Juliane Jarke

AI-powered predictive systems have high margins of error. However, data visualisations of algorithmic systems in education and other social fields tend to visualise certainty, thus invisibilising the underlying approximations and uncertainties of the algorithmic systems and the social settings in which these systems operate. This paper draws on a critical speculative approach to first analyse data visualisations from predictive analytics platforms for education. It demonstrates that visualisations of uncertainty in education are rare. Second, the paper explores uncertainty visualisations in other fields (defence, climate change and healthcare). The paper concludes by reflecting on the role of data visualisations and un/certainty in shaping educational futures. It also identifies practical implications for the design of data visualisations in education.

With this paper we join others in their call to resist and challenge regimes of anticipations that suggest our futures are inevitably linked to certain imaginaries about data-driven systems. The future is not simply happening but is made now – through regimes of anticipation that shape our expectations, imaginaries, visions and hypes, and define what is thinkable and desirable. Who or what is able to claim the future is an exercise of power and a matter of social justice. However, current anticipations circulating about datafied futures are often determined by powerful social actors such as states or technology companies. In this paper, we explore how we might open up futures-making to different people in relation to futures of ageing. Central is the question of whether and how we can actually think (and imagine) outside of powerful anticipation regimes around the increasing spread and relevance of data-driven systems and/or ageist assumptions about how to ‘fix’ the problem of demographic ageing. We draw on data from a series of design fiction workshops with older adults, civil society organisations and civil servants in Germany, Austria and the UK. Our analysis explores how participatory futuring might allow participants to question their own assumptions and anticipations about the futures of data-driven technologies in ageing societies but that, due to ‘discursive closure’, this may not lead to radically different futures imaginaries.