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Repair worlds: Maintenance, repair, and ICT for development in rural Namibia
Abstract
This paper explores the nature and centrality of maintenance and repair ('M&R') work in the extension and sustainability of ICT infrastructure in the global South. Drawing from pragmatist traditions in CSCW and the social sciences at large, we develop a concept of 'repair worlds' intended to map the varieties and effects of such maintenance and repair activities. Empirically, our analysis builds on ethnographic fieldwork into local practices of maintenance and repair that have accompanied and supported the extension of mobile phone and computing infrastructure in the Kavango region of northeastern Namibia.
... To explore the infrastructural breakdown of informal repair and recycle practices in Bangladesh due to the pandemic and understand the resilience of the communities to withstand the situation, we situate our work within the emerging literature of repair, recycle, and e-waste handling within HCI. In recent years, repair and ewaste handling practices have emerged as a major topic of interest among the HCI community [36,[38][39][40]. A series of ethnographic works on repairing electronic devices and recycling electronic waste documented important findings on knowledge, craft, collaboration, efficiency, improvisation, values, care, and sufferings [9,30,36,37,65,67] among the repair and bhangari communities. ...
... A series of ethnographic works on repairing electronic devices and recycling electronic waste documented important findings on knowledge, craft, collaboration, efficiency, improvisation, values, care, and sufferings [9,30,36,37,65,67] among the repair and bhangari communities. This emerging yet understudied literature brings to the fore the significance of the "broken world" and emphasizes that the after-use phases of technologies should be studied as an equally important site in parallel with the design and use of technologies [30,40,41,65,66]. ...
... For example, while exchanging or upgrading phones for a discounted price is a widespread practice in the Western market, people in the Global South usually get their phones repaired after it breaks down because of economic constraints. This is why cheap and informal repair and e-waste markets are bigger in the Global South that is often the only source of income for many workers [2,3,9,19,39,40,89]. In summary, the culture of consumption, obsolescence, and repair of technologies are locally constructed where they are primarily used. ...
... To explore the infrastructural breakdown of informal repair and recycle practices in Bangladesh due to the pandemic and understand the resilience of the communities to withstand the situation, we situate our work within the emerging literature of repair, recycle, and e-waste handling within HCI. In recent years, repair and ewaste handling practices have emerged as a major topic of interest among the HCI community [36,[38][39][40]. A series of ethnographic works on repairing electronic devices and recycling electronic waste documented important findings on knowledge, craft, collaboration, efficiency, improvisation, values, care, and sufferings [9,30,36,37,65,67] among the repair and bhangari communities. ...
... A series of ethnographic works on repairing electronic devices and recycling electronic waste documented important findings on knowledge, craft, collaboration, efficiency, improvisation, values, care, and sufferings [9,30,36,37,65,67] among the repair and bhangari communities. This emerging yet understudied literature brings to the fore the significance of the "broken world" and emphasizes that the after-use phases of technologies should be studied as an equally important site in parallel with the design and use of technologies [30,40,41,65,66]. ...
... For example, while exchanging or upgrading phones for a discounted price is a widespread practice in the Western market, people in the Global South usually get their phones repaired after it breaks down because of economic constraints. This is why cheap and informal repair and e-waste markets are bigger in the Global South that is often the only source of income for many workers [2,3,9,19,39,40,89]. In summary, the culture of consumption, obsolescence, and repair of technologies are locally constructed where they are primarily used. ...
... The notion of maintenance is closely related to previous CSCW research on maintenance engineers' work on smart factories [143], information maintenance work in knowledge production communities [97], and the maintenance and repair work of equipment [57,104] and community networks [37]. While maintenance work is often characterized as highly technical in relation to breakdowns, error handling, and fixing things [57,97,104,143], this is a simplistic view as it overlooks the political, sociocultural, infrastructural, material and economic elements that shape maintenance and repair practices [37,57,73,104]. ...
... The notion of maintenance is closely related to previous CSCW research on maintenance engineers' work on smart factories [143], information maintenance work in knowledge production communities [97], and the maintenance and repair work of equipment [57,104] and community networks [37]. While maintenance work is often characterized as highly technical in relation to breakdowns, error handling, and fixing things [57,97,104,143], this is a simplistic view as it overlooks the political, sociocultural, infrastructural, material and economic elements that shape maintenance and repair practices [37,57,73,104]. In healthcare, maintenance work is often linked to equipment failures at the hospital [100], however, Gui et al. (2018) described the repair work that parents engage in to fix breakdowns while navigating healthcare services to get what they need for their children [47]. ...
... The notion of maintenance is closely related to previous CSCW research on maintenance engineers' work on smart factories [143], information maintenance work in knowledge production communities [97], and the maintenance and repair work of equipment [57,104] and community networks [37]. While maintenance work is often characterized as highly technical in relation to breakdowns, error handling, and fixing things [57,97,104,143], this is a simplistic view as it overlooks the political, sociocultural, infrastructural, material and economic elements that shape maintenance and repair practices [37,57,73,104]. In healthcare, maintenance work is often linked to equipment failures at the hospital [100], however, Gui et al. (2018) described the repair work that parents engage in to fix breakdowns while navigating healthcare services to get what they need for their children [47]. reported how community outreach workers engage in restoration work attempting to repair a "life disruption" by helping to restore patients' "old normals" [67]. ...
Frontline health workers are the first and often the only access point to basic health care services in low-and-middle income countries. However, the work and the issues frontline health workers face are often invisible to the healthcare system, with limited resources to assist them. This study explores the work practices, challenges and roles of frontline health workers in community health with particular focus on pregnancy care in South India. Drawing on the notion of maintenance and articulation work, we describe the maintenance work of frontline health workers maintaining, anticipating, reconciling, and supporting care infrastructures beyond data collection practices. Our findings highlight how socio-cultural practices, perceptions, status, and existing systems influence maintenance work practices. Based on our findings, we suggest moving beyond the focus on training and performance to design CSCW tools to support the maintenance work of frontline health workers as ‘system-builders’ to make healthcare infrastructures work in community health.
... (2019) asserts that DIY videos provide useful information about the structure of objects, and how to repair them simply. Some studies especially focus on the visibility of maintenance and repair in social life (Graham and Thrift, 2007;Jackson, Pompe & Krieshok, 2012). They aim to make subtle repair activities more evident in the technology-enhanced world. ...
... Making the repair network visible provides fruitful insights to understand the nature of repair activity. One significant study illustrates a local repair network by mapping the actors through an ethnographic study (Jackson, Pompe & Krieshok, 2012 and they make recommendations. In this study, they point out that building better connections among technology producers and repairers are essential. ...
... Mumbai (Rangaswamy, Nair, 2010) and Namibia (Jackson, Pompe, Krieshok, 2012). Geographical differences lead to a variety in findings of the studies. ...
Interacting with the inner face of products leads to knowing more than knowing the product as a user. Repair creates an opportunity for the user to interact with the components of the product. This study investigates amateur computer repairers and the amateur computer repair activities including maintenance, upgrading, modification, replacing part, cleaning, and customization by approaching them with practice theoretical framework. The research aims to describe the user-product interaction that is characteristic of amateur repair practice. For this purpose, I conducted semi-structured interviews with participants who have amateur repair experience on desktop computers or laptops. Further, I made observations of their repair practices using a think-aloud protocol. End of the study, five prominent conclusions are revealed: (1) Amateur repair is a practice that comprises elements as implicit knowledge, explicit knowledge, skills, perspective, value and setting. Therefore, it is meaningful to use the practice theoretical approach to reveal product-user interaction in terms of amateur repair. (2) Amateur repairers are critical actors who sustain and shape the practice. They are considered as users who have particular identity, perspective and skills. (3) Amateur repairers transform the character of the product, independent of how it is designed. (4) The social network and the production network are critical mediums for amateur repair practice in terms of access to the components, tools and the knowledge. (5) Amateur repair practice would contribute to sustainable system design by providing a broader view of repair.
