HCC Seminar Series: Digital Culture Shock: Who Creates Technology and Why This Matters

Abstract

Robots that encroach on your personal space, confusing emojis, a chatbot that gives answers you completely disagree with—does any of this sound familiar? If so, you may know what it feels like to experience digital culture shock. Culture—shared values, norms, and behaviors—influences both the design of technology and its use. An encounter with new technology can teach us to embrace the unfamiliar, but a mismatch between design and user can create misunderstanding and loss of trust, and can even become a tool of digital imperialism. In this talk, I will take you on a journey through countries and cultures around the world to show several fascinating ways that technology design and use can differ and what is at stake if technology products continue to be one-size-fits all. 

Biography

Katharina Reinecke is a professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. She is the cofounder of LabintheWild, a virtual lab that studies how people around the globe interact with technology, director of the UW Center for AI & Culture (AIC), and she leads the PEACE project, which helps developers to Proactively Explore and Anticipate Consequences and Ethics of their technology innovations. Her lab has developed a number of approaches and systems that make technology better suitable for diverse user groups and that can help designers and developers anticipate unintended consequences of technology. Katharina received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Zurich and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan.