Being Human Festival: DiSCo’s Culture of Optimisation Café
By Sandy Di Yu, PGR student at University of Sussex and co-managing editor of DiSCo Journal from the Digital Studies Collective.
Breakthroughs are often framed as unquestionably good. But what if the pursuit of breakthroughs for their own sake was bringing us towards a breaking point? This was the question I had in mind when we organised our Being Human Café on the Culture of Optimisation, as a part of Being Human Festival.
As the biggest humanities festival in the UK, the Being Human Festival poses questions about humanity that are of interest to the many disciplines across the spectrum of humanities. Events in their programme span large-scale conferences to small workshops, including "cafés", off-the-shelf formats that make it easier to get involved. Taking part in the festival meant a chance to work in a format that goes beyond staring at screens and books for 10 hours a day, a method that most PGR students will be familiar with. It also meant reaching an audience that might not be familiar with the workings of academia, an interesting exercise in making specialist research accessible to a wider audience.
This year's theme was Breakthroughs. As a co-manager of the Digital Studies Collective (DiSCo), a CHASE research network, I knew this would perfectly match our vision of celebrating and critiquing the digitisation of the everyday. Digital technologies offer a constant stream of breakthroughs such that one might consider breakthroughs to be foundational to the essence of digitality. Indeed, they often operate on what we might call the logic of optimisation, a mechanisation of the process of making something better. But "better" is a highly subjective term. Better for what, and for whom? Are optimisation and breakthroughs in digital technology necessarily good for humanity? Or might breakthroughs for their own sake be a dangerous logic to advocate? It was these questions that especially piqued my interest.
Partnering with fellow DiSCo member Ben Potter, we devised a workshop that included a roundtable discussion on the various aspects of our research, focusing on the culture of optimisation that we observe in our research as well as our everyday lives. Our task was to stitch together the historic instances of optimisation with the optimisation at the bleeding edge of technology today. For my part, this meant drawing a line between improvement, progress, and optimisation, especially the idea of land improvement as a violent form of privatisation and progress as the raison d'etre of imperialism, and how these precede the technologies and networks of today. For Ben, it meant drawing out the specifics of AI and how optimisation is embedded within the very lines of code that construct them, as well as the scenarios we might encounter if optimisation for optimisation's sake is pursued in the wake of artificial intelligence.
We hosted the event at Turf Projects in Croydon, London, an artist-run gallery and project space located inside a mall that hasn't changed since the early 2000s. As a Croydon resident, I was incredibly pleased to be able to partner with Turf Projects for this workshop. It was the perfect space to host a Being Human Café, not least because there are rarely academic and cultural events taking place in this borough that has been historically underfunded.
I supplied the event with cake and tea (way, way too much cake and tea; I wouldn't advise going grocery shopping whilst hungry and having only those two things on one's shopping list.) Both Ben and I gave brief presentations about our areas of expertise, and we presented questions to prompt our discussion. The participants ranged from fellow PhD students to those with no academic affiliation, but regardless of their position, nearly everyone contributed valuable and interesting takes on the topics of social media, labour, automation, breakthroughs and optimisation. And with the amount of snacks and refreshments provided, no one left hungry or thirsty.
How we got involved with Being Human Festival
The process to participate and host an event as a part of Being Human Festival is fairly straightforward, and the Being Human Café format is an especially uncomplicated way to get involved. It's also the only format that can be organised by postgraduate research students without an established researcher to help. CHASE offered a small amount of funding to their research networks to host such an event, and the first step for DiSCo to participate was to brainstorm ideas.
As I was leading the workshop, I settled on the culture of optimisation, which closely related to my own research interests and matched the theme of Breakthroughs. We then reached out to organisations that had spaces available for us to host our event. Whilst we looked at a few different options in central London, we opted for Turf Projects in Croydon in hopes of engaging a demographic who might bring fresh, non-academic perspectives to our workshop. I wrote to them and scheduled a meeting with one of their team members to discuss the Café. After a successful meeting, during which Demelza, the community producer at Turf, showed me around the spaces they’ll be renovating, they provided me with a letter of support, which I used in the application.
The application itself had a particular focus on accessibility which differentiated it from other academic events that I’ve applied to. Once the application was written, we sent it to fellow DiSCo members with an eagle eye for applications to read through.
Once we had the green light, we submitted our application along with references from supervisors and the letter of support from Turf Projects. We received a letter of acceptance a few weeks later, and official planning began. This included putting the fun stuff such as together presentations in accessible language and buying cake (a necessity in my eyes, since it’s a “café”), as well as administrative tasks such as creating a risk assessment form and marketing.
For us, the biggest challenge was marketing. We're fairly experienced with engaging academic audiences, but we wanted to attract participants outside of academia. I submitted the event to a number of local listings in addition to the usual routes of institutional email communications in the hopes of reaching a wide audience. Our efforts paid off as we had 19 out of 20 spots booked, including a few locals. There were a number of no-shows, as is to be expected for free events, but the workshop in the end was a success, with lively conversation and light-hearted debate on the topics we presented.
Part of the requirements of Being Human Festival was feedback from us, the event organisers, as well as the participants. I found that printing out the feedback forms for the participants was helpful, and it ensured that everyone was able to provide feedback, even those who couldn’t access the link we provided to fill out the form online.
All in all, it was a fun experience and a good exercise to produce an event contingent on my research that was not strictly academic. It also acted as a trial for focus groups that I may hold for my research, giving me practical skills in organising such events. And of course, I ended up taking home lots of leftover cake.