I had mentioned in a blogpost earlier this year that I am taking part in a project, called “Looking into Black Boxes”.
The idea of the project is to produce a web video series about algorithms, their meaning in our everyday life and how society and software are already strongly intertwined. Despite of the rather negative associations connected with that question, we wanted to throw a glance at this topic in a neutral way, leaving the answers to the viewer and rather hand questions than definite judgements to the audience. Also, we planned to use the format to make this exciting field of software more tangible.

Dirk, the producer, Jan, the camera guy (both from 6sept13) and I started to raise money in a crowd funding campaign in order to finance the first three episodes. We got an incredibly positive response, which was both a great motivation and a hint at the demand for a low-barrier offer for people that do not necessarily have a technical background.

Hence we got started shortly after the crowd funding campaign ended. Our first and frankly quite elaborate task was to draft the concepts for the first episodes. In the end, a hospital in Berlin was chosen as the setting for our first episode, mostly due to the valuable advice of one of our supporters, Johannes. The “Unfallkrankenhaus Berlin-Marzahn” (Accident Hospital) can be described as one of the most digitally advanced hospitals in Germany. Together, we started our journey into the hospital’s interior structure, processes and hence, of course, algorithms. We searched and found different cases of digitalization. We spoke with Felix Katt, the chief of IT and with Dr. Asmus, a hand surgeon, to dive into different perspectives.

I personally really learned so much already just by being part of the first episode. And, more importantly, the experience in the hospital raised so many exciting questions, and I hope, it’ll do the same for you!
We used some of the extra money to have a friend write English subtitles for us. Just switch them on in the bottom right corner. Hooray \o/