Paper short abstract:

How far do today's imaginative horizons define futures that will emerge? This paper discusses how a cadre of engineers and mathematicians are attempting to generate a holistic model of contemporary and future energy systems, through imaginings of current and hypothetical infrastructures.

Paper long abstract:

The current moment is often described as a global energy crisis, as conflicting needs and desires, resources and degradations emerge. Among the professions concerned with seeking a resolution for the crisis are a cadre of engineers and mathematicians who seek to tame multidimensional uncertainties over time. By 'building' elaborate and integrated models of energy systems, they hope to provide a framework to help others to take decisions about the future. But 'building a model' and integrating diverse models is an extreme shorthand for many and diverse ways of imagining, calculating, reasoning, and defining certainties and uncertainties. What do they mean when they talk about 'models', how do they imagine, and what kinds of future do they describe? And what kinds of decisions do they anticipate being necessary? The paper builds on early fieldwork with the UK National Centre for Energy Systems Integration.

Paper short abstract:

With the notion of 'promise', the paper thinks through imaginaries of emerging technologies in engineering, based on a two-year long ethnographic fieldwork in the "Dynamic Medium Group," an influential research collective in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is about a specific form of engineering and design in the tradition of Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay, whose aim is to perform work on the computational medium. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the "Dynamic Medium Group": a highly influential research collective in the San Francisco Bay Area. The group, working under the lead of Bret Victor, consists of a handful of engineers, who focus on building the conceptual and technical foundations for a new "dynamic spatial medium." Drawing on this two-year long fieldwork, the paper will argue that at the core of this endeavour is a set of promises, most notably the promise of making history by working on the medium. With the notion of 'promise', the paper thinks through the social and technical gesture, with which the group constructs futures, and as such itself as a strong subject. The research group makes promises by building them into prototypes, by extracting new promises out of these prototypes, and by using prototypes to make their promises convincing. This paper shall explore how internally, promises produce both coherence and conflict. Externally, the research group tries to fight off attempts to use or understand their work without buying into the full set of its promises. Even though their promises consist of daring junctures of speculation and technology, they are positioned as opposites to techno-solutionist shortcuts situated in the Silicon Valley and beyond, and are directed against current digital media and their commercially-driven development.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper we discuss emerging technologies associated with smart cities through the prism of three concepts which are articulated in the narratives of the policy makers, researchers and project leaders who support and mobilise smart city agendas: co-creation, validation and infrastructuring.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper we discuss emerging technologies associated with smart cities through the prism of three concepts which are articulated in the narratives of the policy makers, researchers and project leaders who support and mobilise smart city agendas: co-creation, validation and infrastructuring.

In doing so we draw on fieldwork undertaken in Denmark, Spain and Australia, focusing on the processes that sought to support and boost the development and deployment of smart city technologies, between government, business and citizens. We outline how we used a methodology of being with and in the processes in which emerging technologies are implicated and involved. Through this approach, we investigated how the 'native' categories of co-creation, validation and infrastructuring provide a particular narrative and set of resources for 'innovation' that does not determine what emerging technologies would become, but that articulate a potentiality that feeds back into and drives the very processes through which emerging technologies are materialised.

As we show, it is this very circularity of a process that is intended to drive innovation and social change forward that underpins the apparent failure of the smart city concept to ever become the utopian reality that its proponents invest their hopes and resources.

Paper short abstract:

Perspectives on world making from anthropology and design practice can open for new modes of research and engagement into the social, cultural and material processes of designing with and for emerging technologies. The case reports on digital technologies for future educational practices.

Paper long abstract:

From maker technologies in education, to automated vehicles, or assistive technologies and robotics in the home, the rapid advanced of emerging technologies calls for new humanistic modes of research and engagement. Design anthropology's position as a transdisciplinary field gives it a unique position to explore and intervene in the emergent social, cultural and material processes and worlds through social theory, empirical research, and situated interventions and experiments (Gunn et al. 2013; Smith et al. 2016; Akama et al. 2018).

