize online
and what are the harms they could potentially face.
Probably the best way to think of my work
is that I do design research in the human rights space,
and through a social justice lens.
So what I do is I look at how people use products
and how those products can unintentionally harm.
And I look at that
through a specific human rights framework.
I have a undergraduate degree in photography
and a Master's
from the Interactive Telecommunications Program.
I used to work at IBM Watson as a design researcher
and at the Wikimedia Foundation.
But now I have shifted into this space of human rights work.
And I've been studying for the past eight years,
online harassment and social networks
and artificial intelligence.
I worked with companies like Facebook and Intel.
I've worked at the Wikimedia Foundation
and I've worked with Bandcamp as well as others.
As an artist,
my work has been shown in the Tate Modern state exchange,
the Victoria and Albert Museum,
the Museum of Modern Art, Polonia, as well as others.
And I think a lot about what we do,
how we speak and how we talk and how all of that online
can be translated into data.
What you're looking at here are examples of an art project
of mine called Feminist Dataset.
Feminist Dataset applies the theory
and framework of intersectional feminism
as an investigatory lens to technology and AI.
And since March I've been transitioning my workshops
to being online.
As an intersectional feminist,
I'm someone who studies online harassment,
but also as a millennial,
the shift to this more purely digital space
is something that I sort of greeted innately,
almost like a second nature.
I'm relatively young and internet savvy,
but I still approach the shifting to digital
with a lot of trepidation.
In March 2020, COVID-19 shutdown spread to Europe
and then started spreading the United States,
which led to nearly every facet of life shifting
to the purely digital.
With funding from the Mozilla Foundation
and Omidyar Network,
I've been conducting research since March
on how communities are responding to the right now.
What kind of events are they holding?
What digital tools are they using
and how are those tools failing them?
And what kind of new research do we need
to respond to this moment?
Coming out of this research is a toolkit
and a website which will launch next week.
It was researched during March, April, may, and June.
So I'm looking at creative schools and activists,
and specifically what kinds of events are holding the tools
that they're using?
One thing I've found interesting is,
this notion that the world is a scary
and uncertain place right now.
But the world has always been an uncertain place.
And it's always been scary at times,
especially depending upon if you're a marginalized group.
We are facing a truly kind of catastrophic horror
that we've never seen before.
And I think it's okay to be scared.
It's okay to hold space for confusion
and anger and upsetness.
We should be scared.
And I hate sounding like a bit of
like chicken soup for the soul here,
but I also wonder if there are things we can learn
from this moment.
And that for me,
has been looking at what are communities doing?
And what are they doing to stay in contact?
Life moves on and we adapt.
And our social lives adapt too,
which feeds our emotional lives.
And so social ties and social resiliency
are really important.
The ability to engage with, or talk to your friends
to keep that kind of connection going.
So, which kind of brings me to this question,
how are we creating moments of intimacy,
which leads to resiliency
and how are we avoiding harm online
and what does this look like?
And a lot of it is recognizing the digital interfaces
are the bridges to our communities.
More so now, even more than they've been before.
Technology can't fix the systemic inequality
revealed by COVID-19,
but it could help make some of the connections
with our communities slightly better
because technology is what's failing
in our connections that we're having.
Because these tools aren't designed for the kinds of use
that we're using them.
We're using a lot of things that were designed
for enterprise software, which is so narrowly constrained.
Right now we're using Zoom which was designed
to be business-to-business conferencing tool.
And it wouldn't necessarily work well for a karaoke party
or if we were having a collaborative discussion.
So I wanna focus on how these tools were designed
with a very narrow idea in mind
of what conversation looks like.
What conversation sounds like,
and how conversation is designed on a user-to-user
and person-to-person level inside of these tools.
Right now I'm presenting to you,
but I'm not the moderator per se.
And right now you're all participants.
There were certain things you couldn't do when you got here.
So this is a different kind of space
than if I were on stage giving you a talk,
or if we were sitting at the same table
and we were engaging in a conversation.
As designers and engineers and community members,
we need better and more responsible tools
so our communities can have safety and intimacy
and hopefully at some point delight.
