Let the explorations begin!

The Stockholm Explorative Talks webinar series started out on its maiden journey with an engaging exploration of the topic – ‘Persuasive Technologies: How can we better steer the technologies designed to steer us?’. Interdisciplinarity was the watchword of the session, both in terms of the ‘explorers’ – Gustav Borgefalk , Dr Claire Ingram Bogusz , Dr Stanley Greenstein , Prof Harri Oinas-Kukkonen and Prof Susanne Wigorts Yngvesson – who came from disciplines as varied as behavioral design, informatics and media, law and information technology, information systems science, and media ethics – as well as the host Dr Ann Wong (a neuroscientist) and the audience representing 16 countries and a range of different backgrounds.

Gustav’s prompt at the beginning to ‘look around in the rooms that you’re in’ set the tone of the session and underlined the immediacy of human beings navigating a world of designed environments where our choices are constantly molded by persuasive technologies. The co-explorers chimed in at the question posed by Gustav, ‘How should we prepare the next generation to navigate, live and prosper in an artificial world’ and offered their own perspectives. Over the following hour various issues were touched upon – the need to be able to think critically and be self-aware, the ability to distinguish between the real and virtual worlds, the role of academics as an educational influence in this context, the ethical dimension of designing technologies,the necessity of looking at persuasive systems through the prism of existential philosophy and reassessing ‘what it means to be human’, the nature of surveillance capitalism and persuasive strategies vis-à-vis human autonomy – and many more. The session was capped off by a Q&A session, and the explorers responding to the parting question Gustav raised – ‘What keeps you up at night?’ which laid the path for future discussions and explorations.

We are just getting warmed up with the Stockholm Explorative Talks webinar series. Check out our event schedule for the upcoming webinars, and here’s to explore the future together!

Explorer

Gustav Borgefalk is a technologist, an entrepreneur, and a guest lecturer in behavioral design and persuasive technologies at RCA and Imperial College. He is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London and his research investigates the design, ethics and governance of persuasive systems. Borgefalk also has an MSc. degree in Business Administration from the Stockholm School of Economics and a diploma from Singularity University in Silicon Valley.

Co-Explorers

Dr Susanne Wigorts Yngvesson  is Professor of Ethics at University College Stockholm. Her research mainly focuses on the ethical, philosophical and theological aspects of media ethics, surveillance, rights-oriented questions about the freedom of religion and conscience, and also AI technology. Her research also spans the theological analysis of hymns. The common denominator in her range of research interests is her exploration of ethical and moral aspects.

Dr Claire Ingram Bogusz  is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University, and is also affiliated with the House of Innovation at Stockholm School of Economics. She conducts empirical research into how code-based technologies (eg code itself, digital platforms, machine learning, AI, digital automation) are changing how we work, how organizing occurs, and what these things mean for us as individuals and as members of increasingly unequal societies.

Dr Stanley Greenstein is a trained lawyer with experience of working in both civil and common law, and is presently Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Law and Information Technology (IT) at the Department of Law, Stockholm University, and a co-worker at the Swedish Law and Informatics Research Institute (IRI). Greenstein’s main area of ​​focus is the interaction between technology and law and how these two disciplines relate to each other. His teaching and research has centered on artificial intelligence and machine learning, and its ethical and societal implications, of which privacy, data protection, information security and cyber security considerations are central.

Dr. Harri Oinas-Kukkonen is Professor of Information Systems Science, and Dean of Graduate School at the University of Oulu, Finland. His research has been published in a wide variety of computer science, human-computer interaction, information systems, business and management, and health and medical informatics journals. His main research interests include persuasive design, behavior change, digital interventions and humanized ICT. Oinas-Kukkonen has held different researcher positions at the Academy of Finland, apart from being a Nokia Visiting Fellow and visiting scholar at Stanford University, USA. He has been listed among the 100 most influential ICT experts in Finland, and is an expert consultant for companies developing their strategies for ICT services.

Host

Dr Ann Wong is a neuroscientist, specialized in hearing physiology and hearing loss. She has previously worked at top-ranked international research institutes in science and biomedicine such as UNSW Sydney, University of California San Diego, and the University of Auckland. In Stockholm she has worked at Karolinska Institutet, Scilifelab, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and House of Innovation at Stockholms School of Economics both as researcher, scientific writer and research and outreach manager. She is currently a Senior Research Fellow at Taipei Medical University.