The interaction of stakeholders is regarded key in modern environmental and spatial planning. Marine/maritime spatial planning (MSP) is an emerging marine policy domain, which is of great interest worldwide. MSP practices are characterized by diverse approaches and a lack of transnational cooperation. Actors with various backgrounds have to identify mismatches and synergies to jointly aim towards coherent and coordinated practices. The ‘Living Q’ is a communication method to make actors aware systematically about their viewpoints in an interactive, communicative and playful environment, while it draws on results of a proceeding ‘Q Methodology’ study. Results from ‘Living Q’ exercises with international expert’s groups from European Sea basins show that the method is capable to foster communication and interaction among actors participating in ‘Living Q’ exercises, while having the potential to generate added value to planning processes by actor interaction in a collaborative setting.
LINK
The 2014 EU Directive on Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) lays down obligations for the EU Member States to establish a maritime planning process, resulting in a maritime spatial plan by 2020. Consultation should be carried out with local, national and transnational stakeholders. Stakeholder engagement in MSP is complex because of the great number and diversity of maritime stakeholders and the unfamiliarity of some of these stakeholders with MSP and its potential impact. To facilitate stakeholder engagement in MSP, the 'MSP Challenge' table top strategy game was designed and played as part of several stakeholder events in different European countries. The authors study the efficacy of the game for stakeholder engagement. Background and evaluation data of nineteen game sessions with a total of 310 stakeholders with different backgrounds were collected through post-game surveys. Furthermore, the efficacy of the game for stakeholder engagement processes, organised by competent MSP authorities in Scotland and Belgium, is studied in more detail. The results show that the board game, overall, has been a very efficient and effective way of familiarising a great diversity of stakeholders with MSP and to create meaningful interaction and learning among stakeholders in formal planning processes. However, the case studies also show that contextual factors-the level of familiarity with MSP and participants' perception to sustainability-influences the efficacy of the game.
LINK
Prompt design can be understood similarly to query design, as a prompt aiming to understand cultural dimensions in visual research, forcing the AI to make sense of ambiguity as a way to understand its training dataset and biases ( Niederer, S. and Colombo, G., ‘Visual Methods for Digital Research’). It moves away from prompting engineering and efforts to make “code-like” prompts that suppress ambiguity and prevent the AI from bringing biases to the surface. Our idea is to keep the ambiguity present in the image descriptions like in natural language and let it flow through different stages (degrees) of the broken telephone dynamics. This way we have less control over the result or selection of the ideal result and more questions about the dynamics implicit in the biases present in the results obtained.Different from textual or mathematical results, in which prompt chains or asking the AI to explain how it got the result might be enough, images and visual methods assisted by AI demand new methods to deal with that. Exploring and developing a new approach for it is the main goal of this research project, particularly interested in possible biases and unexplored patterns in AI’s image affordances.How could we detect small biases in describing images and creating based on descriptions when it comes to AI? What exactly do the words written by AI when describing an image stand for? When detecting a ‘human’ or ‘science’, for example, what elements or archetypes are invisible between prompting, and the image created or described?Turning an AI’s image description into a new image could help us to have a glimpse behind the scenes. In the broken telephone game, small misperceptions between telling and hearing, coding and decoding, produce big divergences in the final result - and the cultural factors in between have been largely studied. To amplify and understand possible biases, we could check how this new image would be described by AI, starting a broken telephone cycle. This process could shed light not just into the gap between AI image description and its capacity to reconstruct images using this description as part of prompts, but also illuminate biases and patterns in AI image description and creation based on description.It is in line with previous projects on image clustering and image prompt analysis (see reference links), and questions such as identification of AI image biases, cross AI models analysis, reverse engineering through prompts, image clustering, and analysis of large datasets of images from online image and video-based platforms.The experiment becomes even more relevant in light of the results from recent studies (Shumailov et al., 2024) that show that AI models trained on AI generated data will eventually collapse.To frame this analysis, the proposal from Munn, Magee and Arora (2023) titled Unmaking AI Imagemaking introduces three methodological approaches for investigating AI image models: Unmaking the ecosystem, Unmaking the data and Unmaking the outputs.First, the idea of ecosystem was taken for these authors to describe socio-technical implications that surround the AI models: the place where they have been developed; the owners, partners, or supporters; and their interests, goals, and impositions. “Research has already identified how these image models internalize toxic stereotypes (Birnhane 2021) and reproduce forms of gendered and ethnic bias (Luccioni 2023), to name just two issues” (Munn et al., 2023, p. 2).There are also differences between the different models that currently dominate the market. Although Stable Diffusion seems to be the most open due to its origin, when working with images with this model, biases appear even more quickly than in other models. “In this framing, Stable Diffusion becomes an internet-based tool, which can be used and abused by “the people,” rather than a corporate product, where responsibility is clear, quality must be ensured, and toxicity must be mitigated” (Munn et al., 2023, p. 5).To unmaking the data, it is important to ask ourselves about the source and interests for the extraction of the data used. According to the description of their project “Creating an Ad Library Political Observatory”, “This project aims to explore diverse approaches to analyze and visualize the data from Meta’s ad library, which includes Instagram, Facebook, and other Meta products, using LLMs. The ultimate goal is to enhance the Ad Library Political Observatory, a tool we are developing to monitor Meta’s ad business.” That is to say, the images were taken from political advertising on the social network Facebook, as part of an observation process that seeks to make evident the investments in advertising around politics. These are prepared images in terms of what is seen in the background of the image, the position and posture of the characters, the visible objects. In general, we could say that we are dealing with staged images. This is important since the initial information that describes the AI is in itself a representation, a visual creation.
