Our assignment for today's lesson was to do an observation of a situation we want to tackle:

«The topic I am currently interested in is the social biases in our coded and digital technologies.

In my observation I wanted to see which technologies don‘t equally treat each person depending on external or even internal features, to eventually be able to concretize and specify the direction I want to go to with my main topic.

I decided to just casually watch and analyze every technology that somehow interacts with humans in my day-to-day life traveling to Zurich and back home, to see what difficulties some people may encounter that others don‘t.

I realized the main technological interactions happen while being on public transport. Well, actually just opening the doors. The sensors of the doors that separate each wagon are placed in the top right corner, which makes it sometimes more difficult to open the door. Especially small people usually have to wave their hand in front of the sensor to get it to activate, while tall people can just walkthrough.It makes no sense to me to have it placed up there since it‘s probably just a motion or proximity sensor, which could also be placed in the lower area of the door, to have the sensors work equally for everyone.

The next problematic technology I noticed was at the traffic light near the Toni-Areal.In my opinion, the lights change way too fast from Green to Red. I usually just manage to get over the street when the lights are yet again changing back to Red, while already walking pretty quickly. I know that you don‘t need to hurry if the lights turn red while you‘re still on the street in the process of crossing it, but I still imagine it stressful for older or handicapped people, that might not be able to make it across the street in that period. Even if I don‘t want to doubt that there‘s a system behind that technology that might eventually prevent fatal traffic jams, there would be a solution to make everyone feel validated in traffic.

Overall I have to say that I don‘t even meet that many interactive technologies in my day-to-day life, and when I do, they usually don‘t exclude people based on their external features, except for those two examples I mentioned. I think where the magic of social biases mostly happens is beyond the public eye, hidden in unbalanced, and inaccurate algorithms and datasets that influence different areas of our social living together. These areas will be my next destination to explore and observe.»