Thank you very much for watching this presentation.
I’m Kruakae Pothong. I'm a visiting research fellow at the London
School of economics and political science.
During this research project, I served
as a research fellow in the computer science department at University College London.
I'm here on behalf of our team, to present our approach,
to engage people in a critical assessment of technology-enabled transparency
and what they deem acceptable and responsible trade-offs,
concerning transparency practices. Societal,
Issues surrounding the trust, people have in their social political
and economic interactions have led to an increase in desire
for transparency of the actions and decisions made in human interactions.
Over the years. we've seen Technology Solutions emerging in response to this call
for transparency. Examples of these technology solutions include distributed ledger technologies such
as blockchains and the open data movements.
Commonly these Technology Solutions deploy information based technologies to deliver transparency
or information visibility. But is information visibility the sunlight that kills
all social ills. Have we thought of
its consequences? Will it burn is in process?
According to Zuboff, it might. 360 Degrees,
transparency of business and government operations might be too overwhelming for consumers
and citizens, and even meaningless if we cannot act on the information,
we have. Businesses and government seemed better equipped with the resources to
extract benefits of greater information visibility about us.
Even so, So there is a price to pay for everyone,
whether you are individuals businesses
or government. To make transparency
and information technology that enables transparency to work
for consumers and citizens, and other stakeholders.
We first need to explore the intended and unintended consequences of transparency and work out
what acceptable and reasonable trade-offs are for the parties involved. In this paper
we focus on what would be acceptable
and reasonable trade-offs
for individuals and businesses
and what these traceoffs mean for the design and development of information,
technology and governance of the technology applications. To crack this puzzle
we developed a method, combining live action roleplay
(LARP) with deliberation for examining the attitude
and expectations of individuals and businesses towards transparency.
We use flour, plus a means to facilitate the co-created Human Experience
through improvisation with transparency in daily transactions
within social context of food, fashion and finance.
We use deliberation as a process to help people in their characters to share their co-created experience
and based on that identified
what their characters, given their different life circumstances found problematic.
Then we invited participants to reflect on their co-created
experience with transparency in our post-LARP reflection.
As part of this reflection, we asked
whether they could relate to any of the problems that their characters identified
and how they envisioned the problems
be addressed. We paid a lot of attention to character
design to ensure that our participants would encounter life
experiences that are different from their own
and that anyone irrespective of their actual demographic
backgrounds could relate to and play
these characters. Design of these characters was based on a five factor model of personality
and participants responses to the pre-workshop
survey concerning the factors that shape,
their purchasing decisions and information sharing preferences.
We then randomly assigned to these characters to our participants and asked them to fill out
their dilemma diary as their characters before joining the workshop to practice making decisions
and these characters shoes.
We use dilemmas tailored to the rules of either consumer
or business characters to situate participants in their
daily interaction with the highly information
dependent society. We created two sets of dilemmas: one in the persent day
and the other in the future.
Both the characters and dilemmas were used to expose participants to aspects of
transparency within social contexts that they are unlikely to have experienced,
thus challenging participants familiarity with transparency
and opening opportunities for participants to explore various transparency practices and outcomes.
This following video offers a taste of participants
co-created experience with transparency in our lab
and the problem of present-day dilemma
that they encountered. We're in a moment of PR
fiasco a little bit. I want to make sure that
as I run my business, which is a falafel food store, that I can really make a difference.
As a consumer, if we can afford it, it would be nice to promote brands that show,
a more concern about how they produce their food,
their goods, and where it comes from. Then we took
participants time traveling to the Future, ten years,
in ten seconds to the age of 360 degrees
transparency. Participants, in their characters, then shared their experience
of transparency consequences in relation to the changes in the evolution of
transparency practices in various industries. From their experience,
sharing, participants in their characters, began to identify
what they found problematic about transparency.
Welcome to 2030 in food the automation of food packaging design
means that we can immediately see the environmental
and social impact of different products.