... Technology maintenance and upkeep remains salient for low-income communities. As prior research on repair culture suggested [57,65,67,68], there is a great need to address obsolescence and the up-skilling required for new digital tech users. The rapid introduction of new technology models combined with stricter warranty invalidation rules only widen the digital divide [56]. ...
... We take the embedded skills underlying digital technology use, specifically for workforce and entrepreneurial training, for granted if we do not assess or support on-boarding populations that do not have the same kind of access or prior experience of use. This includes remembering that for both the urban poor in the Global North and much of the urban Global South, technology maintenance and repair is the reality [48,57,65,67,68]. The normalization of a "ubiquitously networked urbanism" -whether in the Global North or Global South -works to "deny the very possibility of spaces and times when networks are not available, or do not function" [pg. ...
... We suggest these communities learn from other regions where technology repair among peers is thriving, such as in Accra, Dhaka, or Kampala [56,57,68]. In particular, we see possibilities in taking more activist roles in advocating for the dismantling of repair regimes that lock out a significant part of the world's population. ...
Workers are increasingly expected to take on the responsibility and effort of preparing for employment in the new economy, where digital technologies play a central role in bridging access to resources, connections, and opportunity. Drawing from multi-year studies of entrepreneurs in Accra and Detroit, two cities that continue to experience high rates of inequality and persistently low incomes for the majority of their residents, this article highlights three key challenges to self-entrepreneurialization in the digital age: self-upgrading, maintaining technology, and overcoming exclusion. Locating these challenges at the intersection of (1) two powerful global discourses of entrepreneurialism and technology upgrade and (2) class frictions and racial dynamics, this paper uncovers ways in which CSCW might support entrepreneurialism in the new economy, particularly given that it is becoming a de facto space of work and mode of living.
... To date, studies have largely focused on urban areas (such as the capital city of Bangladesh [24]). Those that focus elsewhere, such as densely populated rural environments (e.g., the capital of a rural area in Namibia [29]), still see readily available parted-out devices, digital junkyards, and certified or trained personnel. Thus, these areas already fall within the ambit of the broader urban-centered infrastructure of repair. ...
... In recent years, a series of ethnographic work on repair has been conducted in different parts of the world that builds on that theoretical framing. For example, Jackson et al. studied electronic repair practices in rural Namibia and showed how those efforts are connected with an international network of knowledge and materials [28,29]. Jackson further developed the idea of a "broken world" that needs to be addressed with care [23]. ...
... Other studies in varied global contexts [1,19,20,24,27,41,51] discussed how repair work involves many human qualities that are often undervalued in a larger context of globalization, capitalism, and free economy. Repair is also found to be a viable business in the bustling underground markets of Bangladesh [1] and the semi-formalized "tech-shops" of Namibia [29]. ...
This paper analyzes the processes and challenges of technology repair in remote, low-income areas far from standard ICT repair infrastructure. Our sites of study are the fishing and farming villages of Dibut, Diotorin, and Dikapinisan in Aurora Province, Philippines, located in coastal coves against a mountain range. Residents are geographically isolated from urban areas, with the nearest peri-urban center of Baler a boat trip of several hours away, infeasible in some sea conditions. Unlike prior work in more connected rural areas, there are no local repair shops and device repair is uncommon, despite frequent breakage due to harsh conditions for electronics. The scarcity of local electronics repair limits technology access and leads to accumulation of e-waste. While prior work demonstrates that local electronics repair capability does arise in many rural areas around the world, we must also acknowledge that the successful emergence of this infrastructure depends on the intersection of many structural conditions and cannot be taken for granted. We present the material hardships of achieving local repair in terms of seams between heterogeneous urban and rural infrastructures, which illustrate the cove communities' marginality with respect to many forms of public infrastructure. However, intermittent and informal repair infrastructures based on trust relationships emerge to patch these seams in remote settings. We show how trust affects the way people dynamically construct repair infrastructure and why, based on their remoteness and the resulting value propositions of repair. Networks of trust between repairers, their clients, suppliers, fellow repairers, and certifying or training institutions crucially facilitate the movement of resources and expertise across the Philippines, but also reinforce the marginality of residents and repairers in the coves. Despite these structural challenges, local people are able to maintain a robust ecosystem for rural electrical line repair, from which we generalize the model of training grounds as a strategy for sustaining local communities of repair experts.
... Scholars from the fields of CSCW and beyond have contributed rich, ethnographic accounts centered on the repair of both material and social orders [28,35,37,56,62,76]. Based on Star's foundational work [69], research traditionally considers infrastructures to be invisible until they break. ...
... We draw on these perspectives, but rather than considering breakdowns as atypical [45,69], we join with scholars in advocating for a re-conceptualization of breakdowns as normal [28,34,36,37,62]. Focusing on repair worlds in rural Namibia, Jackson et al. propose broken-world thinking, "a gestalt shift in our ways of thinking about sociotechnical system development that moves moments of maintenance and repair, rather than just moments of design and adoption, to the heart of CSCW thinking and practice" ( [37]:9). ...
... We draw on these perspectives, but rather than considering breakdowns as atypical [45,69], we join with scholars in advocating for a re-conceptualization of breakdowns as normal [28,34,36,37,62]. Focusing on repair worlds in rural Namibia, Jackson et al. propose broken-world thinking, "a gestalt shift in our ways of thinking about sociotechnical system development that moves moments of maintenance and repair, rather than just moments of design and adoption, to the heart of CSCW thinking and practice" ( [37]:9). Broken-world thinking focuses on the ongoing labors, interests, and power underpinning the sociality of objects and their survival in the world [36]. ...
In Cuba, where internet access is severely constrained, technology enthusiasts have built StreetNet (SNET), a community network (CN) that has grown organically, reaching tens of thousands of households across Havana. Through fieldwork conducted in 2016 and 2017, we investigate participants' strategies as they engage with a network where the material elements---cables, switches, nanos, and servers---are regularly breaking down. Drawing on maintenance and care (M&C) scholarship, we present an in-depth investigation of the management and anticipation of breakdowns in SNET, foregrounding the deeply relational nature of repair work, collective efforts required for SNET's M&C, and the values and motivations underpinning these practices. Our paper contributes a unique perspective on how CNs are run locally and organically, outlining considerations for how interventions along these lines might be more suitably designed. We also complicate perspectives of innovation through a discussion of cultural ideologies and tensions underpinning M&C practices.
... Without such scaffolding, any AI intervention is bound to fail. While the need to plan for maintenance and repair is true of all technology deployments, especially in HCI4D [157,138], the complexity of troubleshooting and maintaining complex AI software may require continued involvement of highly-skilled AI designers and developers. It is unlikely that local repair ecosystems, such as those that have emerged for mobile phone repair [157,156], will possess the tools or capabilities to appropriately troubleshoot complex AI systems. ...
... While the need to plan for maintenance and repair is true of all technology deployments, especially in HCI4D [157,138], the complexity of troubleshooting and maintaining complex AI software may require continued involvement of highly-skilled AI designers and developers. It is unlikely that local repair ecosystems, such as those that have emerged for mobile phone repair [157,156], will possess the tools or capabilities to appropriately troubleshoot complex AI systems. ...
