Examining Systems Changes As a Result of the COVID-19 Pandemic

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March, individuals and institutions alike scrambled to adapt to the demands of the novel public health emergency. In particular, many existing products and services quickly repositioned their offerings as pandemic-response solutions, raising questions of both their effectiveness and appropriateness. 

In response to this phenomenon, Professors Jonathan Healey and Sydney Luken and Ethics Lab Program Assistant and CCT graduate student Meera Kolluri presented a workshop entitled “Care vs. Control — Frameworks for Systems Redesign” at the ninth annual Relating Systems Thinking and Design Symposium (RSD9). The virtual symposium took place in October and was hosted by the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India.

Consistent with RSD9’s theme of systemic design for well-being, the trio addressed the difficulties in drawing distinctions between care and control as surveillance systems have found traction as public health tools during the pandemic. (As one participant put it, “Surveillance went from spying to ‘taking care of you’ in a heartbeat.”)

One example discussed in the workshop was thermal scanners, which have been utilized as red-light traffic cameras, weapons detection instruments, and border surveillance. By shifting their use-case from security and surveillance to public health, their contactless implementation projected a pathway for employees to safely return to in-office work. 

However, the technology’s original design prioritized the control of environments—and the people within them—by remote administrative authorities responding to an adversarial condition. Doubts about the devices’ qualifications to perform as medical instruments raised immediate questions, and were quickly followed by concerns for privacy and well-being when employers begin tracking health data and employees are turned away from their work by automated health screenings. 

In looking toward other systems for evidence of care, participants pointed to such examples as distilleries pivoting to produce hand sanitizer and cloud kitchens working to feed migrant populations. There was a marked contrast in response to interventions originating within a community versus a corporation, and trust was a key factor. Selflessness on the part of the organization assuming responsibility for care-giving was another.

Following the workshop, Healey, Luken, and Kolluri are continuing their research of technological function creep in the name of care, with an emphasis on property-technology. They hope that by drawing attention to this issue, especially within the industry, access-control professionals will think more deeply about the social impacts of their work and more expansively about the interests of people affected by their systems.