Surveillance on Exhibit: Using Problematic Technology To Teach About Problematic Technology
Ethan R. Plaut, Kiri West, Fabio Morreale, Maya Gibson, Grace Thompson, Kara Woodward, Danielle M. Lottridge · 2025
As our most advanced technologies, such as AI, become both infrastructural and opaque, experts must educate and engage the broader public.To that end, we developed an Augmented Reality * (AR) museum installation about facial recognition and data collection that served both as a medium of public education and as a platform for collecting multiple different kinds of data-though, notably, not facial or other biometric data-from more than 100,000 museum visitors.We explain our design process through four animating tensions: comfort/discomfort, simplicity/complexity, neutrality/critique, and the individual/communal.Using thematic analysis of interviews and surveys, we draw insights on how people exposed to problematic technologies in a 'safe space' such as a museum make sense of these issues: with levity and resignation but also reverence, often specifically rooted in local cultures.We conclude with implications of the guiding principle derived from this work: "using problematic technology to teach about problematic technology."