Dawn Nafus

Cultural mobilities: diversity and agency in urban computing

The rise of wireless networks and portable computing devices has been accompanied by an increasing interest in technology and mobility, and in the urban environment as a site of interaction. However, most investigations have taken a relatively narrow view of urban mobility. In consequence, design practice runs the risk of privileging particular viewpoints, forms of mobility, and social groups. We are interested in a view of mobility that reaches beyond traditional assumptions about the who, when, why, and what of mobility. Based on analytic perspectives from the social sciences and on empirical fieldwork in a range of settings, we outline an alternative view of technology and mobility with both analytic and design implications.

Stuck data, dead data, and disloyal data: the stops and starts in making numbers into social practices

Indicators with long social histories, such as the Consumer Price Index, often serve as nodes of calculative infrastructures. They create a field of social action, making some relations between people, institutions, and materials possible, and other relations less possible. By reflecting on two experiments in do-it-yourself sensor data, this article explores the tensions that occur when indicators have not yet become stable entities. When the conditions of possibility for the indicators continued existence are less assured, the labor it takes to build numbers into something socially meaningful becomes surprisingly visible. This labor proceeds in stops and starts, as the various material and epistemological and social resistances reveal themselves. Sensors shape these starts and stops. Sensors give their users an indication of a possible whole entity whose contents they cannot fully imagine, and either must create or abandon. Far from producing certainty, sensor data often provokes a sense of vagueness that is worked on until it becomes either clarity or action, failure or indifference. Through this view of numbers in the making, we can see just how remarkable it is that indicators become part of calculative infrastructures at all.

Sizing Up Information Societies: Toward a Better Metric for the Cultures of ICT Adoption

When researchers study technology diffusion in a global and comparative manner, they often find that economic productivity explains differences in the diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs). But when researchers study technology diffusion in a regional, national, or subnational context, they often find that politics and culture explains different diffusion rates. How do we make use of different kinds of conclusions drawn from different levels of analysis? Just knowing the ways in which wealth explains technology diffusion can obscure the ways in which politics and culture also explain patterns in technology diffusion. In this article, we offer a new perspective on weighting technology diffusion data by economic wealth to set into sharp relief the ways in which other factors—such as politics and culture—influence how well a country metabolizes new technologies. A simple but useful computation is offered, examples are assessed, and implications for public policy, industry, and research are discussed.

Freedom Imagined : Morality and Aesthetics in Open Source Software Design

This paper is about the interaction between the human imagination and technology among a self-described ‘community’: that of developers of Free or Open Source Software. I argue that the moral imagination observable in this phenomenon can be understood with reference to its emergence around specific methods of technical production. Principles of openness, truth, freedom and progress, which are also understood as central to the technical production of good software, are reinforced (as a ethical orientation) by their contribution to making ‘good’ software. A reciprocal dynamic ensues in which better software is seen as dependent on particular social practices and ideologies while these practices and ideologies are given salience by their success in fostering valuable production. Processes key to the generation of this social form are examined before a number of key features of the practice of programming, such as its often combative and individualistic character, and an absence of women in developer communities, are considered in the light of the analysis.

Algorithms as fetish: Faith and possibility in algorithmic work:

Algorithms are powerful because we invest in them the power to do things. With such promise, they can transform the ordinary, say snapshots along a robotic vacuum cleaner’s route, into something much more, such as a clean home. Echoing David Graeber’s revision of fetishism, we argue that this easy slip from technical capabilities to broader claims betrays not the “magic” of algorithms but rather the dynamics of their exchange. Fetishes are not indicators of false thinking, but social contracts in material form. They mediate emerging distributions of power often too nascent, too slippery or too disconcerting to directly acknowledge. Drawing primarily on 2016 ethnographic research with computer vision professionals, we show how faith in what algorithms can do shapes the social encounters and exchanges of their production. By analyzing algorithms through the lens of fetishism, we can see the social and economic investment in some people’s labor over others. We also see everyday opportunities for social creativity and change. We conclude that what is problematic about algorithms is not their fetishization but instead their stabilization into full-fledged gods and demons – the more deserving objects of critique.

Interrogating Biosensing in Everyday Life

This workshop seeks to expand our understanding and imaginations regarding the possible roles biosensors (sensors measuring humans) can-and should-play in everyday life. By applying a critical lens to issues of interpretation, representation, and experience around biosensing and biosensors, we aim to shape research agendas within DIS, and generate new recommendations for designers working with biosensors or their data.