So what does a community need?
Well, they need safety.
They need support.
They do need intimacy.
So with that, they need tools that can be customized,
or that allow for agency to create different kinds of spaces
and needs to reflect the group.
The next few slides,
will be showing examples of mutual aid groups,
art shows lectures,
and other such things.
They're all happening online right now.
To get to this where we are now in this meeting even,
even it took a planning and caring and consideration.
And to get to where we are right now,
we have to be mindful to avoid this,
which is online harassment.
It is everywhere on every tool that you use.
And specifically one that comes to mind is Zoom bombing,
as we sit in Zoom here together.
What is it?
It's a new form of harassment that popped up in March
when the US and Europe,
we could just call them the Global North at this point,
started responding more readily to COVID-19.
So what is your Zoom bombing?
It's when people take control of the Zoom meeting
by turning their audio on and saying harassing things
that could be racial slurs, misogynistic threats,
transphobia, homophobia, et cetera.
Or giving people taking control of the video
and exposing themselves, or showing harmful content.
A way to combat this is by having the moderator
be the only one in control
and remove the ability for anyone to speak
or use their videos, which this Zoom meeting had.
Our technology or tools have never been perfect.
And we're seeing the cracks now more than ever
with things like Zoom bombing.
As the CEO of Zoom said, I believe in late March,
that they just never thought of harassment.
That they had made this tool
and harassment just wasn't on the list of considerations.
We can unpack that for many hours as to why that is,
maybe because he's a cis male.
But also perhaps that the structure of the team
was lacking in diversity,
or just that maybe a lot of enterprise software
doesn't think of harassment in the same way
that perhaps other social networks do.
So our tools have never been perfect,
but we're seeing the cracks more now than ever.
Technology has always been unequal.
Harassment has always disproportionately affected people
of color, especially women of color.
And that's been true,
same with facial recognition surveillance technology,
and COVID-19 that it more affects people of color
than it does white people.
But we're seeing also how important privacy
and security is in this digital space as well.
And perhaps for some people
they're seeing it more clearly now.
I would say for a lot of white people
or people with a fair amount of privilege,
who've never had to engage with a lot of friction
in their lives.
They're seeing friction-filled events and spaces
because they're online.
We see this with examples of Zoom announcing
that it wouldn't use end-to-end encryption on free accounts
to better partner with police departments.
And then very recently,
due to public outrage deciding
to give everyone three end-to-end encryption,
especially in free accounts.
So I've been taking all these considerations
into my research,
when I'm thinking of what does a community need.
With Zoom bombing,
there are some solutions to mitigate it,
but some of the solutions can potentially cut down
on intimacy.
For example, I can't see any of you.
I can't really interact with you beyond the chat channel.
And so this isn't really an engaging conversation.
It's me sort of lecturing into a dark space in my apartment.
And I have to hope that this is resonating with you
in some way, shape or form.
I can't read or sense your feedback the way I could
in a room.
This brings me back to my question,
what does a community need?
And we'll get some examples of community out there
in the wild that are adapting to COVID-19.
One of the examples is Bed-Stuy Strong, a mutual aid group.
Mutual aid groups are volunteer groups
that provide supplies and support
even groceries during a time of crisis.
This community building effort, Bed-Stuy Strong,
was able to grow up quickly and successfully
because the participants in the group,
some were already community builders
already involved in their community.
It was a focus on community and not the individual
that allowed Bed-Stuy Strong to come online.
These community ties existed before
albeit in less official forms before COVID-19.
The technology sprung up around the communities
as people went into action to help each other.
These groups are using multiple tools
and a phrase that I'm describing as digital duct taping.
So there are digitally duct taping tools together
to function, working with thousands of data points
and many volunteers from Airtable to Slack.
So WhatsApp.
Digital duct taping is when people have to use many tools
to accomplish sort of a single goal or point.
So if the point is organizing, it's recognizing
that you can't stay solely in one space.
That, information,
perhaps more naturally exists in many different spaces.
So contacting people over WhatsApp
to arrange for grocery delivery,
but making notes in Airtable of who's delivering where,
controlling access to Airtable.
