This is the title of a talk I'll give for: ‘Pervasive or Invasive?’ hosted by the UWE Digital Cultures Research Centre at the Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol on Friday, March 5th 2010.

The day is designed to bring cutting edge research to the Pervasive Media design community under the auspices of an AHRC Knowledge Transfer Fellowship project.

Pervasive Media may afford an intensification of surveillance, data mining, and loss of privacy, and this is certainly the perception amongst many potential designers and users. 'Pervasive or Invasive?' is designed as a day of presentations and discussions with people from different disciplines, to generate shared understandings of the issues, and then start to define what Ethical Design in Pervasive Media might be. The day will have workshop discussion opportunities - working with developers and designers to generate the beginnings of a set of ethical design principles for Pervasive Media applications.

  • What data is being collected/collated and commercially exploited by the applications we use?
  • When does anonymity matter?
  • Is it possible to design an application so that people are able to choose which information they share?
  • What levels of user consent are needed?
  • Which design decisions can be left to the end user?

[slideshare id=3344129&doc=miah2010ethicaldesign-100305082822-phpapp01]