part of The Photographers' Gallery

Florian A. Schmidt

Florian A. Schmidt is a professor for Design and Media Theory at the University of Applied Sciences HTW Dresden.
He holds a diploma in Communication Design from the Weissensee Academy of Art Berlin and a Ph.D. from the Royal College of Art in London. His doctoral thesis 'Crowd Design' (Birkhäuser, 2017)is an analysis of the crowdsourcing of design as well as the design of crowdsourcing.
He has published widely on the intersection of design, digital media and the future of work. His latest research reports are: Digital Labour Markets in the Platform Economy (FES, 2016); Gig Work in Berlin (City of Berlin, 2017); and Crowdsourced Production of AI Training Data (HBS, 2019). He was a speaker at conferences such as the Digital Labor Conference in New York, Reshaping Work in Amsterdam, transmediale and re:publica in Berlin. He has consulted committees on digital labour and the platform economy at the Deutsche Bundestag in Berlin as well as the EU in Brussels.

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Unevenly Distributed
Florian A. Schmidt
2020-03
The Future Is Here!, the title of Mimi Onuoha’s video project reflecting the human side of crowdsourced image labelling, is spot on. The stories I have been told by crowd workers from across the globe doing this work full-time indeed often have an eerily Gibsonian ring to them. Especially the stories from Venezuela.
image datasets annotation crowdwork labour artists projects