As researchers and technology companies rush to develop artificial intelligence (AI) applications that aid the health of marginalized communities, it is critical to consider the needs of community health workers (CHWs), who will be increasingly expected to operate tools that incorporate these technologies. My work in this dissertation shows that these users have low levels of AI knowledge, form incorrect mental models about how AI works, and at times, may trust algorithmic decisions more than their own. This is concerning, given that AI applications targeting the work of CHWs are already in active development, and early deployments in low-resource healthcare settings have already reported failures that created additional workflow inefficiencies and inconvenienced patients. Explainable AI (XAI) can help avoid such pitfalls, but nearly all prior work has focused on users that live in relatively resource-rich settings (e.g., the US and Europe) and who arguably have substantially more experience with digital technologies overall and AI systems in particular. Comprehensively, my dissertation aims to aid AI practitioners (designers, developers, researchers, etc.) in building tools accessible to users with limited AI knowledge who are situated in resource-constrained environments in the Global South.
Chapter 3 of this dissertation begins by characterizing the knowledge and perceptions CHWs hold regarding AI. Given CHWs’ misconceptions about AI, XAI could potentially aid in addressing this issue. However, there is currently a low amount of XAI research focused on the Global South and on novice AI users, which could limit how researchers make AI understandable to users such as CHWs. To work towards making AI more explainable for users within the Global South, Chapter 4 conducts a literature review of XAI research within this region, highlighting unique factors that could potentially hinder the implementation of these methods by AI practitioners for real-world use. Given the small amount of XAI research I found that engages with users in the Global South, Chapter 5 details my efforts in designing interactive prototypes with CHWs to understand what aspects of model decision-making need to be explained and how they can be explained most effectively. To comprehend how researchers make AI tools understandable for users like CHWs, Chapter 6 examines how AI practitioners identify problems to address, leverage participatory methods, and consider explainability in their work.
... In doing so, we can better understand the entanglement between local practices and global technologies and why, despite their importance, these local practices remain invisible to some platforms. We adopt Jackson and colleagues' "broken-world" [34] thinking to center the ongoing labor involved in maintaining gig work platforms, the values imbued within the platform economy, and the underlying power structures. In the following sections, we examine the infrastructure of platform-mediated food delivery to understand the values imbued within mainstream food delivery platforms, how those values create friction that leads to infrastructural breakdowns, and how end-users engage in repair work to make platforms viable. ...
... Infrastructure scholarship shows us that the 're-conceptualization of breakdowns as normal' [14,34] can help surface and recenter the labor, values, and power underlying a given system. In Nosh, systems constantly broke down. ...
This paper examines the sociotechnical infrastructure of an "indie" food delivery platform. The platform, Nosh, provides an alternative to mainstream services, such as Doordash and Uber Eats, in several communities in the Western United States. We interviewed 28 stakeholders including restauranteurs, couriers, consumers, and platform administrators. Drawing on infrastructure literature, we learned that the platform is a patchwork of disparate technical systems held together by human intervention. Participants join this platform because they receive greater agency, financial security, and local support. We identify human intervention's key role in making food delivery platform users feel respected. This study provides insights into the affordances, limitations, and possibilities of food delivery platforms designed to prioritize local contexts over transnational scales.
... Repair has long been a central concept in pragmatist and ethnomethodological perspectives within CSCW for framing the situated and materiallyembedded processes by which people respond to breakdowns in their work practices (Frohlich et al. 1994;Orr 1996;Suchman 2007). These breakdowns concern not just artifacts, but also procedures, social relationships, or any other structures involved in work practices (e.g., Orr 1996;Henke 1999;Lutters and Ackerman 2002;Jackson et al. 2012). ...
... Another emphasis of these studies is to highlight how repair work depend on establishing, mobilizing, and aligning diverse relations of material resources, knowledge, and people (Orr 1996;Castellani et al. 2009;Jackson et al. 2012;Cohn 2016;Huh et al. 2010). Orr (1996), for example, looks at how copy machine technicians at a multinational corporation collaboratively articulate, circulate, and modify their communal repair knowledge in narrative forms, beyond the manuals provided by the corporation. ...
How can we make data science systems more actionable? This dissertation explores this question by placing end-users and their data practices, rather than data scientists and their technical work of building models and algorithms, at the center of data science systems. Inspired by phenomenological views of technical systems from CSCW, HCI, and STS, I use ethnographic and other qualitative methods to understand how participants from four studies worked with data across three settings: craft brewers producing beers, people with visual impairments engaging with image descriptions of their photos on their smartphones, and repair workers repairing broken artifacts. I analyze implications for making data science systems actionable by framing the participants as potential end-users of these systems. My findings emphasize that actionability in data science systems concerns not just predictions made on mostly given datasets. Actionability in my settings arose from the ongoing work of making data relevant to artifacts and phenomena that end-users engaged with in their practices and settings. I show how this ongoing work of making data relevant was challenging. The properties of artifacts and phenomena were inherently multiple and their relevance was contingent on end-users’ situations. I describe end-users’ data practices as processes of “registering” (making intelligible) a contingent yet coherent set of properties to turn multiple, uncertain artifacts and phenomena into actionable versions. My dissertation makes several contributions to emerging research on actionability and data science in CSCW, HCI, and STS literature. First, based on my findings, I theorize an approach to data science systems that imagines actionability as driven not so much by data scientists generating predictions, or even by putting humans in the loop, but by placing end-users at the center. Second, my end-user approach to data science systems informs the technical work of data science by proposing requirements for models and algorithms to be accountable not just in their predictions but to end-users’ practices and settings. Third, my dissertation integrates into data science research foundational phenomenological views from CSCW that focus on how technological systems can account for and support end-users in their domains of practice, rather than the other way around.
... Full of improvisations and discoveries, the informal sector has much to offer regarding its repair practice, showing that repair can be a chance of learning, a source of innovation, and a space for rethinking environmental justice (Houston and Jackson, 2016;Jackson et al., 2012;Wyche et al., 2015). In rural Namibia, repair shops heavily rely on recycled phone parts to repair hardware and may hack software to unlock the phone (Jackson et al., 2012). ...
... Full of improvisations and discoveries, the informal sector has much to offer regarding its repair practice, showing that repair can be a chance of learning, a source of innovation, and a space for rethinking environmental justice (Houston and Jackson, 2016;Jackson et al., 2012;Wyche et al., 2015). In rural Namibia, repair shops heavily rely on recycled phone parts to repair hardware and may hack software to unlock the phone (Jackson et al., 2012). In rural Kenya, local repairpersons express that mobile phone design should consider rural conditions such as the lack of electricity (Wyche et al., 2015). ...
Mobile phone repair is booming in the Global South, creating new players and approaches. Based on ethnographic research in Ghana’s major phone markets, this article maps the local repair ecosystem by illustrating two sets of repair actors: “company repairers” and “independent repairers.” Paying attention to their internal diversity and complex interactions, this article categorizes three types of repair practices, including the high-end approach employed by Samsung, Apple and Huawei, the mid-range approach adopted by the Chinese after-sales service provider Carlcare, and the low-end approach used by independent repairers. This article argues that Carlcare, as a rising repair actor, creates a middle ground between the elitism of big tech and the informality of local repair shops. Through its repair practice, Carlcare not only translates dysfunctional technologies into functional ones but also transforms informal laborers into professional technicians. Contextualizing Carlcare’s development in Ghana, this article discusses the tensions and implications of institutionalization.
... Without such scafolding, any AI intervention is bound to fail. While the need to plan for maintenance and repair is true of all technology deployments, especially in HCI4D [51,59], the complexity of troubleshooting and maintaining complex AI software may require continued involvement of highly-skilled AI designers and developers. It is unlikely that local repair ecosystems, such as those that have emerged for mobile phone repair [58,59], will possess the tools or capabilities to appropriately troubleshoot complex AI systems. ...
