We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Noura Howell a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Noura, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?
‘Smart city’ narratives herald promises of data-driven innovations leveraging increasingly invasive surveillance collecting data about people’s bodies and behaviors. This data is often enrolled to ‘know’ people more transparently, claiming to support normative ideas of safety, wellness, and productivity. Knowing people in terms of data-driven categories is problematic. Surveillance is not safety.
“If we examine the process of ‘understanding’ people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover at at its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce… I relate it to my norm. I admit you to existence, within my system.” —Glissant, Poetics of Relation, “For Opacity”
I designed the Heart Sounds Bench to resist this will to know people more transparently via data. Drawing from postcolonial philospher Glissant’s call for the right to opacity, I think biosensing technology should respect people’s right to be opaque, unknowable, to exist outside and beyond what it is possible to know via data. Too much gets lost in translation when people are reduced to normative data-driven categories. Claims to knowing people with data should be more humble and more respectful of the diversity and complexity of human experience.
The Heart Sounds Bench is one design exploration of enrolling data in public space to support opacity rather than transparency. Listening to heart sounds is a very intimate form of data, but it does not ‘reveal’ much ‘information’, and the heart sounds are not recorded. Instead, pairs of strangers who tried out sitting on the bench described feeling a sense of shared life energy. Although there was no new ‘data-driven insight’ here–they’re alive, duh!–experiencing the heart sounds was a visceral reminder of shared vitality and shared vulnerability.
I propose life-affirmation as an alternative goal for data in public space. Affirming our shared existence across our differences in public spaces is an important part of the experience of city living. Moments of life-affirmation in city living can range from something as grand and celebratory as a public festival, to something as mundane as making space for someone to sit on the bus. Instead of trying to use surveillance to make people more ‘transparent’ according to societal norms and categories, this idea of opacity calls for respecting what we simply cannot know about others, for respecting their existence, experience, and ways of knowing as valid even without ‘understanding’ them.
This project came out of my experiences living in an area that has been amping up surveillance in public space, contrasted with mundane moments of sharing space with strangers in public space (e.g., on the sidewalk, on public transit). It was also a reaction to past experiences both personal and familial that taught me the harms of surveillance and miscategorization, that surveillance often reinforces existing systems of oppression and in the name of ‘security’ brings greater harm to marginalized groups. Finally, it was a way of reworking my experiences of being ill for a few months, and wanting to appreciate simply being alive.
Noura, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I am an assistant professor in Digital Media at Georgia Tech. I completed my PhD at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, where I was a member of the BioSENSE lab. Previously I have worked as a human centered designer and engineer in Singapore, Morocco, and China, as well as at the MIT Media Lab, Intel Labs, Microsoft, and The Echo Nest. I did my undergraduate studies in software engineering at Olin College just outside Boston.
My design research investigates Emotion AI—algorithmic ways of knowing emotion that use data about people’s bodies and behaviors. Combining custom sensor technologies and design, I challenge dominant narratives of data and explore alternatives. I work with code, circuits, wood, e-textiles, and sound.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
My work investigates, how can sensors, data, and algorithmic systems invite more ethical, respectful ways of knowing ourselves and others? How can these technologies maintain fairness and inclusivity across human differences, uncertainty, and the irreducible complexity of human experiences?
Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?
Benjamin, R. ed. 2019. Captivating technology: race, carceral technoscience, and liberatory imagination in everyday life. Duke University Press.
Glissant, É. 1997. For Opacity. Poetics of Relation. The University of Michigan Press. 189–194.
Nafus, D. ed. 2016. Quantified: Biosensing Technologies in Everyday Life. MIT Press.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://nourahowell.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nourahowell/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noura-howell-38304026/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/howell_noura/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8xVloTxpvmu70uEoS02yyg
- Other: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=urDLnnEAAAAJ