Society First, Then Technology: Lessons Learned from Studies of NASA, Radical Data Autonomy, and Anti-Racist Design

We often consider the impacts of technology upon society or culture, frequently as “ethics” or “unintended consequences.” But we can short-circuit these ill effects by thinking sociologically first, about the people building and using the technology. In this talk, Janet Vertesi draws on two decades of research and design work alongside NASA scientists, her “opt out” experiments against the personal data economy, and recent work in anti-racist design to consider how bringing sociological principles in up front circumvents well-known problems in technological systems.

This talk is part of our Humanistic Design Speaker Series.

About the speaker

Dubbed “Margaret Mead among the Starfleet” in the Times Literary Supplement, Janet Vertesi is Associate Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. She has spent two decades studying NASA’s robotic spacecraft teams as a sociologist of science and technology where she examines issues such as data sharing and work with artificially intelligent agents on the ground. She is also a conscientious objector to the personal data economy and uses critical technical practices to undo the harms of privacy-invasive systems through her well-known “opt out” projects. She is author of the books Seeing Like a Rover and Shaping Science (University of Chicago Press), editor of the groundbreaking collection digitalSTS (Princeton Press) and the MIT Press Infrastructures Series, and has published papers in top ranked venues in the sociology of science and technology and human-computer interaction. Professor Vertesi is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton, sits on the Director’s Advisory Council for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and is a former advisory board member of the Data and Society Institute.

Learn more about Janet Vertesi.