... While the need to plan for maintenance and repair is true of all technology deployments, especially in HCI4D [51,59], the complexity of troubleshooting and maintaining complex AI software may require continued involvement of highly-skilled AI designers and developers. It is unlikely that local repair ecosystems, such as those that have emerged for mobile phone repair [58,59], will possess the tools or capabilities to appropriately troubleshoot complex AI systems. ...
... Since these early appeals, maintenance and repair have been of growing interest in various areas of research, and more and more scholars have brought to light an incredible variety of hitherto neglected objects and practices. In the last years, studies have documented maintenance and repair activities in ICTs (Cállen & Sánchez Criado, 2015;Houston & Jackson, 2016;Jackson, Pompe & Krieshok, 2012;Rosner & Ames, 2014), Arts (Domínguez Rubio, 2016), large infrastructures (Barnes, 2017;Ureta, 2014), software and information systems (Cohn, 2016;Fidler and Russel, 2018), urban settings (Denis & Pontille, 2014Strebel, 2011), legacy buildings and heritage sites (Edensor, 2011;Jones & Yarrow, 2013), domestic consumption (Gregson, Metcalfe & Crewe, 2009;Rosner, 2013) and even corpse preservation (Yurchak, 2015). In the following sections, we propose to give hints on these emerging maintenance and repair studies by articulating, beyond their variety, two of their main contributions. ...
... Several works in maintenance and repair studies also insist on the organisational and geographical distribution of activities (Edensor, 2011;Jackson, Pompe & Krieshok, 2012;Domínguez Rubio, 2014). Repairing mobile phones in the workshops of downtown Kampala, for instance, is not as local an activity as it may seem. ...
The text is available here: https://hal-mines-paristech.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02172939v2/document
... Since these early appeals, maintenance and repair have been of growing interest in various areas of research, and more and more scholars have brought to light an incredible variety of hitherto neglected objects and practices. In the last years, studies have documented maintenance and repair activities in ICTs (Cállen & Sánchez Criado, 2015;Houston & Jackson, 2016;Jackson, Pompe & Krieshok, 2012;Rosner & Ames, 2014), Arts (Domínguez Rubio, 2016), large infrastructures (Barnes, 2017;Ureta, 2014), software and information systems (Cohn, 2016;Fidler and Russel, 2018), urban settings (Denis & Pontille, 2014Strebel, 2011), legacy buildings and heritage sites (Edensor, 2011;Jones & Yarrow, 2013), domestic consumption (Gregson, Metcalfe & Crewe, 2009;Rosner, 2013) and even corpse preservation (Yurchak, 2015). In the following sections, we propose to give hints on these emerging maintenance and repair studies by articulating, beyond their variety, two of their main contributions. ...
... Several works in maintenance and repair studies also insist on the organisational and geographical distribution of activities (Edensor, 2011;Jackson, Pompe & Krieshok, 2012;Domínguez Rubio, 2014). Repairing mobile phones in the workshops of downtown Kampala, for instance, is not as local an activity as it may seem. ...
Open Access version : https://hal-mines-paristech.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02172939/document
... Jenkins et al., 2019), notions of repair and maintenance (e.g. Jackson et al., 2012;Maestri & Wakkary, 2011;Mattern, 2019), and knowledge production (Balaam et al., 2019;Howard & Irani, 2019;Light & Akama, 2014;Toombs et al., 2017). ...
This dissertation is about the research program designing with care as a pathway towards interaction design otherwise amid a world in crisis. Considering how established ways of doing interaction design will change involves recognizing the role of digital materials in social injustice and systemic inequality. These concerns are inseparable from the material complexity of interactive experiences and their more-than-human entanglements in care. Through five design experiments, I explore everyday human care as wickedly attending to some care doings and not others, and an intimate and generous questioning of oneself as human.
I offer four contributions for interaction designers and design researchers. The first contribution is designing with care. This research program draws upon care ethics and posthumanism to establish four axioms: everyday, wickedness, intimacy, and generosity. Within this programmatic framework, the second contribution is definitions of wickedness and generosity as ethical stances that can be taken by designers and researchers. The third contribution is the synthesis of my four methodological approaches: auto-design, spatial orientations, leaky materials, and open speculations. Each is a generative and analytical pathway towards more sustainable and just futures. The fourth contribution is five careful designs as prototypes of what interaction design otherwise might be like: technologies of human waste, spying on loved ones, leaky breastfeeding bodies, scaling bodily fluids, and a speculative ethics.
From my research program and contributions, I discuss disciplinary resistances to suggest three possibilities for how I argue interaction design should change: engaging with mundane yet unrecognized topics, doing design work where the consequences would be present, and reconsidering how the formats of research publications could better reflect positionality. I then reflect upon the relevancy of self-centered research in moving beyond oneself for more sustainable worlds.
... While these retailers may be providing repair services, the customer's intent is not to get the device repaired. Some researchers have explored the knowledge and skills of technicians [21], [22] and how the repair infrastructures are set up in low income countries [23], [24]. However, these works do not explore the customers' privacy aspects. ...
Electronics repair and service providers offer a range of services to computing device owners across North America -- from software installation to hardware repair. Device owners obtain these services and leave their device along with their access credentials at the mercy of technicians, which leads to privacy concerns for owners' personal data. We conduct a comprehensive four-part study to measure the state of privacy in the electronics repair industry. First, through a field study with 18 service providers, we uncover that most service providers do not have any privacy policy or controls to safeguard device owners' personal data from snooping by technicians. Second, we drop rigged devices for repair at 16 service providers and collect data on widespread privacy violations by technicians, including snooping on personal data, copying data off the device, and removing tracks of snooping activities. Third, we conduct an online survey (n=112) to collect data on customers' experiences when getting devices repaired. Fourth, we invite a subset of survey respondents (n=30) for semi-structured interviews to establish a deeper understanding of their experiences and identify potential solutions to curtail privacy violations by technicians. We apply our findings to discuss possible controls and actions different stakeholders and regulatory agencies should take to improve the state of privacy in the repair industry.
... Th e fi rst sub-body of literature concerns social practices and skills in infrastructure maintenance and repair, especially their often-ignored, bottom-up, improvisational, and fragmented features, compared to the popular image of infrastructure design and invention dominated by a narrow group of designers with systematic knowledge. 9 Th e other sub-body addresses how infrastructures are maintained through their interactions with social institutions and people's everyday social lives, such as fi nancial and administrative systems, networks, patron-client relations, and bureaucracy. 10 Studies of taxis as infrastructures also frequently focus on maintenance. ...
This article examines the competition between taxis and e-hailing from the perspective of the temporality of infrastructures, which refers to 1) decay and maintenance of infrastructures, 2) imaginations of infrastructures regarding old, new, past, and future, and 3) the (spatio)temporal experience of infrastructure supporters. I propose that taxis and e-hailing are simultaneously transport and livelihood infrastructures that facilitate passengers’ and drivers' lives, and that they are maintained by the two parties. One reason that taxis are maintained in this competition lies in taxi drivers’ preference for taxis as a livelihood infrastructure. The article highlights infrastructure supporters’ labor and spatiotemporal experience, emphasizes the importance of the perspective of the decay and maintenance of infrastructures, and proposes a dialectic view of the infrastructure-related imaginations of old and new, especially in a context in which disruptive innovations in infrastructural technologies are continuously emerging.
... Steven Jackson (2014) illustrates this crucial importance by emphasising that repair and maintenance is the fulcrum upon which the "world of things" revolves; infrastructure constantly breaks down due to normal wear and tear, and broken infrastructure is continually being restored through repair work (ibid). Infrastructure decay and break down and the resulting repair and maintenance work is thus characterised as transient, recurring and dynamic (Ramakrishnan et al., 2020) and is necessary for 'welding' together a 'material world' that is constantly falling apart (Jackson et al., 2012). ...