So people's personal information doesn't leak out.
Then having the Slack channel exist,
which people access through flyers in Bed-Stuy.
So the community can speak to each other
and have this sort of more,
like open or round table discussion,
almost like a town hall in a way that's digitized.
This is a Bed-Stuy Strong volunteer buying groceries
for over 21 neighbors.
So Bed-Stuy Strong is this digital group
that sprung up to help the neighborhood of Bed-Stuy
during COVID with all kinds of support like groceries.
The group has flyers all over the physical neighborhood.
And then instructions on the flyers
on how to join the Bed-Stuy Strong Slack channel.
It's only for people in Bed-Stuy.
The Slack channel can help people coordinate delivery.
So people can say, hi, I need supplies delivered,
or I need groceries.
Or it can be people that want to volunteer to deliver.
It creates spaces of communication during COVID-19.
And then there are different channels
to organize organizers.
They use Slack, Google Voice,
the narrow table to help organize deliveries.
They also have a phone number that you can call.
I spoke with one of the volunteers a few weeks ago,
Samantha Garfield.
And she gave me some examples of how the group tries to meet
and organize their nearly 3000 volunteers.
She said the other day they posted an all-hands meeting
where they were looking to get,
broad-based buy in on a set of guiding principles
for the mutual aid group.
And they were struggling with
what they can do effectively,
because there might be hundreds of people on the call.
And the goal isn't to ask them to thumbs up or thumb down,
but to generally invite hand raisers
of all different levels of possible engagement.
So they had a conversation of what they were gonna do,
which was, asking people to stack in Zoom.
So saying like stack, like they wanna speak.
B, asking them to weigh in on a stroll poll on Slido
and then C concurrently posting the Q&A
on Slido and having people upvote and downvote questions.
This is what they were doing during a call.
So there are all sorts of levels for how people
could voice their dissent based on
how extreme the descent was.
So in this case, there was all these other tools
they had to use outside of even the phone call
to be able to organize,
just hundreds of people on this phone call.
One thing Bed-Stuy Strong really thinks through
is intaking information and what to do with it.
And also what the point is of their group
and what the solutions are.
Bed-Stuy strong exists just for Bed-Stuy.
It doesn't exist for all of Brooklyn.
And maybe there couldn't be one group for all of Brooklyn.
They've also defined their mission,
which is to help provide support just in that space.
And what they accomplish is monumental
because they accomplish it with dedication, organization
and specific kind of fulfilling mission.
And then thinking through how all these things exist
in these different digital spaces.
Another example that comes to mind,
is something I attended in March,
was I spoke to graphic designer and educator
and lecturer Prem Krishnamurthy
about his performance lecture series called Present.
Present started by happenstance,
Prem had planned an exhibition called Polymorph
in the University of Connecticut at the end of March.
It would be accompanied by a lecture performance essay
he had written that would then be
a distributed PDF publication.
In mid March the show was postponed
and Prem quickly shifted gears.
Then he would still like
to do something related to the event.
And he wanted to invite the other artists and curators
from the show, which had now been canceled to do cameos.
So what was supposed to be
this solo performance lecture series for himself
became this much more inclusive format
where artists can be given space
to show their postponement.
It was meant to be a onetime thing,
but so many people said that you should keep doing this.
And that they really resonated to the sense of connectedness
that people needed at this time, which was early March.
I think we're probably in a different time now.
At least I feel like we are with the onslaught
of so many digital events.
Then Prem thought, this is what I can offer in March,
then I should keep doing it.
One thing he engaged in is a variety of tempo
and rhythm which is important.
Time on Zoom feels twice as long as normal time.
And this is something he does a lot when teaching.
A talk is supposed to be a physical talk.
He'll include things like a listening experience
or snippets of a film inside of his lecture.
In the case of Present,
all of these would end with something like group karaoke.
One thing he's been thinking about
is how do you rethink how to do things?
How you present ideas and give them shape.
Prem learnt to work with Zoom in a particular way
and edit film in a specific way as well,
and has a documentation of the show in Google Slides.
And so for him, it's always reiterating
and learning from the show itself.
