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Short abstract:

Interactive exhibit, featuring poster pin-up space and flexible table-space, and seating arrangements for participants to add their own contributions to the display

Abstract:

Extant paradigms for platform governance, particularly those advanced by platform companies, configure the front-end user interface as the sphere for governance, while simultaneously occluding the back-end operations central to the economic value of the platform. Building on STS research on how this stage management of data relations configures platform governance (Huang & Krafft, in press), as well as research on hacking metaphors for the regulation of emerging technologies (Jones & Millar, 2017), this interactive exhibit animates, through experimental modalities of boundary-drawing, how what is made visible goes hand-in-hand with what is actionable for governance. As designers and STS scholars, we propose an interactive exhibit of critical and speculative drawing, inviting participants to destabilize the boundaries drawn by platform companies, and to reclaim collective power in determining what is actionable for governance. Rooted in architectural approaches to drawing and diagramming, which map spatial relationships in the built environment, this exhibit provides material and discursive tools for interrogating and re-imagining platforms. In the first act, we will utilize the metaphor of stage management to reformulate transparency as a regulatory ideal. Through a series of critical drawing exercises, participants will experiment with visualizing the back-stage operations (e.g., sketching optimization metrics central to a platform’s business model), and with re-drawing the lines of visibility demarcating front- vs. back-stage operations. In the second act, participants will shift from critique to speculation. Discarding “platform” as the metaphorical grounds for sense-making, participants will collectively re-imagine alternative metaphors by which to understand, visualize, design, and govern these sociotechnical systems.