One of the main challenges undermining water supply in African cities is the rapid decay of networked
infrastructures. Urban water managers, policymakers and researchers, however, have paid little attention to repair
and maintenance or to their importance for the operation and renewal of urban water utilities. Using a
sociotechnical framework, this paper investigates the maintenance and repair practices of utility officials from two
water companies, one in Accra and one in Dar es Salaam. More specifically, through the interplay of four variables,
we develop a novel analytical framework inspired by science and technology studies to explain and compare the
contingent, place-based maintenance and repair practices that shape urban water supply. These four variables are
materialities, discourses, institutional arrangements, and the knowledge of local experts. The two aims of this paper
are to explain how the 'everyday' repair and maintenance practices of utility officials shape water supply, and to
draw lessons for improving water supply in both cities. Our findings show that repair and maintenance practices are
strongly shaped by place-based materialities and contextual knowledge in water supply, but at the same time are
contingent on wider national and international relations as reflected in discourses, policies, and the supply of
technical and material spare parts.
... A growing body of research has demonstrated how repair could be a chance of learning, a source of innovation, and a space for rethinking environmental justice (Graham and Thrift 2007). In countries like Namibia, repair shops rely heavily on recycled phone parts and repairmen may hack software or repurpose hardware to fix handsets (Jackson, Pompe, and Krieshok 2012). As these cases show, technological texts need repair and maintenance just like literary texts require transliteration and revisions. ...
Technology flows are becoming increasingly diverse in the twenty-first century, calling for an update of concepts and frameworks. Reflecting on the inherent tensions of technology transfer, including its technocratic dreams, insensitivity to technological materiality, and narrow focus on certain human actors, we propose technology translation as a complementary conceptual framework to understand traveling technologies. Taking a socio-technical approach, technology translation views artifacts as socially shaped with distributed agency, which makes technology flows unstable and unpredictable. In so doing, we develop a typology to explain five technology flow scenarios, shedding new light on the mechanisms of technology traveling by foregrounding the role of translators. Last, we discuss the politics of translation and elaborate how technology translation opens new space to engage with the complexity and uncertainty of technology flows, especially in the Global South.
... Work on repair has often taken an ethnographic approach, producing in-depth descriptions of the maintenance of automobiles (Dant and Bowles, 2003), housing (Strebel, 2011), signage (Denis and Pontille, 2015a), and furniture (Gregson et al., 2009). Although research has been done on mobile phone repair, most of this work has focused on the Global South, with representative work in India (Chipchase, 2006), Bangladesh (Jackson et al. 2014), Uganda (Houston, 2014), and Namibia (Jackson et al., 2012). As a result, there has been much less work on phone maintenance and repair in Europe and North America. ...
... Research specifcally focusing on practices of repair and reuse [35,18,17,79,73,72] offer a productive intersection of sustainable-thinking and noticing through hands-on practices with broken or otherwise outmoded materials. This has taken the form of studies of "everyday design" [74,45], through critical "deconstruction" activities [49,50,51] , and by approaching artistic practices of reuse through attending to the "life" of that which is being reused [34]. ...
... This work often approaches INDIY M&R in the form of rich, qualitative fieldwork-based ethnographies at sites of voluntary community repair and of commercial-based repair. Interest in community and commercial-based sites of INDIY ICT M&R detail how branding can generate affective communities of repair and maintenance that may promote sustainability in the smartphone sector (Svenson, 2019); how technical knowledge is acquired and circulated amongst technicians (e.g., Ahmed et al., 2015;Houston, 2019); how that knowledge effects sustainability, especially in contexts of ICT for development and the "Global South" (e.g., Jackson et al., 2011;Jackson et al., 2012); how M&R practices undermine and uphold power relations, including those threading through gender, citizenship, and justice (Crooks, 2019;Rosner, 2014); and how ICT repair labour practices strategically reveal and conceal those labour practices so as to modulate customer experiences and build trust between repair technicians and those they provide repair services to (Bell et al., 2018;Jang et al., 2019). ...
This paper explores the geographical distribution of independent and do‐it‐yourself information and communication technology maintenance and repair (INDIY ICT M&R) activity around the world. It examines a large set of Google Analytics data pertaining to users of free, open‐source online repair manuals provided by iFixit, a US‐based organisation that develops the free manuals, sells tools and components, and also engages in technical education and policy advocacy. The paper draws on three years of available user data (2016–2018). Over this time period the total user base of iFixit's manuals grew from over 1.3 million users to more than 4.1 million users across the planet. However, counter to what might be expected, the global distribution of iFixit users does not systematically co‐vary with internet access rates or with the population size of locations. The results reported here, while partial, are valuable in that they demonstrate both a globally distributed phenomenon and high‐resolution location patterns of INDIY ICT M&R activity. Mapping the extent and spatial patterning of such activity is a jumping off point for the kinds of qualitative analyses needed to elucidate the how's, the why's, and the meanings of the observed uneven distribution patterns. More broadly, the results suggest fruitful directions for deeper analyses and research into both pragmatic questions about ICT maintenance and repair (such as their social, economic, and environmental significance), as well as more speculative questions about how and why the fates of ICT within and between production, use, and discard stand in for dreams of technological futurity and nightmares of social and environmental breakdown.
... also importantly highlight a infrastructural approach to managing chronic behavioral health needs and describe a personal informatics model centered around "social ecologies" that includes informal caregivers and friends along with clinicians [51]. Along with studies of care, our paper is influenced by infrastructural approaches to thinking about maintenance and repair which have highlighted the wide range of human activity involved in creating and living with uncertain and unstable information systems in local contexts [34,58]. Given our focus on community health work, we are inspired by the analytic sensibilities proposed by Steven Jackson and colleagues who have examined complex ecologies of people, technologies, and cultural traditions that describe the lived experience of infrastructural brokenness and the creative, generative forms of collective repair work [33,35]. ...
In this paper, we present ethnographic account of people's everyday behavioral health experiences in the city of Jackson, Michigan to explore community forms of care work through an infrastructural lens. Detailing people's interactions with clinical processes and health policies, local resources, and diverse social worlds, we highlight problematic healthcare delivery gaps, as well as the informal (and often invisible) practices people depend upon to manage their health needs given socioeconomic hardships and cultural concerns. We also discuss the city's efforts to support local behavioral health needs through the development of a community health record. Placing fieldwork findings in conversation with the goals of this ongoing civic design project, we propose the analytic sensibility of precarious intervention to unpack the significance of the infrastructural tensions and power relations at play when people seek solutions to complex sociotechnical problems. Precarious intervention calls for CSCW research that attends to 1) the collective labor necessary to create and maintain ecologies of care in the face of infrastructural brokenness; and 2) the high-stakes and varied costs of 'engagement' for different community stakeholders.
... In particular, studies that are conducted in rural areas in which Internet access is not widespread can draw attention to the creative processes that underlie information exchange among people in such contexts, and to the mixture of resources brought to bear on such exchange. In this way, such research could facilitate further insight into HCI/CSCW concerns about the interplay between humans and technological infrastructures [80]. Moreover, further work in this area could assist rural communities in planning infrastructure projects that appreciate the connections between types of infrastructures, and the critical roles of humans in deploying sustainable technologies. ...
