Sung-Yueh Perng

Solutions and frictions in civic hacking: collaboratively designing and building wait time predictions for an immigration office

Abstract Smart and data-driven technologies seek to create urban environments and systems that can operate efficiently and effortlessly. Yet, the design and implementation of such technical solutions are full of frictions, producing unanticipated consequences and generating turbulence that foreclose the creation of friction-free city solutions. In this paper, we examine the development of solutions for wait time predictions in the context of civic hacking to argue that a focus on frictions is important for establishing a critical understanding of innovation for urban everyday life. The empirical study adopted an ethnographically informed mobile methods approach to follow how frictions emerge and linger in the design and production of queue predictions developed through the civic hacking initiative, Code for Ireland. In so doing, the paper charts how solutions have to be worked up and strategies re-negotiated when a shared motivation meets different data sources, technical expertise, frames of understanding, urban imaginaries and organisational practices; and how solutions are contingently stabilised in technological, motivational, spatiotemporal and organisational specificities rather than unfolding in a smooth, linear, progressive trajectory.

How to follow the information?:a study of informational mobilities in crises

This article discusses mobile methods of “following the information” to contribute to a new politics of sociological method and inform the development of new design philosophies for information technologies. The approach is motivated by the increasing informationalization of everyday life in general and crisis management in particular. At this juncture social and political principles of privacy and solidarity are being transformed in ways that undermine fundamental values of equality and freedom. Crisis management is a particularly important site for such transformations. By showcasing different ways in which we have followed information in different crisis management settings through tracking, retrospective go-alongs, shadowing and tracing, we show how technologies designed with the ambition to enable “direct interconnection,” “one stop” access and “collect-all” ambitions eliminate control for many data subjects. The studies we present contribute to alternative information system design philosophies that actively support human sensory and social practices of making and making sense of data.

Locative Media and Data-Driven Computing Experiments

Over the past two decades urban social life has undergone a rapid and pervasive geocoding, becoming mediated, augmented and anticipated by location-sensitive technologies and services that generate and utilise big, personal, locative data. The production of these data has prompted the development of exploratory data-driven computing experiments that seek to find ways to extract value and insight from them. These projects often start from the data, rather than from a question or theory, and try to imagine and identify their potential utility. In this paper, we explore the desires and mechanics of data-driven computing experiments. We demonstrate how both locative media data and computing experiments are ‘staged’ to create new values and computing techniques, which in turn are used to try and derive possible futures that are ridden with unintended consequences. We argue that using computing experiments to imagine potential urban futures produces effects that often have little to do with creating new urban practices. Instead, these experiments promote Big Data science and the prospect that data produced for one purpose can be recast for another and act as alternative mechanisms of envisioning urban futures.

Performing Tasks With Wi-Fi Signals in Taipei

This article examines the process of constructing, repairing, and improvising “human–signal assemblages” by drawing on in-depth interviews and virtual ethnography regarding the engineering of Wi-Fi connectivity in Taipei, Taiwan. It is demonstrated that spatial, temporal, infrastructural, and embodied orchestrations of Wi-Fi signals both reinforce and challenge prescribed ways of conducting daily tasks. Continuity and change, enacted by attempts to incorporate Wi-Fi signals into daily urban life, are explored by discussing a wide range of practices performed by government entities, local companies and initiatives, and users themselves. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which machines, the city landscape, discourses, maps, and signs grow and multiply, as well as intersect and intervene with each other at various levels, locales, and stages of establishing Wi-Fi connections. The article thus argues for the importance of “machine juggling” as a skillful performance that mends, maintains, and improvises Wi-Fi-enabled urban everyday rhythms.

Periphere Kooperation am Beispiel der Anschläge in Norwegen 2011 / Peripheral Cooperation in Crises: Norway 22/7/11

Zusammenfassung Dieser Beitrag thematisiert, wie Zivilbürger während der Anschläge in Norwegen vom 22. Juli 2011 soziale Medien nutzten um Hilfe zu leisten. Bei den Anschlägen detonierte der Attentäter Anders Behring Breivik zunächst eine Bombe in Oslo und riss acht Menschen in den Tod. Danach fuhr er auf die 40 Kilometer entfernte Insel Utøya, wo er 69 Jugendliche ermordete. Unsere Analyse erarbeitet ein neues Konzept der „peripheren Kooperation”, um die öffentliche Beteiligung an der Ressourcenmobilisierung am Rande der offiziellen Krisenhilfe besser zu beschreiben. Abstract This contribution examines how people used social media to provide help during the Norway attacks on 22 July, 2011. In the attacks, a person first detonated a bomb in Oslo, killing eight people. He then drove some 30 miles to the island of Utoya, where he shot 69 young people. Our analysis develops a new concept of ‚peripheral cooperation’ to enable better understanding of how the public can contribute to the mobilization of resources.