Anthropological approaches to world making can help us explore and understand how technological design is developed, manifested and transformed through specific social, cultural and political practices and imaginations (e.g. Goodman 1978; Suchman 2011; Sneath et al. 2013; Escobar 2018). But more focus is needed on the material engagements and experiments with(in) the design processes. Schön's (1983; 1922) conception of reflective design practice as world making and as a reflective conversation with the materials of a design situation, can help us ground anthropological perspectives in the situated micro-acts of technological imagination and design. Based on research into the potentials of maker technologies in future educational practices, I demonstrate how a focus on situated and collaborative engagements with social, material, and digital design processes allowed the making of new artifacts, meanings and worlds for both students, teachers and researchers. I argue that such approaches can be transferred to other context and more advanced engagements with emerging technologies.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, we study how the actual and potential consumers of smart insurance products understand, perform and negotiate the degrees of autonomy in self-tracking practices. Through the examination of these practices and the consumers' imaginaries, we develop the concept of distributed autonomy.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we study the so-called "smart insurance" that combines self-tracking technologies with life insurance. Our main question is, how the actual and potential consumers of smart insurance products understand, perform and negotiate the degrees of autonomy in self-tracking practices. Through the examination of these practices and the consumers' imaginaries, we develop the concept of distributed autonomy. The paper is based on interviews conducted in Finland in 2017.

Smart insurance products aim to track and manipulate the insured's behaviour by utilizing activity wristbands and other sensory devices. The policyholders are encouraged to share their acts of self-determination in health decisions with the devices while the insurance company gathers data on the insured's activities. We demonstrate tensions and possibilities around smart insurance, discussing relationalities that it opens, rather than seeking a linear story of a disciplinary mechanism. We outline how imaginaries of surveillance, control, self-determination, and freedom are distributed in multiple ways, and in various degrees. The empirical materials make evident that personal autonomy is not a question of either/or, or on/off. It is not as if either the control is externalized and given up to institutions and gadgets, or it is retained by the subject. Rather, we emphasize the wide variety of the degrees of autonomy evident in the practices and in the fantasies related to the scope of possibilities that the new technologies provide.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the socio-technical assemblage of flying drones in an infrastructure of hyper-visuality, omnipresent cameras, and a lack of control over who gets access to the flow of images. This ties into and reframes well-known notions of proxemics, privacy, female nudity and the male gaze.

Paper long abstract:

The context for our discussion is one where drones with cameras are airborne digital information technologies, making up part of larger socio-technical systems. Science and technology (including information technology) are fundamental parts of the political and social worlds we inhabit and of our intimate sense of ourselves. Increasingly, the emerging technologies of (perceived) autonomous material/physical objects in the 'space of humans' are moving in close proximity to our physical bodies - such as self-driving cars and drones. This poses new questions about the social and political worlds we inhabit - and not least about our intimate sense of ourselves and our bodies.

In this paper, we address this through the question of how drones in the Danish air space evoke reactions by people experiencing and interacting with the drones. The gendered aspects of a set of concerns related to the presence of drones, emerged in a research project on the public's privacy concerns regarding drones, commissioned by the Danish Transport Authorities. The material is generated through focus group debates and 'experiments' with drone overflights. The reactions are gendered due in part, our research shows, to the knowledge that a drone with a camera attached hovering outside your window or in the backyard, affords the spread of images across the world wide web in a split second. In this paper we explore how the socio-technical assemblage of drones, cameras, human bodies and the Internet tie into and reframe well-known notions of proxemics, privacy, female nudity/modesty and the male gaze.

Paper short abstract:

The paper presents an analysis of a smart university building and shows how the built-in sensors can be used for understanding and influencing people's behaviour. The study is part of the EU MOBISTYLE project, whose main goal is to support sustainable and healthy lifestyle in buildings.

Paper long abstract:

In 2014, the University of Ljubljana opened a new €81M complex. It was the University's largest infrastructural investment in its entire history. The building, located in a swampy suburbia of Ljubljana, is equipped with state-of-the-art automation systems and sensors measuring large amounts of data mostly related to the building's energy performance and thermal comfort.

In this paper, we present an analysis of the building and demonstrate how smart solutions influence people's lives, both positively and negatively. Our ethnographic study, which started in 2016, has been supplemented with quantitative approaches, from questionnaires for employees and students to data mining sensor signals. The study is part of the EU Horizon 2020 MOBISTYLE project, which aims to raise awareness and motivate behavioural change by providing personalised IT services on energy use, air quality, health, and wellbeing. The international project enabled us to carry out a comparison of the Ljubljana case to other similar buildings in the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, and Italy.

First, the comparison has shown that the social and infrastructural particularities of cases should be taken into account when adapting the general IT solution to different buildings and people living and working in them. Second, the study shows that a smart building does not necessarily guarantee wellbeing and satisfaction. On the contrary, smart solutions have often proven to be a source of discontent, especially when they appropriate agency from people and try to 'interpret' what people want and need. In such cases, people often find innovative solutions for outsmarting the building and taking back control.