HCI researchers are increasingly conducting research in rural communities. This paper interrogates how rurality has been treated in previous HCI research conducted in developed and high-income countries. We draw from research outside of HCI to suggest how we can effectively engage with rurality in research. We present results of a scoping review of HCI literature that asks: 1) How do HCI researchers define rurality?; 2) How do the unique characteristics of rural communities enter into study findings?; 3) What methods are used in rural research?; and 4) Where has rural research been conducted? More than twice as many rural HCI articles have been conducted in low-income and/or developing countries than in high-income and/or developed countries. HCI researchers rarely define rurality, and when they do, they primarily define it using descriptive rather than sociocultural or symbolic definitions. Rural research findings have primarily addressed infrastructure and distance/geographic isolation as unique rural characteristics, while qualitative, observational, and cross-sectional methods dominate this research. There are further opportunities for HCI research to more productively advance understanding of what rurality is, and how it matters for sociotechnical systems.
Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers have increasingly been questioning computing’s engagement with unsustainable and unjust economic growth, pushing for identifying alternatives. Incorporating degrowth, post-development, and steady-state approaches, post-growth philosophy offers an alternative not rooted in growth but in improving quality of life. It recommends an equitable reduction in resource use through sensible distributive practices where fulfillment is based on values including solidarity, cooperation, care, social justice, and localized development. In this paper, we describe opportunities for HCI to take a post-growth orientation in research, design, and practice to reimagine the design of sociotechnical systems toward advancing sustainable, just, and humane futures. We aim for the critiques, concerns, and recommendations offered by post-growth to be integrated into transformative HCI practices for technology-mediated change.
Tanzanian mobile money and telecom agents (called wakala(s) in Swahili) have played a crucial role in expanding digital financial services (DFS) to rural areas. However, wakalas are losing their ability to financially sustain themselves providing intermediation services that their communities require. This work explores the potential for the wakala network to extend intermediation services to emerging ICTs beyond the scope of commercial DFS by uncovering the social and institutional factors that currently shape wakala practices. First, we investigate how two different models of intermediation from ICTD literature can inform broader strategies for intermediation through human infrastructures. We then complement this analysis with an on-the-ground quantitative survey and focus groups with community members and wakalas in Kagera, Tanzania. Our focus groups reveal that community members face challenges with new ICTs that require sustained intermediation and that wakalas encounter mounting financial instability and are thus receptive to intermediating for other ICTs. Finally, we present three factors that influence the broadening of the wakalas’ role of general ICT intermediaries: (1) aligning incentives and addressing the limits of pro bono actions, (2) providing appropriate training and a suitable support infrastructure, and (3) fostering trust-building and reciprocity.
When tech initiatives end, the artifacts they leave behind continue to impact stakeholders. Following an orientation toward broken world thinking, our study introduces the concept of documental afterlives to refer to the range of fates to which these digital artifacts have fallen. In this paper, we systematically review the 118 websites listed in a publicly available database of refugee tech initiatives in Germany as they appear today. We identify that documental afterlives of these projects fall into categories of being broken, unattended, and memorialized. Given the value and impact of these artifacts, we argue that an ethical response to these afterlives requires that we attend to them through stewardship, centering the notion of care and drawing from archival practices. On an empirical level, this paper contributes an updated understanding of how the traces of our initiatives appear long after many of them have ended. Conceptually, our notion of documental afterlives calls on us to attend to the artifacts that we leave behind, recognizing their continued entanglement in social relationships.
It is often assumed that the interests of users and developers coincide, sharing a common goal of good design. Yet users often desire functionality that goes beyond what designers, and the organisations they work in, are willing to supply. Analysing online forums, complemented with interviews, we document how users, hackers and software developers worked together to discover and apply system exploits in hardware and software. We cover four cases: users of CPAP breathing assistance machines getting access to their own sleep data, 'hacking' the Nintendo switch game console to run non-authorised software, end-users building their own insulin supply system, and farmers repairing their own agriculture equipment against suppliers terms and conditions. We propose the concept of the 'gulf of interests' to understand how differing interests can create conflicts between end-users, designers, and the organisations they work in. This points us in the direction of researching further the political and economic situations of technology development and use.
As digital fabrication machines have become more accessible and widely available, practitioners in maker communities have become increasingly responsive to the opportunities to achieve bespoke modifications, known colloquially as ‘modding’. Drawing on interviews with five experienced makers who engage in modding a laser cutter, along with ethnographic observations of maker-machine interactions, we analyse makers’ experiences and ‘war stories’ to frame modding as a prevalent but less explored maker activity. We highlight how makers care for machines, how they cope with risks when engaging in modding, and how mods are essentially creative projects. Based on our findings, we present the conceptualisation of the ‘pliable machine’ – a socio-technical system constituted by, (1) an accessible machine that can be altered, (2) maker skills that go beyond intended use, and (3) a surrounding ‘maker culture’ of caring, sharing and experimentation. Treating the machine as a material offers an alternative perspective on our interactions with technology; we show how the laser cutter becomes pliable in the hands of those who mod.
The Historic Westside Universities Alliance Data Dashboard was created to meet the data equity needs of a group of resource-constrained communities in the Westside neighborhoods of Atlanta. We observed the development of this dashboard by participating as ethnographers and developers of its public safety module. Our ethnography and subsequent situational analysis of the dashboard's infrastructuring process led us to the work that individual stakeholders do in bringing such a dashboard to fruition. These stakeholders, whom we call infrastructural bricoleurs, operate through principles of situated knowledge, partial perspectives, limited power, and located accountability. Our analysis, which builds on concepts of infrastructures, bricolage, and feminist principles of technology design, helps us add further specificity to the work that infrastructural bricoleurs need to do when building civic data dashboards with resource constrained communities. Our findings benefit other researchers studying data infrastructures as well as administrators and practitioners within programs like DSSG (Data Science for Social Good) who are interested in building data infrastructures under similar constraints.
Building from sociotechnical studies of disinformation and of information infrastructures, we examine how - over a period of eleven months - Italian QAnon supporters designed and maintained a distributed, multi-layered "infrastructure of disinformation" that spans multiple social media platforms, messaging apps, online forums, alternative media channels, as well as websites, databases, and content aggregators. Examining disinformation from an infrastructural lens reveals how QAnon disinformation operations extend well-beyond the use of social media and the construction of false narratives. While QAnon conspiracy theories continue to evolve and adapt, the overarching (dis)information infrastructure through which "epistemic evidence" is constructed and constantly updated is rather stable and has increased in size and complexity over time. Most importantly, we also found that deplatforming is a time-sensitive effort. The longer platforms wait to intervene, the harder it is to eradicate infrastructures as they develop new layers, get distributed across the Internet, and can rely on a critical mass of loyal followers. More research is needed to examine whether the key characteristics of the disinformation infrastructure that we identified extend to other disinformation infrastructures, which might include infrastructures put together by climate change denialists, vaccine skeptics, or voter fraud advocates.
This article aims to provide a design intervention to support the repairability of mobile phones and, in turn, promote sustainability. Typically, mobile phones are designed with a view towards obsolescence for users in industrially developed countries, as the expected repair in these circumstances is minimal. In contrast, in developing countries, such as India, these phones are constantly repaired and are owned several times by different people before their final demise. Therefore, to support repairability, a field study based in Mumbai, India, was conducted to understand the cognitive basis of repair. The results were further analyzed using a cognitive work analysis framework that provides insight into the possibilities for informational requirements for design. The findings indicate that small-scale repair shops (3–4 repairmen) and the hole-in-the-wall shops (1 repairman) can benefit from the intervention in terms of informational support for the repair activity. If the cognitive dimension of repair is supported for these low-cost repair shops, we can expect an increase in the capability and efficacy of the repairmen, resulting in fewer phones ending up as e-waste. Thus, due to its low cost, informational diagrams that support the repair activity can be incorporated by the manufacturer without any radical changes in existing proprietary technology, resulting in the possibility for the long-term growth of the repair ecology in a country such as India.