On another level, he's starting to think of questions
of scale and community in different ways.
The cap now isn't who can physically fit in the room.
It's a different kind of cap.
He hasn't limited the number of participants yet.
But he's thinking about what a natural scale could be
as it starts to shape out.
Also just with the number of people interested in Present.
But again, it's not the scale that would fit in the room.
He said he wouldn't cap scale until harassment happens.
One thing that's interesting
is that there's not a singular viewpoint in Zoom.
So part of this project kind of highlights
the impossibility of having a singular viewpoint.
What I see is different
than what you see as the participants
is different than what the organizers see.
And even for participants who you see sitting next to you,
if you were all sharing video, would be probably different
for different people.
So there isn't really this true experience.
Another event I attended was data feminism,
which was a multi-hundred person lecture series.
Lemme see here,
is one of the writers Lauren Klein presenting.
And a variety of chats that are happening at once.
So much like this experience where people can engage
in the comments and the moderators are the authors.
The engagement falls to the authors to read out the comments
who are Lauren Klein and Catherine Ignacio.
The moderators have complete control.
It is a much more structured lecture.
But the content is extremely enjoyable
and really pertinent.
And what I enjoy about this being based in Berlin
is that this open kind of lecture series
never would have happened prior to COVID-19.
This would be in a physical room, probably in Boston,
where one of the writers is located.
And it wouldn't actually be very accessible.
It would maybe not be recorded.
There would be no kind of artifact around it.
No sort of digital ephemera.
This actually allows for a much more diverse audience.
And the audience was really diverse
from the events I attended.
They were from across the globe.
From across the EU, India, Malaysia, the US and the UK.
Sometimes the shift online actually can create more equity
than we realize, because it allows for many more people
to engage with what we're looking at.
I hope post this new normal that we're in,
we can still create these digital spaces
and opportunities for digital communities.
Another example I'm gonna show is Now Play This,
a games interactive arts festival
held in London, Somerset House.
Right when the COVID shutdowns were happening in London,
Now Play This was canceled.
And then a few weeks later reinstated to be digital.
As you can tell from the video,
it's an experimental arts and games exhibit.
And so a lot of the games are really physical.
And a lot of the experiences that you can have around games
actually can be physical.
So being in the space with other people
and responding to how they're responding to a game.
Marie Foulston, the curator of the festival
and a former curator of games
at the Victoria and Albert Museum
has been thinking about what curation
and exhibition design means in this digital space now.
She built what you see above in Animal Crossing,
which is Chris Burden's Urban Lights,
and pushed for Now Play This
to actually be in Animal Crossing.
They held events in the game.
Marie is assessing as a curator
who's traditionally worked with the digital,
but the digital in the sense
of bringing it into a museum.
What does it mean to only work purely with the digital?
They can't be in the same space and touching things.
How do we translate the physical into the virtual,
especially with a festival.
This isn't about making an exhibition purely physical,
digital already can manifest physically
in terms of installing monitors.
But Marie started thinking about rituals
and resonances and constraints.
So for example, when you go to a festival or an art exhibit,
you get into a car, you go into a physical space
and only so many bodies can fit into the museum at a time.
But when you're in the museum, it's a form of intimacy.
You change perhaps how you act in that space
versus how you'd act in your own living room
or backyard or bedroom.
So can any of those rituals be brought
into the digital space, which brings us to Animal Crossing.
Historically, there have virtual exhibitions online
and in virtual life, like Second Life.
So these things have come before and this isn't new.
What we see here are the creators of untitled goose game
presenting on a panel in Animal Crossing.
But it just feels like a different kind of experience,
especially if you're able to be there.
Lots of things online, feel like the broadcast version
of one person sort of lecturing out to the world,
I guess a bit like what I'm doing now.
It's one to many, but Marie wanted intimacy.
Animal Crossing is not a broadcast channel.
It allows users to engage in a specific and ritualized way.
They have to visit a specific Animal Crossing island.
The embodiment of that space is different
for users doing it on Zoom.
The juxtaposition of that space also looks a certain way.
