Silvia Lindtner

Making cultures: empowerment, participation, and democracy - or not?

Making has transformed from a fringe and hobbyist practice into a professionalizing field and an emerging industry. Enthusiasts laud its potential to democratize technology, improve the workforce, empower consumers, encourage citizen science, and contribute to the global economy. Yet critics counter that in the West, making often remains a hobby for the privileged and seems to be increasingly co-opted by corporate interests. This panel brings together HCI scholars and practitioners active in making, handwork, DIY, crafts, and tool design to examine and debate the visions that come from maker cultures.

Cultural appropriation: information technologies as sites of transnational imagination

The diverse ways in which technologies are modified and appropriated into local contexts are an important theme in CSCW research. Today, translocal processes such as the formation of international corporations and the movement of people and ideas across nation states increasingly shape these local contexts of technology use and design. We draw from prior work on appropriation in CSCW and meld it with work from transnational studies to illustrate appropriation as a cultural phenomenon and as it unfolds in relation to emerging translocal processes. We ground our explorations in findings from ethnographic research on collaborations and exchange among IT professionals in urban China. This work makes two main contributions. First, it expands CSCWs focus on socio-technical systems by taking seriously socio-political and socio-economic processes. Second, it contributes to debates on cross-cultural and global technological development by employing transnational imagination as an analytical tool.

Created in China: the makings of China's hackerspace community

Community + Culture features practitioner perspectives on designing technologies for and with communities. We highlight compelling projects and provocative points of view that speak to both community technology practice and the interaction design field as a whole. Christopher A. Le Dantec

Hackerspaces and the Internet of Things in China: How makers are reinventing industrial production, innovation, and the self:

This article discusses the visions and practices of DIY (do-it-yourself) maker culture in China. It analyses how the ideals held by DIY makers, such as openness, peer production, and individual empowerment, are formulated in relation to China’s project of building a creative society and economy. To demonstrate, this article draws from long-term ethnographic research, including the setting up of China’s first hackerspace, the proliferation of making, and partnerships between makers and manufacturers. China’s makers are driven to reinvent what creativity, innovation, industrial production and citizenship mean today, simultaneously exploiting and challenging political rhetoric. By setting up hackerspaces, designing open technologies and starting up businesses, they craft alternative subject positions, for themselves and others. The contribution of this article is threefold. First, it fills a gap in current research by providing an account of a culture of technology production. Second, it proposes the analytical lens of ‘making subjectivities’ to open up the concept of the netizen, illustrating the importance for Chinese Internet research to consider not only technology use, but also the culture and materials of its production. Third, it demonstrates that maker culture is better understood as a parasitic culture rather than a counterculture, altering the system from within, contributing to our understanding of the relationship between technology use, production, society, activism and the state.

Towards a framework of publics: Re-encountering media sharing and its user

Design and evaluation of user-generated media production and sharing in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) often focus on formal and informal media sharing, such as communication within social networks, automatic notifications of activities, and the exchange of digital artifacts. However, conceptual tools for understanding how people relate to the audiences they reach through these systems are limited. The increasing interest in user-generated content in HCI demands the infusion of new methods and theories that explicitly engage the construction and use of media within and among large groups of individuals and systems. In this paper, we suggest that the notion of “publics,” drawn from media theory, provides useful insights into user-driven, social, and cultural forms of technology use and digital content creation. We illustrate this by employing the notion of publics to the findings from a two-month deployment of a mobile photo sharing platform in a youth housing community. The results of this empirical work coupled with a theoretical examination of publics stimulate reflection on prevailing interpretations of user-designer-reader roles. The paper provides an outlook for potentially new and productive ways of understanding interdependencies within those activities. Implications that can be drawn from this work concern the role of digital media creation and sharing for the formation of collectives and how people position themselves collectively in relation to larger social groups and societal norms. The analysis suggests fruitful crossovers among HCI, Media Theory and New Media Research by approaching the user as both consumer and producer of digital content.

The Promise of Play: A New Approach to Productive Play

Games are woven into webs of cultural meaning, social connection, politics, and economic change. This article builds on previous work in cultural, new media, and game studies to introduce a new approach to productive play, the promise of play. This approach analyzes games as sites of cultural production in times of increased transnational mediation and speaks to the formation of identity across places. The authors ground their explorations in findings from ethnographic research on gaming in urban China. The spread of Internet access and increasing popularity of digital entertainment in China has been used as an indicator of social change and economic progress shaped by global flows. It has also been described as being limited by local forces such as tight information control. As such, gaming technologies in China are ideal to ask broader questions about digital media as sites of production at the intersection of local contingencies and transnational developments.

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.

Transnational times: locality, globality and mobility in technology design and use

This workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the role of ubiquitous computing, the use of information and communication technologies and the politics of technological design in transnational practices. The ultimate goal of this workshop is to investigate the implications for the design and development of ubiquitous technologies in non-western contexts. We will consider the implications for conducting research and technology design within and across global and networked sites of technology production and use. The aim of the workshop is to gain a deeper understanding of the social, cultural and economic practices within global IT development.

Transnational HCI: humans, computers, and interactions in transnational contexts

This workshop will consider the implications for conducting research and technology design within and across global and networked sites of technology production and use. In particular, we focus on transnational practices: that is, seeing technology use beyond a single country or culture, but as evolving in relation to global processes, boundary crossings, frictions and hybrid practices. In doing so, we expand upon existing research in HCI to consider the effects, implications for individuals and communities, and design opportunities in times of increased transnational interactions. We hope to broaden the conversation around the impact of technology in global processes by bringing together scholars from HCI and from related humanities, media arts and social sciences disciplines.

Introduction to This Special Issue on Transnational HCI

It is not surprising that HCI researchers are attracted to the role of technology in global processes as many of us already live inherently transnational lives. While the notion of global connectedness is hardly new, the issues that confront us are more than specific concerns for remote migration, distributed work, or developing nations. Rather, we argue that transnational HCI is a contemporary condition of the design and use of technological systems, both at home and abroad. This special issue of Human-Computer Interaction is dedicated to exploring how and why a transnational lens matters to the study, design, and development of computational systems. We consider this theoretical perspective in terms of both present technology use to construct and manage transnational relations and processes, and the possibilities such a lens opens for future research and design. The papers in this issue contribute to the field of HCI by bringing the principles developed in anthropology, sociology, and elsewhere to bear on the conversation in HCI, retooling them for our present context, while preserving the richness of their methodological orientation.