Day 06. Activating Digital Futures
Designing Against a Data Dystopia
Saturday June 27, 11:00am EDT
🔌 Talk, 45 minute session
Yes, it feels like a dystopia right now.
Including how our personal data is treated. Palantir has developed “predictive policing,” deployed in New Orleans. Your Roomba is mapping the layout of your home without you knowing it. AT&T is selling your web browsing history associated with your real name and address.
How can we use these dystopias as inputs into our own product building process? Yes, we can use dystopia as a tool. Dystopia helps us imagine futures we don’t want to create and by reversal, the ones we truly do.
Agnes Pyrchla
Program Manager, Planet
Agnes Pyrchla thinks about, writes about, and builds digital products. Anthropological in her approach, Agnes roots her work in people's narratives to build products with intentional outcomes. She finds herself always coming back to the question, "what behavior is being incentivized here?" Agnes will always be a fierce advocate for data ethics, technical literacy and elevating human dignity above short term profit. She is currently a product manager at Planet, where she is working on making daily images of the Earth easily accessible and valuable online, to anyone who wants them (especially outside of the geospatial niche). She has also advised start-ups and Fortune 500 companies on how to build new products and services (often in industries that don’t quite exist yet) as a strategist at both frog design and Accenture. Her writing and work has been featured in MIT Tech Review, Business Insider, UX Collective, SXSW, International Development Design Summit, and Wesbeth Arts Center.