It's tweet and cute,
but hyper-personalized person to person.
It touched on intimacy.
Everyone in the Animal Crossing
made their character a certain way.
The rituals don't translate 100%, but that's okay.
Now play This also created virtual field trips
with Robert Yang, a games professor, artist
and creator who took people into Half-Life 1.
The idea was to go just beyond a talk.
So there are multiplayer games where you can go
into the game itself.
And in this it gets turned into a guided experience.
For the field trips participants have to book a ticket
prior to the show.
No, prior to the field trip,
then show up at a certain time in the game,
and then you have to get into the game
and then you have to focus and follow the field trip guide.
The field trips are capped at a certain size
so the artists can really engage with the participants
and actually follow along.
Now Play This also curated another field trip.
That's not shown above,
but it's a field trip in No Man's Sky.
So No Man's Sky is a game where there's,
hundreds and millions and millions of planets.
And the artists selected the planet
and invited people there.
And then the artists on the field trip
actually explained landscape photography
and how to conduct landscape photography in video games.
The 10 participants in this field
were then given assignments
and asked to come back as a group
and show what they'd photographed.
Both of these events,
there were different levels of engagement.
Both of these field trips were also livestreamed.
So people could watch in a more broadcasty way.
However, the point of the field trips were to create
more intimate experiences.
And I love this example because it's showing a morphing,
or reconfiguring of video games,
of us using something that's not intended
to yield delightful results.
And I spoke to over 28 creators.
I'm just showing you a small snippet of the project,
which launches next week.
And AIGA will most likely share with you the links.
And what came out of this was,
a checklist for what designers
and engineers can keep in mind.
And I'll just read a few of them out to you.
So people need consistent ways
to share across video platforms
and just media platforms in general.
So we can look to Slack actually,
which has the ability to drag and drop
across any part of the tool interface to share content.
On Zoom, which they've now finally added the ability
to share.
You can only drag to share the content.
And it's really a small, tiny window where the chat is.
You can't even share media, for example,
really on Google Hangouts unless it's a URL
or unless you have to go through all these steps.
People need more intimate ways to have.
So then another takeaway is people need more intimate ways
to have a conversation.
So on Zoom, we have breakout rooms.
So the ability to pair off
and create smaller areas of engagement that could be safer,
and more private spaces are really key.
And if we start to think of video conferencing platforms,
as many social networks,
we have private messaging for example, on Facebook,
and on Twitter we have DMS.
And then lastly,
one of the things that's really needed is customization.
Many creators, school educators, event planners
and mutual aid groups mentioned wanting a dashboard
to just better import audio or lineup speakers,
or just better ways to create
more thoughtfulness in content.
What they actually needed
is something like a broadcasting tool.
So this is the kind of TLDR of the takeaways.
This is just a sample of what people needed.
And people needed all of these things before COVID-19.
People needed consistent ways to share media.
They needed ways to create smaller, safer conversations.
They needed customization and agency.
And in some cases they needed dashboards
and tools like broadcasting software
in video conferencing tools.
It's just from this moment, we're able to see more clearly
what these cracks are,
because it's so much more heightened
since everyone is having to do similar things online.
Since all of our personal and private lives are now digital.
A conferencing tool,
we should think of it functioning like,
and really we should think of a conferencing tool
being like a social network at the same time
as being a TV station, at the same time a space
that holds the most intimate conversations
that people can have.
And the tool needs to reflect that safely and securely
and also through design.
But no matter what,
even with the best design tools, they will still fail.
And there's interesting things people are doing
to combat these failures.
People are creating workarounds,
like engaging in digital duct tape,
which is, as I said earlier, it's using a lot of tools
like Slack, Google Docs,
and Zoom to create workflows for communities.
So some schools are using Zoom, email, Google Docs, Slack,
GitHub, and Arena, all for assignments,
for knowledge sharing and for talks
and tasks with their students.
One tool isn't sufficient enough,
but could integration across these tools be helpful?
And then we have to think about the drawbacks
with data privacy and safety.
So is there a way to securely honor people's privacy
and data privacy with any kind of tool integration?
Or is there a secure tool that could have these features?
Another thing that's popped up
is what's called the run of show.
So earlier I mentioned time in Zoom feels longer,
but even with digital tools, a host needs a plan.
They need to know who's speaking
and when and how long it is.
They need to keep the speaker on task.
That they need to be prepared with questions
in case there are none.
And from the run of show, attendees need guidance.
So users need to know if they're being thrown
into breakout rooms.
And I've heard this from a lot of people
of attending events or talks,
and then just being randomly thrown in a breakout room
with no clarity or warning,
which can be really jarring and a little upsetting.
Posting to tell attendees what is going on
and what the plan is.
A tool or interface could help with that a little bit
by showing breakout groups like how many there are
and the ability to leave one,
without totally leaving the entire phone call.
Or they could show the time that's left in a breakout room.
But a host still needs to outline what is going on.
And lastly, tangible rituals.
What are things that attendees can do
to provide any kind of closeness
that a tool can't necessarily do,
or maybe it's not as enjoyable.
So CreativeMornings has asked people at times
to hold up signs that they've made.
Or for example, Prem would start Present
with everyone engaging in breathing exercises.
Sometimes the most intimate acts online
aren't the UI we put in a tool,
but the exercises we can do a part but together.
Even the best tools
still require human planning and insight.
We can't entirely tech our way out of this.
And we shouldn't think that we can.
But design and technology can exist
to help support communities without adding more friction
to their lives.
And this leads me to some other things we can realize.
Which is, I think remembering
that the moment we're in no matter what,
we aren't in a one-to-one to the offline
and no tool can reflect that.
But maybe we can make these experiences different.
But they don't have to be friction-filled.
Marie and Prem both brought that for themselves,
reconfiguring expectations.
And I think that's true here, especially for design.
It's a different kind of medium.
We interact with the screen now differently.
There may be similarities.
We still have to yield to the limitations
of the medium you're in, or at least incorporate them.
Prem mentioned an hour in Zoom feeling
like three-hour meeting.
So time here matters.
You're on the speaker of thing I mentioned earlier.
You feel the audience differently.
I can't hear any of you laugh or sigh or smile or be upset.
And so I have to perform more
and be confident that this talk is resonating with you.
We're lacking the specific social cues
that physical closeness provides.
And there's really not a lot we can do to overcome that.
Another thing is recognizing,
no matter what harassment happens everywhere.
So some of the tools may not have harassment moderation.
I'm dead staring at you, Google Hangouts.
There's almost no moderation in there at all.
So until all tools
have harassment user interface moderation tools,
like the ability to mute and block someone,
Slack doesn't have the ability to block.
Or hide someone from the chat or hide them from you,
which Zoom doesn't have.
Then harassment will still occur.
And even with these harassment will still occur
if events and groups
and organizers don't have harassment codes of conduct
and harassment policies.
Much like having a physical talk
where you could ask questions, or I hope that you would.
You especially need to ask questions for online gatherings
and designers need to realize harassment happens everywhere
in every facet of life.
And in any instance where one person
can talk to one other person
or one person can talk to five people,
or one person can talk to a thousand.
And our tools have to reflect that.
Our tools need to have harassment moderation in them.
And the other thing to recognize is
what are the power dynamics at play?
And what generally are the power dynamics of communication?
Like I said, our offline lives,
technology has always been unequal
and that there is systemic injustice in the world.
And we don't leave that behind
when we come into digital spaces.
So what are the power dynamics
that are at play in this conversation we're having,
or generally in other spaces you're in?
For example, Prem in one of our interviews,
mentioned a professor with a telegram group.
So what are the controls in that telegram group?
There's some moderation in telegram, but the real control,
is the fact that it's the social dynamics.
The students can technically do whatever they want
in telegram, there are a few controls moderation.
But the students know
that it's their professor's telegram channel.
And that there's the social
and powerful weight of the professor in that channel,
and what a professor means outside of the channel.
The professor controls their grades.
So the control that exists in that space
is a similar control that exists in society.
And we imprint societal biases
and societal structures into social networks
and into the digital spaces.
