Connecting Technology with Human Values, with Sarah Pink

Hi #SmartCommunity friends! In this episode of the Smart Community Podcast, I have a great chat with Sarah Pink, Founding Director of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University in Melbourne. Sarah is a Futures and Design Anthropologist and in this episode she tells us about her background in both anthropology and as a documentary filmmaker, and how that has shaped her career. We then talk about some of the projects Sarah has been working on with the Emerging Technologies Research Lab, including some key insights from some of these projects. Sarah and I discuss why you need to start projects from a place of values and outcomes, rather than starting with the data, and how we can enable people to connect technologies with their human values. Sarah also tells us about a really interesting and powerful approach called ‘Thing Ethnography’ that involves roleplaying people as technology in order to understand what people actually want from their technology, not just what technologists think they want. We finish our chat discussing the problem of Smart City debates being driven by people who don’t understand real life contexts, and why we should be simulating future experiences to get a better understanding of how people behave in order to better plan for the future. As always, we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it.

Connect with Sarah on LinkedIn or Twitter @pinkydigital

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Podcast Production by Perk Digital