The global community networking movement promotes locally-managed network infrastructure as a strategy for affordable Internet connectivity. This case study investigates a group of collectively managed WiFi Internet networks in Argentina and the technologists who design the networking hardware and software. Members of these community networks collaborate on maintenance and repair and practice new forms of collective work. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, we show that the networking technologies play a role in the social relations of their maintenance and that they are intentionally configured to do so. For technology designers and deployers, we suggest a path beyond designing for easy repair: since every breakdown is an opportunity to learn, we should design for accessible repair experiences that enable effective collaborative learning.
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.
We can learn most about how science funding works when it stops working. Like moments of breakdown surfacing the inner workings of infrastructure, periodic fiscal crises reveal the social life of science funds at the level of everyday practice. Through a case study of NASA-funded planetary science in an era of austerity, the article explores how scientists navigate uncertain funding environments and articulate financially defensible projects. Examining the development of the Mariner 10 mission to Venus and Mercury in the aftermath of a significant downturn in science support, the article offers a middle path between the macro-politics of government funding and the micro-politics of doing science. In shaping how the mission was conceived and later operated, Mariner 10’s cost-driven paradigm translated the austerity of the period into the projectized work of robotic spaceflight missions.
Free and/or open-source software (or F/OSS) projects now play a major and dominant role in society, constituting critical digital infrastructure relied upon by companies, academics, non-profits, activists, and more. As F/OSS has become larger and more established, we investigate the labor of maintaining and sustaining those projects at various scales. We report findings from an interview-based study with contributors and maintainers working in a wide range of F/OSS projects. Maintainers of F/OSS projects do not just maintain software code in a more traditional software engineering understanding of the term: fixing bugs, patching security vulnerabilities, and updating dependencies. F/OSS maintainers also perform complex and often-invisible interpersonal and organizational work to keep their projects operating as active communities of users and contributors. We particularly focus on how this labor of maintaining and sustaining changes as projects and their software grow and scale across many dimensions. In understanding F/OSS to be as much about maintaining a communal project as it is maintaining software code, we discuss broadly applicable considerations for peer production communities and other socio-technical systems more broadly.
This paper offers the related concepts of 'caring' and 'commoning', borrowed from feminist technoscience and feminist political economy, as both values for design and analytical lenses to scrutinize computer-cooperative infrastructures for activist interventions. The paper draws on the empirical work conducted in a European participatory design project confronting risks of social exclusion that result from precarious labor conditions increasingly affecting the European populations. We discuss how the combined concepts of caring and commoning present alternatives to capitalist accumulation, supporting activist and emancipatory aims by shedding light on dimensions related to work, affects, and politics.
Venezuela is in the midst of a humanitarian crisis. In addition to food and medicinal shortages, violent crime has risen dramatically since 2014, spurring a mass exodus from the country. In order to cope with persistent material, informational, and digital infrastructural breakdowns that their friends and family in Venezuela are facing, members of the Venezuelan diaspora have turned to social media platforms to support people they left behind. Through semi-structured interviews and participant observation, I uncover the ways participants form a critical infrastructure for people in Venezuela. I describe participants' actions as infrastructural care --- infrastructural action as a form of caring for others at a distance through the ongoing management of resources, relationships, and infrastructures. Infrastructural care consists of relational, negotiated, and dialectic actions that provide critical support while also generating ongoing tensions as participants are geographically separated from the crisis and, through their involvement, are forced to confront their own experiences of trauma. In addition to proposing the lens of infrastructural care, this paper contributes to our understandings of the ways people cope with an ongoing humanitarian crisis at a distance and how social media platforms fit in with wider ecologies of efforts.
The science goals of heliospheric and planetary missions continue to require longer mission durations. Meeting the science goals being discussed for the Interstellar Probe mission will require the spacecraft to operate for 50 or more years. The mission will require not only a spacecraft to operate for this long duration but also a team of scientists, engineers, and managers and an infrastructure that can support the mission and science objectives. In this paper, we review past missions that have met these challenges – Voyager, Cassini, and New Horizons – and draw upon the sociology of science and technology – tacit knowledge, repair work, and management continuity – to reveal what lessons can be learned to provide strategies for this next generation of mission exemplified by the Interstellar Probe concept. We provide recommendations for making mission longevity part of the mission planning process with an eye to the human dimension.
Through the case study of itel, a low-end Chinese phone brand, this article examines the cross-cultural design for the bottom of the pyramid population in Africa. Focusing on the process that an artifact comes into existence, this article shows that itel’s design practice has been tied to local culture, infrastructure, and social structure, which may challenge, modify, and reshape global design norms. Being cost-sensitive, context-conscious, and demand-driven, itel develops a place-based design approach and business model. Through mapping and elaborating itel’s design network, this article demonstrates that design is not only about making artifacts but also about designing ways of knowing, seeing, and being. This study calls for a Southern perspective of design to acknowledge the heterogeneity of design culture and rethink the geopolitics of design.
In this paper, we use the notions of artful integrations and infrastructure to analyze two cases of community Participatory Design 'in the wild'. Though the communities are quite different on the outside, they bear surprising similarities when it comes to collaboration in technology design. We identify several features of how the community members artfully integrate their everyday materials, tools, methods and practices into collaborative processes of infrastructuring. The notions of 'artful integrations' and 'infrastructure' sensitize our analysis towards a more conceptual understanding on information system development as multi-relational: socio-material, socio-historical and processual. We conclude by suggesting some refinements to the notions in the context of community PD.
Although ethnography has become a common approach in HCI research and design, considerable confusion still attends both ethnographic practice and the metrics by which it should be evaluated in HCI. Often, ethnography is seen as an approach to field investigation that can generate requirements for systems development; by that token, the major evaluative criterion for an ethnographic studies is the implications it can provide for design. Exploring the nature of ethnographic inquiry, this paper suggests that "implications for design" may not be the best metric for evaluation and may, indeed, fail to capture the value of ethnographic investigations. Author Keywords Ethnography, design.
This paper analyzes the initial phases of a large-scale custom software effort, the Worm Community System (WCS), a collaborative system designed for a geographically dispersed community of geneticists. Despite high user satisfaction with the system and interface, and extensive user feedback and analysis, many users experienced difficulties in signing on and use, ranging from simple lack of resources to complex organizational and intellectual trade-offs. Using Bateson's levels of learning, we characterize these as levels of infrastructural complexity which challenge both users and developers. Usage problems may result from different perceptions of this complexity in different organizational contexts.
Designing e-infrastructure is work conducted today with an eye toward long-term sustainability. Participants in such development projects find themselves caught with one foot in the demands of the present and the other in a desired future. In this paper we seek to capture participants' formulation of problems as they go about developing long-term information infrastructure. Drawing from cross-case ethnographic studies of four US e-infrastructure projects for the earth and environmental sciences (cyberinfrastructure), we trace nine tensions as they are framed and articulated by participants. To assist in understanding participants' orientations we abstract three concerns - motivating contribution, aligning end goals, and designing for use - which manifest themselves uniquely at each of the 'scales of infrastructure': institutionalization, the organization of work, and enacting technology. The concept of "the long now" helps us understand that participants seek to simultaneously address all three concerns in long-term development endeavors.
The design of software toolkitsembodies a fundamental tension. On the one hand, itaims to reduce programmer effort by providingprefabricated, reusable software modules encapsulatingcommon application behaviours. On the other, it seeksto support a range of applications, which necessitatesavoiding an overly-restrictive commitment toparticular styles of application behaviour.