So it's important to remember this
in any kind of event or any kind of tool.
Any kind of event you're a designer in,
or any kind of tool you're creating.
That social dynamics from the outside world
will always exist in the inside world.
I think sort of lastly,
this is something I try to remind myself
and in almost hopeful way is,
even with things that feel sort of structuralist
and formless or non-hierarchical,
how can we learn to yield to the intimacy of the space
that we're in?
How can we learn to think about the different spaces
that were existing?
And I think in this case, it's important to realize,
we need guidance and some structure
to be able to safely engage with each other.
So some of that structure can be rules of harassment
and how to engage with one another
and what a code of conduct is.
So we can yield to the intimacy of the group we're in.
Intimacy can be a variety of things.
Intimacy can exist on a scale,
but how do we think about structure inside of a space
to help us like lean into that more?
And this is where the hand of the curator
or the run of show is really important.
What's the point of the meeting?
Who's in charge of it?
What's the meeting going to do and cover?
Having all these things outlined
and setting expectations can help us
and like lean into the moment,
because it's creating safety and parameters for us
to safely engage with each other.
I think lastly it's,
and I think I said this earlier is resetting expectations.
And Marie and Prem both emphasize this.
We have to rethink scale on this moment and at this level.
In the sense of so many people are using so many tools
at the same time, but in a variety of different spaces
from an event that could maybe have five people
to an event that maybe has 1000
to maybe an event that's streamed
across multiple platforms at once.
So how can we reset expectations
around what scale means?
Does having a thousand people attend an event,
make it more successful?
Or does it make it feel less intimate and less engaging?
In another conference I'm attending,
the organizers wrote to participants and mentioned
that they went into move at the speed of trauma
and formed trust in other words, slow.
Scale, slowness and size and expectation,
they're all related.
Marie mentioned letting go of audience number expectations
when designing for intimacy online.
What does this success of Now Play This mean?
Perhaps it's not thousands of page views.
Maybe it's also the kind of intimacy they can create.
So for example, if this were a physical talk
and only 30 people came to this talk,
but it filled the room, wouldn't that be a success?
So why within the shift of the online,
do we think that there needs to be more just simply
for the point of having more
and how can we rethink this shift around thousands of views?
Marie asks, is it that we don't need more content,
but asks what about content needs to shift
to better fit this moment?
So instead of one to many, can we be shifting intimacy
from one to a few or one to one?
For example, having Robert walk around,
and the Twitch stream with thousands of views
would be more successful,
but that's a less enriching experience with the field trip.
Prem echoes this as well.
Why do groups of five to six people
versus 18 to 20 feels so different?
When we move slowly what can we design?
And when we rethink scale, what else can we make?
I like to sort of suggest, instead of making encyclopedias,
can we make zenes.
Instead of thinking of everything we make
as a social network, can we create something that's smaller
and more sustainable and maybe easier to maintain
and safer for communities?
Thank you so much for your time.
-: Thank you so much for that presentation, Caroline.
We really appreciate it.
So we only have a couple of minutes left for Q&A.
So I wanted to try to get to some
from the audience right away.
-: Yeah, sure.
-: First there's a clarifying question,
just of, what do you mean by the dashboard
and tools similar to broadcasting software?
-: So broadcasting software
and I should have shown actually like a screenshot
of like broadcasting.
There's a lot.
There was like a lot of dials, you can like control audio,
you can add in lighting in certain ways.
But also if you're like in a broadcast studio,
like let's say, like we had the AIGA like news hour.
Like Lee-Shaun could be able to like sync me up live,
but then cut to camera two
that's like outside
with some of wearing a face mask, obviously,
because safety first
to be able to sync these things up.
And so you can just sort of know
that everything's ready to go.
So we don't have something like that.
So for example, if I were teaching a class
and I knew that I was presenting
and I had a second person like come in to speak,
but I knew I wanted there to be
a video at some point I should be able to sync things up.
Or if students are presenting,
knowing you could put them in an order
and just be like, all right, let's go,
as opposed to doing,
like, oh, who-wants-to-go-next dance.
So like thinking through how actually there are,
is like a more robust interface we could make
inside the video conferencing tools.
