Sarah Pink

Sarah Pink, professor at Monash University in Australia, is appointed honorary doctor at the Faculty of Technology and Society. Professor Pink is an outstanding researcher who has significantly contributed to the faculty's research field.

Sarah will hold a lecture with the title Emerging Technologies Future Living: For an Interdisciplinary Futures Agenda.

You can take part of the lecture both on site in Auditorium D138 at Orkanen, or via live stream. A link to the live stream will be published on this webpage later on.

Moderator: Martin Berg

 

Abstract

To be able to design, plan for and constitute sustainable and livable futures, we need new knowledge about how people, other species, the environment and technologies will together shape times that are as yet unknown. We are currently at a unique moment. On the one hand, we are experiencing extreme uncertainty relating to climate, public health, and geopolitical security. Yet, on the other hand, we have an unprecedented capacity to generate new knowledge about this moment and the possible futures that might lead from it. Not only do new modes of gathering, generating and analysing digital data exist as predictive data analytics and data science advance, but as the social sciences shift towards future-oriented modes of investigation, we have the potential to create pre-emptive knowledge and frameworks.

In this talk, I will argue for and demonstrate the starting point for a new futures social science, which is designed to participate with the computing sciences in the important task of asking how we might better know and intervene in the ways that technology and society are joined in our possible futures. I will draw on recent research undertaken in the Emerging Technologies Lab, to demonstrate the possibilities of this approach for research into automation and robotisation in the future of work and energy.

Biography

Sarah Pink (PhD, FASSA) is a design and futures anthropologist and documentary filmmaker. She is the founding Director of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University, Australia and a CI and research leader in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Sarah is also an Associate Director of Monash University Energy Institute and Visiting Professor at Halmstad University in Sweden and Loughborough University in the UK. Her most recent publications include the books Emerging Technologies / Life at the Edge of the Future (2023) and Design Ethnography (2022) and the documentary films Smart Homes for Seniors (2021) and Digital Energy Futures (2022).