We report on a research through design study of how our everyday objects, augmented with technologies, could contribute to disseminating people's lifestyle values in public. We developed Jarvis, a hybrid object of a glass jar and a location-tracking system that allowed us to examine how Jarvis stimulated making lifestyle values visible and sometimes hiding of the values across different places. As a design research artifact, Jarvis seeks to spark meaningful interactions as zero-waste practitioners carry it around in their daily routines in public. The data visualized through Jarvis demonstrate how users’ values are spread out locally. 18 zero-waste followers participated in a week-long deployment with a design probe followed by post-deployment interviews. Our findings highlight the role of different agencies in circulating values represented by Jarvis. We discuss our methodological insights on hybrid objects, and how the circulation of values may inform us about the alternative roles of technologies in speaking for our lifestyle values.
Congestion control mechanisms, by which network users share constrained capacity on Internet links, are heavily studied in computer science. Such mechanisms are traditionally automated, assuming that users do not wish to be involved in addressing congestion. However, in community-owned and operated networks, users have control over daily operational choices. We explore the design of community-based congestion policies and mechanisms, through the lens of network capacity as a Common Pool Resource (CPR). Through a series of workshops and interviews in a rural community in Oaxaca, Mexico, we encounter design opportunities for new types of tools supporting communal network management. Participants expressed desires for preserving individual privacy while collecting longitudinal data to track the network's impact on the community, prioritization of high-value applications, equal link sharing between users, and human-mediated congestion management in lieu of automated enforcement. We report qualitative insights and offer design directions for future systems to address network resources in a manner compatible with Ostrom's principles for CPR governance.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449135
Licencing frameworks are embedded with sociotechnical imaginaries that limit the potential for networked technologies to make traditional media forms, like radio, more inclusive. We implemented a prototype platform that aims to enable more people to run small radio stations by using internet and mobile networks to avoid the costs of studios and specialist equipment. We sought to refine the prototype by responding to the needs of users as they set up four community radio stations in rural Romania and on Irish islands over two years. Despite national differences, their respective regulations limited who articulated requirements. Activities in applying for and complying with licences shaped design priorities by imposing temporal demands and assumptions about studios, professionalism, and certain organisational structures and division of responsibilities. Indeed, although small rural community stations present no threat of radio interference or competition to media corporations that pursue market power, they are subject to values associated with them. Regulatory frameworks are specific to nations and media form; however, our analysis illustrates that broader sociotechnical imaginaries impede designing technology to widen inclusion, which we hope will provoke discussion in HCI and CSCW about our responsibilities in engaging with the policies that shape possible futures.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449228
Hyperlocal information systems cater to the needs of the people in a well-defined geographical area. Such information systems are ubiquitously accessible to the users in the developed world through their mobile phones. In developing countries hyperlocal information is valued, but often dispersed, constantly evolving, and poorly accessible. Additionally, most of the social information systems in developing countries are adopted from the developed world, and often fail to take into consideration local socio-geographical settings and cultural complexities. As a result, there is a strong reliance on word of mouth through known and unknown networks. In this paper, we present foundational insights on user needs, behaviors and motivations for the design of hyperlocal information systems in developing countries based on a multi-year, multi-method research study with around 5000 participants in three such countries - India, Indonesia and Nigeria. We also discuss how the complexity of real world sociocultural phenomena and heterogeneity of neighborhoods impact hyperlocal information, which can further inform design of such systems in the future.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3479509
Our food system as a socio-material, heterogeneous infrastructure often remains invisible for citizens. While moments of crisis expose the vulnerabilities and injustices underlying this system, this paper seeks to explore which processes and tools CSCW could purposely design to `open up' food infrastructures and bring young and adult people in contact with different aspects of the food system to cultivate food citizenship from a more-than-human perspective. Through a collaboration with a local primary school and four different food organisations (a mushroom grower, a vegetable farm, a bread-baking community centre, and a food bank), we designed `contact zones' that would enable a class of 7-8-year-old students to encounter socio-material food practices at each partnering organisation's site and in the classroom. Our insights show young people's rich engagement in the socio-materiality of place, food, and practices; how encountering food practices across very different sites helped surface the interconnectedness of the food system and its meanings; and how the contact zones opened spaces to practice food citizenship. The paper offers design implications towards infrastructuring more-than-human food pedagogies. It discusses inherent power dynamics of more-than-human design collaborations, critically evaluates the role of technology in more-than-human relations, and presents three design opportunities for a relational understanding towards food.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449121
This paper examines the causes and consequences of legibility as an organizing principle in the design of digital agriculture (DA) systems in the United States. Legibility refers to systems of governance that use simplified understandings of a situation to control and direct action upon it. Legibility in digital agriculture systems occurs at the confluence of two traditions of legibility: the data-driven model common in the design of digital systems, and tactics for the control of nature and labor that have developed in the United States since the foundation of the colonies. Our argument draws from (1) a historical analysis of broader patterns of agricultural technology and racialized land dispossession in what is now the United States and (2) empirical fieldwork that examines the adoption and maintenance of digital agriculture systems in rural New York State. We describe the role that legibility historically has played in the development of agricultural systems in the US, and their consequences for who is able to farm and how. This history raises the questions: What is made legible to whom? In that process, what becomes illegible? While legibility promises transparent and environmentally beneficial control, in our fieldwork we find that the demands of legibility are also restructuring the physical landscape, creating additional invisible labor, producing systems that are brittle to real-world conditions on farms, and creating opaque systems that block people from adapting to their circumstances. In reading our fieldwork together with the historical case, we demonstrate the pressures that are shaping the stakes, subject, and objects of legibility in agricultural technology. As more data-driven systems are used for environmental contexts, the CSCW community needs to extend its ways to understand how data-driven systems impact land, labor, and resources.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3479867
Sustainable HCI (SHCI) researchers have historically looked to small and urban farmers to help situate and extend notions of sustainability within economic, social, and political frameworks. In the face of climate change and the Anthropocene, however, we ask how designing like the alternative farming practices of small and urban farmers might open up new, ecological approaches to agricultural technology. We conducted ethnographic field work with small farmers and their community in Indiana and show how they are challenging “agrilogistics,” defined by philosopher Timothy Morton as a strict separation of nature and culture in food production, a separation, he argues, which underlies the substantial agricultural contributions to climate change. Our ethnography led us to suggest new possibilities for design of agricultural technology that support ecological thinking and caring for more-than-human actors through visceral imaginaries, posthuman storytelling, and engaging curiosity, possibilities which may offer ways to disentangle agricultural technology from agrilogistic paradigms.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3479557
This paper examines “repairedness” — the contingently stable, working version of an artifact under repair that is negotiated out of multiple possible versions to bring about the temporary conclusion of repair work. Our paper draws on an ethnographic study of an analog electronics repair community in Seoul, South Korea to develop two contributions. First, studying processes of negotiating the repairedness of an artifact accounts for contingency in the properties of the artifact itself, which differs from contingencies in collaborative work practices that have been a focus of CSCW research on repair. Second, a concept of repairedness highlights how ongoing processes of interacting with an artifact nonetheless need to be brought to contingent conclusions, suggesting that an artifact’s properties are a valuable site for sustainable engagement. These contributions help CSCW research on repair account for the multiplicity of artifacts highlighted by STS scholars as integral to how humans sustainably engage with artifacts in their practices.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3476069