Oblique Manoeuvres

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In the meantime, you can read about the project idea below:

Over 2023-2024, I spent several months talking to innovators and R&D funders about the evolving ecosystem for the so-called digital twins in the UK. Hearing stories of collective mobilisation, enthusiasm, then disappointment, pivoting and future uncertainty made me reflect about the need to surface the perspectives on hype beyond academic critiques and curate safer spaces for discussing innovators’ own expectations and vulnerabilities. How to challenge the faux-optimistic, hasty and culture of software start ups?

This presentation will report on an ongoing project aiming to translate research findings into a card-based game for practitioners involved in the development of digital twins and adjacent technologies. I was initially inspired by the game called “Oblique strategies” developed by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. The original Oblique Strategies were a series of somehow esoteric card prompts, aiming to help artists with overcoming creative blocks. There is no particular mechanics attached to the original game, i.e., players can draw a single card and reflect on it or decide to discuss several of them as a team.

My second point of inspiration is a recent turn to intervention, found in fields like STS but also HCI and Design. Recently, there has been a proliferation of games, roleplays and scenarios for including ethics in data science projects e.g., “Data Hazard Labels”, “Data Ethics Emergency Drill”. Though I fully support researchers explicitly targeting their engagement efforts at practitioners, I found myself questioning the sole promise of ‘ethics’ tools. While many of the current ethics tools focus on raising awareness among software developers, I wanted to focus on creating space for talking candidly about successes and failures.

Consequently, I have embarked on a collaboration with a graphic designer (Carla de la Torre), to develop a set of cards which aims to act as prompts for more honest and humble conversations which acknowledge hype in innovation development. As the project is embedded in the programme ‘researcher in residence’ at Energy Systems Catapult (UK-based innovation incubator and think tank), I was able to leverage the institutional connections and invite people to play.

Each card presents an innovator’s dilemma followed by a quick reflexive prompt. Although the card content itself is brief and fairly abstract, further project documentation links individual cards to relevant data (e.g. quotations from research interviewees, policy documents) as well as foundational theoretical concepts from STS and beyond supporting the observations.

While a set of cards cannot ensure the appropriate inclusion of ethics in innovation projects (nor it shouldn’t aim for that in the first place as we’re not after individualising responsibility), my hope for this experiment is that it will help to illuminate the collective and political issues with digital twins that are currently obscured by hype. Would it be too idealistic to think an alliance between STS hype scholars and progressive innovators is possible?