Sophia Efstathiou, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

“A Role for the Arts in Technology Assessment: The Science, Humanities and Arts Knowledge Exchange (SHAKE).”

Technologies are becoming increasingly intimate, with momentous yet ‘soft’ moral and cultural impacts (van Est 2014; Swierstra 2015). Soft impacts call for new ways to attend to technology. The arts and especially the performance arts (theater, dance, music, performance) hold invaluable expertise in cultivating a sensual, embodied and affective, awareness of materials and our relations to them. I dub the suite of approaches that mobilise the arts in critical technology development the Science, Humanities and Arts Knowledge Exchange (SHAKE) and proceed to populate it. 

The presentation is structured in three parts. First, I motivate this type of work through philosophical work around sensual, affective, knowledge and ethics. I then outline existing approaches in respectively applied theater and responsible innovation which  inspire and provoke this one: Value-Sensitive Design, Socio-Technical Integration Research (STIR) and the DEEPEN project. Last, I share two gameformances designed to stimulate philosophical reflection in an embodied manner. SHAKE-styled innovation invites a polis to train citizens’ response-abilities through not only rhetoric but drama​.​