Food will Now display the same kinds of Hazard warnings that we are so used to seeing on cigarette,
packaging. In fashion,
thanks to augmented reality technologies
and 7G, we can dress in the highest fashion while safe in our Hazmat overalls and face masks.
It's better for the environment, too. In finance,
demands for transparency in banking have had a controversial knock-on effect
for citizens. Our credit ratings and financial statuses are visible to all at all times.
I find that it helps me know who I'm talking to you.
I also think that now people are just jot on their financial situation
and I feel very oppressed by that.
We Through a restructuring and I got sort of restructured out.
But, before I left I was able to hook myself up with
what actually I think is the real FinTech nowadays
and that is how to hack the distributed Ledger. In our LARP, participants, in
their characters, identified three burning issues.
One is trusting information and accountability.
Another is information delivery
and priorities and the third is blurred boundaries between public and private information.
We asked participants again, when they came out of that character,
whether these problems mattered at all. The following video demonstrates,
how participants, as themselves not their characters, related
to and reflected on the problems that their characters experienced in our LARP. Most companies these
days has such poor reputations,
that we need a lot more from them in order to feel we trust them at
all. Transparency on its own won't solve that.
I think there is a problem between data, information and knowledge.
There is this idea that somehow the more data points you have the more knowledge you
have and that's not necessarily related.
There's a real problem with how feasible it is to display data
to to actually track the sources of a lot.
of things. As captured in the previous video,
participants, as their individual selves, can relate to the problems they identified
When there were in characters. The parallel participants drew between their characters'
transparency experience and their own daily engagement,
with information-based technologies, led them to exchange views on limits of transparency.
They spotted the similar problems that their characters
did and critiqued the ability of transparency to promote individual agency, relationship,
between transparency and trust, the abuse of transparency and the flawed assumption.
that more information would generate more knowledge. Based on these problems,
participants then deliberated on potential solutions to address these limits of transparency,
that they identified. These Solutions,
ranged from regulations such as antitrust,
law, to business incentives, and technology solutions,
such as data, stewardship and data.
trust frameworks. The following video gives a snapshot of participants solution brainstorming.
We all remember the whitewashing stuff. Nobody
Believed the factory inspections because they don't trust,
the people were paid by Nike to inspect the factory.
How do you say a framework within which you can reason to trust
the people who are telling you things. What would help me there is more government regulations.
The example of the food labels, in the future, being the,
Same as the tobacco labels. That would be a step forward.
Can't make an informed decision
about what the value of your data is or what it will mean in the future.
Then what is the solution? Anti-trust.
How can we help businesses to be more responsible
and make that demonstrable. You want to identify
and reward the best businesses to create economic incentives to be that choice.
Essentially the formula is transparency
and accountability in a way that's provable and demonstrable.
So, what is the learning for Design? Technology Solutions,
alone are insufficient to deliver on participants transparency expectations,
which included the ability to dynamically manage and negotiate,
the type and volume of information made available,
according to the context of use; the ability to make use of
information made visible to affect change;
the ability to trust both people and technologies that they interact with daily.
How then can design help make technology enable transparency work for everyone.
One, designers should carefully consider the social context of use in determining
what and how much information should be made visible
when designing technology solutions for transparency,
particularly one aimed at promoting trust and accountability. Context,
also, determines whether technology-enabled transparency would be considered
cost-effective for businesses because, in certain areas such as fashion, transparency
in supply chain, may not yield enough commercial incentives
for businesses to invest whereas in finance,
it would. TWO: Context also plays an important role in determining
what the right balance is between transparency and privacy.
This affects decisions for example
whether to apply privacy solutions to distributed Ledger Technologies
because such solution can undermine the visibility of information that should be made public
for audits, particularly in financial contexts.
So, tread carefully. Three: Building user-friendly control features to enable individual users to manage
the type and volume of information made visible to them,
according to their levels of information literacy
And the context of use. In this way,
the information made visible would be useful
and beneficial to both recipients of information
and those who invest in technology solutions to make information visible.
Thank you.