About Pamela Pavliscak
Pamela studies our conflicted emotional relationship with technology. Her work is part deep dive research, part data science. As a researcher, she creates experiments that challenge us to see technology—and ourselves—in new ways. Whether documenting new internet emotions or asking people to confront their digital alter egos, Pamela’s work is aimed at understanding how technology can help us be human. As founder of Change Sciences, she collaborates with visionary organizations including Google, IKEA, Accenture, and Virgin. Using a mix of design thinking and future foresight, Change Sciences crafts experiences to draw designers, decision-makers, and community members into creative collaboration. Pamela’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, and Quartz. She’s spoken at SXSW, Web Summit, TNW, and TEDx. Her book about designing a human future for technology will be out in 2018. Fully invested in future designers, Pamela teaches design research and speculative design at Pratt Institute and devotes time to guest lecturing at schools like the Stanford d.school, The Center for Science and Imagination at ASU, and University of Washington. She also serves on the IEEE P7000 standard committee for ethics in design.
Creating a Future with Feelings
Artificial intelligence seems poised to reinvent what it means to be human. Just as we struggle with how to maintain our own humanity, we puzzle over how human to make our machines. Without emotion, we won’t even get close. Emotions are the undercurrent to our psyche, our society, and our relationship with technology. The convergence of affective computing and AI promises to lead us in to an era of emotionally intelligent machines. As future feeling designers, it will (partly) be on us to cultivate emotional range, bridge cultural sensitivities, and broaden vocabularies. This talk will be a start.
Designing Emotionally Intelligent Machines
The relationship we have with technology, whether we admit it or not, is emotional. And it’s about to get more complicated. Emotional interactions with those special machines in our lives are about the go mainstream. Will machines with a higher EQ help or harm? Well, that’s largely up to us.
This half-day workshop will look at current examples of emotion AI, techniques for understanding emotion, and ways to develop human and machine emotional intelligence. Through a series of exercises and interventions, we’ll invent near-future emotionally intelligent products.
Learn how to:
-Parse out the emotion theory behind the technology
-Learn how to understand emotion with AI and new (non-AI) research techniques
-Consider complementary and conflicting emotion frameworks
-Practice empathy from all angles
-Try designing for a broad emotional range
-Prototype emotionally intelligent tech