Team Profile: An interview with Ethics Lab Postdoctoral Fellow Alicia Patterson
Alicia Patterson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Ethics Lab who has been assisting the team in integrating ethics into Georgetown’s computer science curriculum as part of the Responsible Computer Science Challenge grant from the Mozilla Foundation. This semester she is working with Visiting Distinguished Professor danah boyd on infusing ethics exercises into the “Data and the Politics of Evidence” course.
What drew you to join Ethics Lab?
Traditional academic philosophy centers on reading and writing papers and engaging in dialogue. Joining Ethics Lab, I was really excited to complement these methods with other approaches that use creativity not just as a tool to keep students engaged but rather as a central method of learning and encountering philosophies. I also liked Ethics Lab’s vision to combine tools of design and creative thinking into tackling some really important moral problems. I was drawn to the deep sense of how we should be using philosophy and design and all these tools that we have to contribute or make progress or add to these discussions in a productive way.
Which projects are you most excited about?
We are working on taking some of our embedded ethics exercises and trying to make them exportable to other universities and partnering with universities to try them out. Through this exercise we can see how these exercises have worked in other classrooms and receive feedback on that. It has been interesting to help educators bring ethics into their computer science classrooms in other institutions.
I’m also working with [Visiting Distinguished Professor] danah boyd on a class called Data and the Politics of Evidence. I'm really interested to see what I can learn from that class and how that's going to inform me both as a researcher and a practitioner going forward. Part of this class is encouraging students to rethink how data is produced, constructed, and categorized. For example, if you want to study a set of data you would have to categorize these data points first. It would be fruitful to explore how categorization can shape your data. The class will touch upon critiques of how we view evidence and data. If creating data is a messy social process, can we really rely on it to be objective?
How important is it to push the boundaries of creativity when creating ethical designs?
I think it's very important. For one, it opens up the space of who's considered a stakeholder in creating ethical design. Through our courses and embedded ethics exercises we do not just want our students to be equipped in making convincing arguments and advocating for more ethical design, but to be brave and creative enough to explore solutions. For example, when I was teaching Social Media & Democracy last spring, my students were saying that they had no idea that there were several ways of engaging with ethical problems. While students can get a lot of knowledge from reading various texts, when you're dealing with messy, complicated real world problems, being able to think about taking risks and assessing all the different stakeholders involved is important. There’s something different that happens when you ask students to not only identify problems but to also engage with problem solving and ask themselves “okay, how might we do this?”