Technical Responses To Critique: The Case Of Skin Tone

How do technical actors respond to critique by developing novel technologies? In this paper, we follow the actors that have positioned themselves as critics of technology; we examine the inspirations and sources of their critical capacities and; we trace the development of concrete technological artifacts designed to respond to those critiques. To illustrate our approach, we outline the case of digital cameras tuned to capture diverse human skin tones, a technical response to long-standing critiques of whiteness bias in photography. Our investigative approach synthesizes three theoretical threads: the sociology of critical capacities, the anthropology of ethics, and studies of valuation. To trace the arc of technical responses to critique: (i) inspect the conditions under which actors are, or are not, capacitated to be critical; (ii) the conditions in which critiques are communicated, disputed, modified, furthered or ignored; and (iii) trace how matters of concern are materialized in technical outcomes.