Caroline Sinders

Person

Caroline Sinders is an award winning critical designer, researcher, and artist. They’re the founder of human rights and design lab, Convocation Research + Design. They’ve worked with the Tate Exchange at the Tate Modern, the United Nations, Ars Electronica’s AI Lab, The Information Commissioner's Office (the UK’s data protection and privacy regulator), the Harvard Kennedy School and others. While at the Weizenbaum Institute, they will be collaborating with Dr. Christian Strippel and Dr. Milagros Micheli, along with machine learning, design, and labor experts, including data workers exploring how the software used within companies impacts data workers, often exploiting the workers. Despite a wide range of research addressing the harms of exploitative data work, and workers organizing for better working conditions, best-practice examples and ethical guidelines for working with data workers are still lacking even in the standard guidelines for good academic practice. The ability to adopt more ethical practices often comes down to the particularities of individual situations: who writes budgets, who sets research priorities, and who implements things. Especially for academic requesters, there is a lack of guidance as to how to outsource data work responsibly and ethically.

In our project, we seek to explore how to create equitable work systems and environments for data workers that center workers’ experiences and expertise. Additionally, we aim to use these insights to develop ethics guidelines for academics looking to outsource data work responsibly. Our interdisciplinary project brings together two research groups at the Weizenbaum Institute,  data and design experts, machine learning experts from DAIR, and data workers themselves. This project will research ethical and professional standards in academia, the improvement of labor conditions in data work, and will use participatory design as a vehicle for achieving both goals democratically and sustainably.