'AI Is Built on Datasets That Are Already Biased'; A Conversation with Felecia Davis
Ever since her childhood summers sewing patterns at the family dining table, Felecia Davis has understood the power of textiles to be a vehicle for communication, connection, and understanding. As her career in architecture unfolded in parallel with wider advances in computational capabilities, Davis dedicated her studies, and subsequent career, to the question of how computational textiles could intersect with and challenge social, cultural, and political constructions.
This dedication to mobilizing design and creativity in the name of confronting societal biases permeates Davis' many leadership positions, whether as the founder of Felecia Davis Studio, a co-founder of the Black Reconstruction Collective, or as an associate professor at Penn State University, where she directs SOFTLAB; a research group dedicated to tools, methods, and design solutions associated with computational textiles. Davis’ leadership in the field has been recognized through many honors, including the Architectural League of New York’s 2022 Emerging Voices award and Cooper Hewitt’s 2022 National Design Award in Digital Design, while her new book, Softbuilt: Computational Textile Architectures, is due to be published in October 2023.
In June 2023, Archinect’s Niall Patrick Walsh spoke with Davis about her career as a practitioner and educator. We explore how Davis’ interests in computation and textiles emerged, how the two interests manifest in her work today, and how her lab’s ‘soft system’ joins wider efforts to confront biases, discrimination, and disempowerment in both artificial intelligence and society at large.
