Laura Forlano

WiFi Geographies: When Code Meets Place

This article argues that as our homes, offices, cities, and spaces get layered with digital information networks, it is vital that we develop new conceptual categories that integrate digital and physical spaces. With that objective in mind, it examines how WiFi networks interact with socioeconomic factors to reconfigure people, places, and information in physical spaces. Drawing on empirical research from ethnographic observations, a survey, and in-depth interviews, it shows how the availability of WiFi public hotspots has opened up new ways for freelancers to do their work, often using different locales for different phases of their work. Also, for freelancers in search of opportunities for co-working, WiFi hotspots are sites of informal interaction, social support, collaboration, and innovation. The article also illustrates how a WiFi network does not map onto existing physical or architectural boundaries. Instead, it reconfigures them in a number of ways by permeating walls, bleeding into public spaces, and breaking down some traditional notions of privacy and property while reinforcing others. Such reconfigurations of people, places and information require a new conceptual framing—codescapes—built on earlier notions of digital information and physical space.

Decentering the Human in the Design of Collaborative Cities

Cities are currently being redesigned with sensors and data at their core. Environmental monitoring, crime tracking and traffic mapping are just a few examples of the socio-technical systems that are remaking cities. These systems are emergent sites of politics, values, and ethics where human and nonhuman actors collaborate, negotiate and debate the futures of their cities. One the one hand, they can be used for prediction, measurement and decision-making, but, on the other hand, they can also be harnessed to imagine alternative possible urban futures. Designers have an important role to play in mediating, making sense of, and intervening in these projects, which are at the intersection of the work of a variety of stakeholders including governments, business and citizens. This article draws on science and technology studies (STS) to think through ways designers can evolve existing human-centered design (HCD) methodologies to contend with socio-technical complexity at a time of great economic and environmental crisis. In particular, this article argues that it is necessary to create and explore methodologies that decenter the human and take the nonhuman seriously in order to meaningfully engage in the design of cities with more responsible, accountable, and ethical ways of engaging with emerging technologies.

Making cultures: building things & building communities

Cultures of making, customization and repair have gained recent visibility within the CSCW literature due to the alternative framings of design and use they present. This panel brings together scholars across human-computer interaction, interaction design, information studies, and science and technology studies to examine the forms of social organization and technological production that come from maker and repair collectives.

Designing collaboration: comparing cases exploring cultural probes as boundary-negotiating objects

This paper examines the use of cultural probes as a method for fostering collaboration within groups of diverse experts working on creative projects. Using two case examples, we show that probes -- short, oblique, and at times whimsical sets of activity prompts - have boundary object properties that can jumpstart interdisciplinary and cross-functional exchange. The first case explores how social scientists and designers used a smartphone-based scavenger hunt activity to gather insights for a workshop on organizational innovation. The second case examines how artist/scientist pairs utilized probe-like prompts to develop short performances for an arts festival. Drawing together theoretical views on boundary objects and cultural probes, we suggest that designed experiences such as probes can create opportunities for both boundary work and the establishment of common ground, which is increasingly vital in the highly collaborative contexts that define work today.

Citizens breaking out of filter bubbles: urban screens as civic media

Social media platforms risk polarising public opinions by employing proprietary algorithms that produce filter bubbles and echo chambers. As a result, the ability of citizens and communities to engage in robust debate in the public sphere is diminished. In response, this paper highlights the capacity of urban interfaces, such as pervasive displays, to counteract this trend by exposing citizens to the socio-cultural diversity of the city. Engagement with different ideas, networks and communities is crucial to both innovation and the functioning of democracy. We discuss examples of urban interfaces designed to play a key role in fostering this engagement. Based on an analysis of works empirically-grounded in field observations and design research, we call for a theoretical framework that positions pervasive displays and other urban interfaces as civic media. We argue that when designed for more than wayfinding, advertisement or television broadcasts, urban screens as civic media can rectify some of the pitfalls of social media by allowing the polarised user to break out of their filter bubble and embrace the cultural diversity and richness of the city.

One university, two campuses: initiating and sustaining research collaborations between two campuses of a single institution

Collaboration has many benefits, but can also be difficult due to increased coordination, incompatible work styles or research approaches, and difficulty in communication. These problems are often exacerbated by distance, which can make collaboration between departments on a single campus more attractive; particularly as universities invest in interdisciplinary facilities. At some universities, however, some departments may be located on a separate campus, hundreds of miles away. This creates unique challenges for these universities in encouraging and supporting collaboration. There have been few systematic studies, however, of collaborations between campuses of a single institution. We report on a qualitative study of collaborations between the medical college and other departments of our university, located 230 miles apart. Results suggest that participants felt it was very important to build social ties or draw on existing experience with potential collaborators prior to starting a project. Participants also identified unexpected institutional obstacles to working effectively.

Towards An Integrated Theory Of The Cyber-Urban

Abstract Over the past decade, scholars have worked to develop a new lexicon of the cyber-urban in order to express, in a more nuanced and careful way, the hybrid nature of everyday life in cities of the 21st century. Yet, for the most part, our current verbal and visual metaphors and imagined futures along with our theoretical and analytical frames, to a large degree, continue to emphasize the separation of the physical and the digital into discrete and hierarchical layers and ‘stacks.’ Given our limited metaphors, it should come as no surprise that we are unable to traverse socio-economic barriers and build more equitable and pluralistic cities. This paper will discuss the need to move beyond hybrid language and towards a truly integrated theory of digital materiality and the cyber-urban using examples from debates about big data, Smart Cities, the ‘internet of things’ and the quantified self.

Avoiding ecocidal smart cities: participatory design for more-than-human futures

The turn to participation in smart cities was intended to increase the involvement of diverse, often marginalised, citizens in the design and use of networked sensing technologies. However, ideals of activism, citizen engagement and democratisation through the co-design of networked technologies and services have been largely based on an understanding of urban space as separate from nature, and for human inhabitants alone. In current conditions of climate change, pollution, and loss of biodiversity, a human-centred perspective of cities is increasingly problematic. This workshop focuses on an expanded more-than-human perspective for cities, informed by studies in the Anthropocene in fields such as STS, geography, planning and design. We will interrogate how more-than-human perspectives and their resultant ethical, legal, and methodological concerns can shape participatory design practices and policies towards cohabitation, and push forward a cultural change in the agenda of sustainable smart cities, urban informatics, IoT, and design.

Provocation, Conflict, and Appropriation: The Role of the Designer in Making Publics

The role and embodiment of the designer/artist in making publics is significant. This special issue draws attention to reflexive practices in Art & Design, and questions how these practices are embedded in the formations and operations of publics, grounded in six cases of participatory design conducted in the United States, India, Turkey, England, Denmark, and Belgium. From these design practices, typologies of participation are formulated that describe the role of the designer. These typologies describe different and sometimes conflicting epistemologies—providing designers with a vocabulary to communicate a diversity of participatory settings and supporting reflexive practices.

Hacking Binaries/Hacking Hybrids: Understanding the Black/White Binary as a Socio-technical Practice

This essay argues that hacking binaries as well as hacking hybrids – theoretically, methodologically and activist as well as in the practice of everyday life – especially around issues of race is an important agenda for feminist technology studies. Using examples from art, architecture, social theory and personal experience, and drawing on science and technology studies (STS), we argue that theoretical and methodological hacking around the Black/White binary is a pathway to the deconstruction of other binaries (as well as reified hybrids) such as digital/material, global/local, private/public, individual/community, open/closed and amateur/professional, which are central to understanding emerging topics in gender, new media and technology.