We explore this tension in the domain of collaborativeapplications, which we believe are particularlysubject to problems arising from this tension. Basedon an analysis of the basic issues of flexibility intoolkit design, we explore opportunities for thedesign of toolkits which avoid application style commitments, with illustrations from two toolkits whichwe have developed. A comparative analysis of these twoapproaches provides insight into the underlyingquestions and suggests new design opportunities fortoolkits that provide a framework for applicationenhancement and extension.
In Uneven Development, a classic in its field, Neil Smith offers the first full theory of uneven geographical development, entwining theories of space and nature with a critique of capitalist development. Featuring pathbreaking analyses of the production of nature and the politics of scale, Smith's work anticipated many of the uneven contours that now mark neoliberal globalization. This third edition features an afterword updating the analysis for the present day. © 2008 by The University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved.
This article asks methodological questions about studying infrastructure with some of the tools and perspectives of ethnography. infrastructure is both relational and ecological-it means different things to different groups and it is part of the balance of action tools, and the built environment, inseparable from them. It also is frequently mundane to the point of boredom, involving things such as plugs, standards, and bureaucratic forms. Some of the difficulties of studying infrastructure are how to scale up from traditional ethnographic sites, how to manage large quantities of data such as those produced by transaction logs and how to understand the interplay of online and offline behavior: Some of the tricks of the trade involved in meeting these challenges include studying the design of infrastructure, understanding the paradoxes of infrastructure as both transparent and opaque, including invisible work in the ecological analysis, and pinpointing the epistemological status of indictors.
NoteCards is an information structuring system developed in the Intelligent Systems Lab at Xerox PARC. A major design goal has been that NoteCards be an adaptable system, that is, tunable or customizable by users for particular applications and styles of use. In this paper, we describe four ways that a system can be adaptable: (1) it can have a flexible underlying conceptual model, (2) its behavior can be parametrized, (3) it can be integratable with other facilities, and (4) it can be tailorable, i.e. users themselves can add new functionality. We discuss the adaptability of NoteCards according to each of the above criteria. Finally, an example of large-scale tailoring in NoteCards is presented.
ABSTRACT The contribution of the field of science and technology studies (STS) to mainstream sociology has so far been slim because of a misunderstanding about what it means to provide a social explanation of a piece of science or of an artefact. The type of explanation possible for religion, art or popular culture no longer works in the case of hard science or technology. This does not mean, it is argued, that science and technology escapes sociological explanation, but that a deep redescription of what is a social explanation is in order. Once this misunderstanding has been clarified, it becomes interesting to measure up the challenge raised by STS to the usual epistemologies social sciences believed necessary for their undertakings. The social sciences imitate the natural sciences in a way that render them unable to profit from the type of objectivity found in the natural sciences. It is argued that by following the STS lead, social sciences may start to imitate the natural sciences in a very different fashion. Once the meanings of ‘social’ and of ‘science’ are reconfigured, the definition of what a ‘social science’ is and what it can do in the political arena is considered. Again it is not by imitating the philosophers of science's ideas of what is a natural science that sociology can be made politically relevant.
An abstract is not available.
Discusses the concept of the reflex arc. The conscious stimulus or sensation, and the conscious response or motion, have a special genesis or motivation, and a special end or function. The reflex arc theory neglects this genesis and function, and gives only the disjointed parts of the whole process. The stimulus and response form specific phases of coordination, which helps to unify the disjointed parts given by the theory. The stimulus represents the conditions which have to be met in bringing about successful coordination, and the response gives the key to meeting these conditions; it serves as an instrument in affecting the successful coordination. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
With the recent growth in sustainable HCI, now is a good time to map out the approaches being taken and the intellectual commitments that underlie the area, to allow for community discussion about where the field should go. Here, we provide an empirical analysis of how sustainable HCI is defining itself as a research field. Based on a corpus of published works, we identify (1) established genres in the area, (2) key unrecognized intellectual differences, and (3) emerging issues, including urgent avenues for further exploration, opportunities for interdisciplinary engagement, and key topics for debate.
Repair and maintenance haunt the margins of ICT and development ('ICTD') and broader information school scholarship, but have rarely received central theoretical or empirical attention in the field. This paper attempts to fill this gap. Theoretically, it explores ideas from the growing but scattered body of social science work around infrastructure, maintenance and repair, and argues for maintenance and repair as key sites of difference, innovation, power, and sustainability in ICTD settings. Empirically, the paper examines patterns and tensions in maintenance and repair in Rundu and the wider Kavango region in northeastern Namibia. We conclude with key findings and lessons for future ICTD and iSchool scholarship.
This paper reports on a field study of the procurement, implementation and use of a local area network devoted to running CSCW-related applications in an organization within the U.K.'s central government. In this particular case, the network ran into a number of difficulties, was resisted by its potential users for a variety of reasons, was faced with being withdrawn from service on a number of occasions and (at the time of writing) remains only partly used. The study points to the kinds of problems that a project to introduce computer support for cooperative work to an actual organization is likely to face and a series of concepts are offered to help manage the complexity of these problems. In so doing, this paper adds to and extends previous studies of CSCW tools in action but also argues that experience from the field should be used to re-organise the research agenda of CSCW.
In this contribution we investigate how results from the ongoing discussion about 'e- Infrastructures' can be used to improve the design of IT infrastructures in organizations. We first establish a perspective on organizational IT as 'work infrastructure' that focuses on the infrastructural nature of organizational Information Systems and describe challenges for designing within and for this type of infrastructure. Then we elaborate on possible use of concepts from the e-infrastructure discussion, in particular on the concept of 'infrastructuring' as it was developed by Star and Ruhleder (1996) and Star and Bowker (2002). Using their 'salient characteristics of infrastructure' we describe the methodological approach of 'Infrastructuring' to develop methodological and tool support for all stakeholders' activities that contribute to the successful establishment of an information system usage (equivalent to a work infrastructure improvement). We illustrated our ideas by drawing on a case in which new work infrastructures were introduced into an organizational context and by mapping out existing and possible tool support for 'infrastructuring'.
No work is inherently either visible or invisible. We always “see” work through a selection of indicators: straining muscles, finished artifacts, a changed state of affairs. The indicators change with context, and that context becomes a negotiation about the relationship between visible and invisible work. With shifts in industrial practice these negotiations require longer chains of inference and representation, and may become solely abstract.
This article provides a framework for analyzing invisible work in CSCW systems. We sample across a variety of kinds of work to enrich the understanding of how invisibility and visibility operate. Processes examined include creating a “non-person” in domestic work; disembedding background work; and going backstage. Understanding these processes may inform the design of CSCW systems and the development of related social theory.
This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection as well as empirical evidence on the effects of patent rights. Then, the second part considers the international aspects of IPR protection. In summary, this paper draws the following conclusions from the literature. Firstly, different patent policy instruments have different effects on R&D and growth. Secondly, there is empirical evidence supporting a positive relationship between IPR protection and innovation, but the evidence is stronger for developed countries than for developing countries. Thirdly, the optimal level of IPR protection should tradeoff the social benefits of enhanced innovation against the social costs of multiple distortions and income inequality. Finally, in an open economy, achieving the globally optimal level of protection requires an international coordination (rather than the harmonization) of IPR protection.
Computing at the Margins
- R Grinter
MTC Namibia Invests USD40m Ends Reliance on Incumbent's Transport Network in Telegeography Research PriMetrica. Telegeography. 2008. MTC Namibia Invests USD40m Ends Reliance on Incumbent's Transport Network in Telegeography Research PriMetrica
- Telegeography
The Global Information Technology Report 2009--2010: ICT for Sustainability International Telecommunications Union. Dutta S. and I. Mia. 2010. The Global Information Technology Report
- S Dutta
- I Mia
United Nations Development Program
- Undp