CUNY PIT Lab is excited to announce that we are convening our inaugural advisory board. This board will serve to broaden our impact as a site aimed at advancing public interest technology. We will be inviting individuals who have a track record in:
- Building career opportunities and credentialing in the civic, non-profit and/or academic sector
- Producing high-impact media and production campaigns
- Driving inclusion and equity in tech
- Supporting cross-sector and transdisciplinary approaches to using, building, and understanding technology
To help shape and lead our inaugural advisory board, Brendon Hawkins will be serving as the founding advisory board chairperson for CUNY PIT Lab. Brendon is a social technologist and systems researcher focused on modeling emotion as measurable infrastructure. He is the founder of Studio Lab BH, a systems research lab currently developing computational frameworks for understanding how affect shapes human behavior, culture, and digital environments. His work spans AI/ML product development, data systems, and interdisciplinary research. This work results in the translation of emotional signals into structured, designable systems at the intersection of science, technology, and culture.
Along with our team, Brendon will be helping to gather individuals from across the broader public interest technology community to convene an advisory board that will serve to guide CUNY PIT Lab’s work in the future. We spoke to Brendon about what draws him to public interest tech and what he hopes to bring to this new advisory board.
What excites you about public interest technology?
I’m a little bit of a semantic nerd. As the lines become blurred around so much of what is becoming our societal reality — disinformation, misinformation, correct information inundated in a space of misinformation — I have to question everything that I’m approached with or that I approach. So when I hear public interest technology, I have to break down all those words separately and then join them back together.
When I think of the public, I think of it in this kind of fractal kind of experience: myself as the public and my own personal interests; my immediate circle – friends, family, partner – as part of the public that sits outside of myself. Then there is maybe my neighborhood, and then so on and so forth, right? And this concept of public kind of keeps augmenting itself the further globalization manifests in every component of the globe.
And I’m interested in that public part, specifically around what we do [to] layer our work so it impacts every layer of the public. So we don’t forget about those who may be five layers away from our immediate proximity versus those who are the most immediate to us.
Which then impacts interests: every layer will have different interests. Every layer will have a different set of values. Values abstract as we augment the amount of voices that are embedded in the question of values and interests. So as we’re working towards defining our sense of public, I’m really interested in understanding how we come to terms around interests — and whose interests get prioritized. And are there ways in which we don’t have to prioritize certain voices over others?
And then the concept of technology. Technology is everything that humans have contributed to within the world that sits outside of things that the world did not create on its own within this thing that we call the Anthropocene. In this context, we are specifically talking about digital technologies, social digital technologies, infrastructural digital technologies. And when we layer all of that up with those two other terms, I’m most fascinated about, again: we have a large public. CUNY has a responsibility in many ways to the folks of New York City. Though, if history has taught us anything, New York City is a great testament to what will occur across the world.
So with that level of responsibility, I’m curious to understand how we can take on the responsibility of defining, respecting, and engaging with an augmented sense of public. Defining, respecting, and engaging with an augmented sense of value across that public. And then tying all of that to these digital technologies.
What sort of perspectives or experience do you hope to bring to your role as advisory board chair?
Katie [Cumiskey]’s running a really unique ship. Civic technology exists, government technology exists, public technology exists, but again, this interest part is so fascinating to me, because it really does suggest that there is a value prop, a real value prop, to prioritizing the interest and values of what we consider to be our public. And that’s a hefty duty. When we were crafting this role, what we wanted to outline was: given that this lab is taking on such a duty, what does that look like across time? Not just in this moment, but a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now. And as we work towards all of that, what are some of the things that we will need?
Most exciting for this advisory chair is that strategy. And this is the skill set that has been most lucrative for me in my experience: the ability to see where we want to go, and then finding the pieces to bring all of that together. Being able to strategize for us now, when we are in this kind of nexus of public awareness of the lab that includes political awareness, general public awareness, as well as advancements in our own understanding of where we want the lab to go.
Being able to strategize now so that everything is intentional as we move over the next few years — it’s quite exciting.
I think the thing that has been most valuable outside of my strategy is my perspective. I come from different angles of prior experience: I’m educated in cybersecurity, experientially trained in machine learning and AI, and then personally trained in art and design. And being able to combine those points of view is one of the things that will be one of the more valuable components of what I’m bringing to this chair position.