Getting Tech Right

Christian Villum is a designer, geek, activist, and electronic music buff. He’s just wrapping up a stint as Director of Digital & Future Thinking for Danish Design Centre; he runs an indie electronic music label, a free culture indie publishing house, and used to run a maker space. In this podcast we talked about Nordic design values, how to strengthen the ethical muscle, and the roles that business and public sector, as well as sharing and the open source ethos all have to play to solve the world’s wicked problems.

Katharina Meyer is a historian of technology, an artist, a curator, and a researcher. She examines the relationship of technology and power structures, and she’s a strong proponent of Public Interest Tech and Open Source Software — especially of maintaining both.

We talked about the importance of historical and artistic perspectives for the development of tech, about the nonsense of the “lone inventor” myth, the benefits of Technikfolgenabschätzung — that’s technology impact assessment for the non-German speakers out there — and why larger goals such as the public interest or sustainable development goals should guide more tech development.

Stephanie Rieger is a designer, researcher, and an infrastructure geek at heart. She’s been working on questions surrounding futures, algorithms, tech policy, internet governance and platforms. Recently, Stephanie published a fascinating report on Web Monetization, a system to help fund creators online via a brand new protocol called Interledger. She also avidly follows internet regulation around the globe, and the tradeoffs between keeping some types of harmful content off the web while also making sure that marginalized communities don’t get shut out. You know, just the simple questions.

Julia Kloiber is the co-founder of Superrr, a lab and a community that works towards more equitable futures. She also co-founded Prototype Fund, a program that funds the development of open source civic tech, and many other notable projects at the intersection of emerging tech and the common good. In this episode we discuss equitable futures, experiences working as an outsider with public administrations, and how to get risk-averse funders to be more open to experiments.

Michael Lenczner works at the intersection of technology and the nonprofit sector, he runs Ajah and Powered by Data, and serves on several nonprofit boards and advisory groups related to technology, democracy, and the nonprofit sector. We discuss the importance of translating between fields and their different lenses, open data, open government, managing change, the flow of information, and adapting new technologies, methods, and possibilities for nonprofits.

Michelle Thorne is an activist for climate justice and a fossil-free internet. In this episode, we talked about the climate impact of the web, about the need for systemic approaches to tackle the climate crisis, and about how climate justice and a greener internet are directly related.

Patrick Tanguay is a curator and thought partner, which is to say: His work is all about making sense of the world. He publishes a popular weekly newsletter, Sentiers. He's also going to be the co-host for this podcast from now on, so we chatted about how we think about tech & society, about the inherent tensions and trade-offs we see, and about how we can work towards better, more inclusive thinking about futures.

Anab Jain is a world-renowned designer, futurist, filmmaker and educator. She co-founded and is the Director of Superflux, a new kind of design studio that specifically responds to the challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century. In this episode, we discuss immersive futures, diverse and inclusive sensing and sense-making, and the power of speculative evidence.

Iskander Smit is a designer, researcher and academic who explores connected systems, IoT and smart cities, and the role of connected things in design and in our environment. In this episode we discuss unintended consequences, the limits of human-centered design, and how to design the public technology stack.

Di Luong is a researcher, technologist and ethnographer who has been exploring issues around public interest technology, social justice and algorithmic bias. On this episode we discuss risks of algorithmic bias, how technology intersects with social justice, and the larger role of public interest technology.