Simplicity is not inclusivity: The politics of smart algorithms in app design

Music apps within the iOS app store promise to broaden the potential for musical participation through smart algorithms and simple, user-friendly interface design. Yet, simplicity is not inclusivity. Join USC Annenberg for a conversation with visiting scholar Victoria Simon in which she will analyze how the iOS platform regulates the current user-testing practices of developers. Simon will trace the way ideas about gender and ability are not only inscribed at the moment of design, but are fed forward in subsequent stages of refinement to the software. Simon asks what concepts such as queer failure and ableism can afford us in theorizing algorithmic systems, user interface design, and the broader social system of normativity they propagate.
 
Victoria Simon is a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California in the Annenberg School of Communication studies and received a PhD from McGill University in 2019. Her research on the social dynamics of human-computer interaction has appeared in the journals Television and New Media, Communication, Culture and Critique, Amodern, and in the anthology Appified: Culture in the Age of Apps (University of Michigan Press). Her book project is on the history and politics of touchscreens for sound production.

Lunch will be served.