Or where you can even think of how, like, for example,
LiveJournal had all these like moderation tools.
Like what if we have those
in kind of like a dashboard setting.
-: Totally, thank you.
And I'd just like to add,
I was a panelist on an event earlier today
and they used Hopin,
which had a pretty robust set of tools
for like a main stage area and breakouts
and sort of networking.
So it's worth checking out different things beyond Zoom.
We also had some questions about Zoom,
just in terms of, since that moment,
I think a couple of months ago
where all of the Zoom bombing was in the news.
Zoom has introduced end-to-end encryption
at all service levels, but they've also gotten some flack
for canceling the account of a US-based activist
because of a Chinese government pushback.
So do you have sort of updated take on Zoom
in terms of some of these security and safety issues?
-: I thought it was a really great sign
when they brought in Alex Stamos of Facebook.
He's a well-known in security
and privacy researcher and engineer.
And I'm glad that
they are reimplementing end-to-end encryption.
I think there's a lot of criticism
to still be lobbied at Zoom though,
because there are sort of making these decisions
and the structure of the company, again.
So I've noticed that a lot of enterprise software
really argues that it's enterprise software.
And we see this a lot with Slack, for example,
of when they say like, well, we don't need a block button.
We're only servicing work.
We're only servicing work channels.
But that's not true.
Like, alumni groups use Slack,
online communities use Slack.
I'm sure like conferences use Slack all the time.
So it's not used in a purely work setting.
So it's kind of a lazy but dangerous argument to say,
we don't need something like a block button.
So a lot of enterprise softwares,
refuses to update policies and create tools
that would benefit people's private and personal lives
under this false sort of,
like false argument
that they're purely enterprise software.
And so this is what I mean,
where COVID has kind of exposed a lot of issues
that existed prior to this moment.
We can see it now we're clearly in a one-to-one way.
So the fact that Zoom was like,
well, we're gonna remove end-to-end encryption
without acknowledging that it's used so frequently now
in a similar way to, for example, WhatsApp,
which has end-to-end encryption.
That it's used in people's personal lives.
But then the fact that they're making policy decisions
of who's allowed to use the platform,
they're making like sort of ad hoc decisions in real time.
And they maybe don't have the internal structure
or like foresight to like work through these decisions.
It feels like they're sort of shooting
from the hip in a way.
So like, I think it's obviously awful
they removed that activist.
But I think we should continue to critique them
and hold them to the standard
that they're not just enterprise software.
That we need to hold them to the standards
that we would hold Facebook, for example.
If Facebook removed someone's platform
or profile for vegan activists, we would be upset.
There would be coverage over that.
And so I think we have to continue to do that to this tool
and not let them just exist as a tool,
but really say like, you are sort of an enabling platform.
-: Thank you, it's almost like Zoom
is part of the civic infrastructure now
whether they admit it or not.
-: Exactly.
-: So just to wrap things up,
unfortunately we don't have any more time for questions,
but to follow up, we will be publishing this recording
on aiga.org in a few days, along with closed captioning,
but you can also go straight to our Facebook page
and it will be archived there right away.
And then whenever Caroline is ready,
we can also share the links to the reports
and recommendations that she showed on her slides.
-: Totally.
It's going to launch next week.
We decided to wait just given the protest in the US
and also across the world.
It just didn't feel right to sort of release something,
that sort of asking on how do we design for intimacy online?
But also just, I think it's good to like wait a second
and not detract from the conversation
that the US and I think every country actually
like needs to have.
-: Or at the speed of informed by trauma
or what was the phrase you used earlier?
-: It's like trauma-informed trust.
So I think it's important to move slowly
and respond to things in a very real time
and not in like an arbitrary marketing calendar time.
-: Thank you for sharing that.
So Caroline Sinders,
thank you for joining us on this webinar.
Thank you all for tuning in live
and for our members for making this programming happen
and available.
And we will see you at the next one.
-: Yeah, sounds good.
If anyone has questions, my DMS are open,
so just shoot me a DM.
-: Take care.
Caroline: Thank you. -: Bye.