LINK
Een vraagarticulatieproces met projectmanagers en -leiders uit private en Triple-Helix organisaties laat zien dat zij behoefte hebben aan tools voor: 1. Het bepalen van de juiste incentives om stakeholders actief te betrekken in multi-sector collaboratieve innovatieprojecten (verder verwezen als innovatieprojecten), en 2. Het concreet, transparant en op één lijn te krijgen van de belangen van de partners. Vandaar dat dit project betreft het doorontwikkelen van het Degrees of Engagement diagram (DoE-diagram), een tool voor het managen van stakeholder engagement in innovatieprojecten voor het behalen van de maatschappelijke opgaven. Hiermee sluit het project aan bij de programmalijn ‘rollen, belangen en coördinatie’ van de Kennis en Innovatieagenda van de missie Maatschappelijke Verdienvermogen- thema’s Klimaat & Energie en Circulaire economie. Het consortium bestaat uit de Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA), KplusV en Amsterdam Smart City (ASC). De HvA ontwikkelde het DoE-diagram. Voor het identificeren van stakeholders bevat het DoE-diagram attributen op project- en organisatieniveau. In dit project wordt het DoE doorontwikkeld door onderzoek te doen naar: 1. De attributen op individuniveau en potentiele nieuwe attributen op project- en organisatieniveau, 2. De mate waarin deze attributen invloed hebben op het bepalen van de passende incentives, de concretisering van de partnerbelangen en al dan niet succesvolle verloop van innovatieprojecten, 3. Een verkenning van een digitale versie van het DoE voor het managen van in- en uitstappen van partners. Hiermee beoogt het project twee doelen: 1. Inzicht verkrijgen in stakeholderconfiguraties voor het ondersteunen van beslissingen met betrekking tot stakeholder-engagement, 2. Bouwen van een consortium van partijen die vervolg aan het project gaan geven door longitudinaal onderzoek te doen naar de inzet van de uitbreiding van het DoE-diagram en het maken van een werkend prototype en testen van de digitale versie ervan.
This project develops a European network for transdisciplinary innovation in artistic engagement as a catalyst for societal transformation, focusing on immersive art. It responds to the professionals in the field’s call for research into immersive art’s unique capacity to ‘move’ people through its multisensory, technosocial qualities towards collective change. The project brings together experts leading state-of-the-art research and practice in related fields with an aim to develop trajectories for artistic, methodological, and conceptual innovation for societal transformation. The nascent field of immersive art, including its potential impact on society, has been identified as a priority research area on all local-to-EU levels, but often suffers from the common (mis)perception as being technological spectacle prioritising entertainment values. Many practitioners create immersive art to enable novel forms of creative engagement to address societal issues and enact change, but have difficulty gaining recognition and support for this endeavour. A critical challenge is the lack of knowledge about how their predominantly sensuous and aesthetic experience actually lead to collective change, which remains unrecognised in the current systems of impact evaluation predicated on quantitative analysis. Recent psychological insights on awe as a profoundly transformative emotion signals a possibility to address this challenge, offering a new way to make sense of the transformational effect of directly interacting with such affective qualities of immersive art. In parallel, there is a renewed interest in the practice of cultural mediation, which brings together different stakeholders to facilitate negotiation towards collective change in diverse domains of civic life, often through creative engagements. Our project forms strategic grounds for transdisciplinary research at the intersection between these two developments. We bring together experts in immersive art, psychology, cultural mediation, digital humanities, and design across Europe to explore: How can awe-experiences be enacted in immersive art and be extended towards societal transformation?
First Virtual Reality Museum for Migrant Women: creating engagement and innovative participatory design approaches through Virtual Reality Spaces.“Imagine a place filled with important stories that are hard to tell. A place that embodies the collective experience of immigrant women during their temporary stay”. In this project the first museum around immigrant women in Virtual Reality is created and tested. Working with the only migration centre for women in Monterrey, Lamentos Escuchados, project members (professional developers, lecturers, and interior design, animation, media and humanity students) collaborate with immigrant women and the centre officials to understand the migrant women stories, their notion of space/home and the way they inhabit the centre. This VR museum helps to connect immigrant women with the community while exploring more flexible ways to educate architects and interior designers about alternative ways of doing architecture through participatory design approaches.Partners:University of Monterey (UDEM)Lamentos Escuchados
