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- Convenors:
-
Attila Bruni
(Trento University)
Manuela Perrotta (Queen Mary University of London)
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- Theme:
- Situated practices
- Location:
- C. Humanisticum AB 1.16
- Sessions:
- Thursday 18 September, -, Friday 19 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
Long Abstract:
Working and organizing are embedded in increasingly complex technological arrangements and they are performed through locally situated social practices. The notion of Technologically Dense Environments (TDEs) refers both to concrete places in which human actors and technological artefacts work ‘together’; and to virtual places in which human interaction is made possible by technologies. In TDEs, complex socio-material practices mobilise the coordinated activities of heterogeneous elements, blurring the distinction between purely technological and purely organisational processes.
In this track, we seek to explore in how far organisations can or should be conflated with the notion of ‘environment’ in TDEs; and in how far technologies expand or disrupt such a simple equation. We ask, if TDEs naturally extend past the boundaries of organisations or if they condense organisations into situations of local practice. Or, of course, if technological and organisational structures and processes actually coincide.
In order to answer these questions, we specifically, but not exclusively, focus on the human/machine solidarities created in TDEs. Information infrastructures may, for instance, create new solidarities or publics within and across organisations. They may be used to mobilise allies or become allies themselves. A novel solidarity with objects, for instance in the natural environment, may be created in TDEs which monitor and evaluate pollution. On the other hand, increased technological density may make the solidarities of ‘sentimental work’ visible in opposition to objectified technologies. We could thus assume that some technologies, humans or organisations show more solidarity than others. We welcome both conceptual and empirical contributions.
The papers will be presented in the order shown within one sessions
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 18 September, 2014, -Paper long abstract:
The study follows the construction of a TDE during a product development process of a food package. In the process, a development team of a paper company worked with a customer and the providers of materials and equipment to design and produce the hybrid package, which combines paperboard and plastic. We observed work practices of the participants during the different phases of the process. The study focuses on the trajectories of the different objects to explore how their roles shifted during the process through their engagements in different activities.
The process was organised around the design and production of objects. In the beginning, the composing parts of the package and its manufacturing technology were in an abstract form; they materialised through the technology-mediated activities of the participating companies. These different material objects were brought together in the phase of trial runs to test their functionality. This took place as iterative experiments where operators adjusted the positions of the objects and the parameters of the manufacturing equipment and observed the following behaviour, visible as test packages. To be able to evaluate the functioning of the objects, the operators needed to set up an infrastructure supporting the experiments. The operators' care for the working together of the objects enabled the TDE, which allowed them to concentrate on the qualities of the packages and their correspondence with the requirements of the customer. The shifting concerns of the participants were reflected in the roles of the objects in the different phases of the process.
Paper long abstract:
I will describe a specific phase of a complex interaction design project related to producing a technology that allows disabled people to communicate using cell-phone networks. Such a project can be considered a way to allow persons which are now excluded by most of our technologies and technological environments to get into a TDE.
But the outcomes of the project will not be the center of my presentation. I will focus on a much earlier phase where, in order to ameliorate the sensitivity of a dataglove constituting the center of this enabling technology, the designers working on the project try in etching an electric circuit on a flexible surface.
This situation, that I observed during a short ethnography in the lab where the above mentioned dataglove is designed, is interesting for few specific reasons:
- it questions the STS-minded ethnographeron how to describe such practices taking into account and accounting for the role of technologies, bodies, materials;
- it presents various instances of solidarity: a material solidarity among the outline of the circuit printed on paper and the sheet of brass on which the former has to stick in order to proceed with the etching; a ethic solidarity related to a certain way of working; a humane solidarity towards the disabled persons to which the final technology is addressed.
- it questions the concept of TDE and especially the subconcept of "density": though the lab is a technology filled environment it is probably not a TDE and this allows the experimental practice that I will describe.
Paper long abstract:
This research is based on the analysis of structured interviews and ethnographically observed practices and strategies of the developer of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, especially aimed at small scale and micro businesses.
The original research focus was to gain a better understanding of the socio-cultural issues and mechanisms of user participation driven design, regarding small scale business software development. As the fieldwork progressed, it became visible that the software developer of this case study used different user driven design concepts as part of his overall strategy to translate the interests of its clients and to enroll them into his specific concept of an cloud based ERP technology. Through the introduction of this technology, individual practices and relations within client organizations are renegotiated through new potentials and restrictions of the software system. At the same time, the ERP technology itself is reshaped through needed adaptation towards the clients individual sociotechnical environment and through the formation of new features and functions in user practice driven design processes.
Through the high level of flexibility of this software, ideas of categories like "developer", "user" and even "competitor" together with ideas of "success" or "failure" of enrollment strategies become equally flexible. In addition, the boundaries in regards of knowledge transfer between otherwise unrelated organizations are blurred through the cloud based architecture of the software. This is the case if features and functions developed with a specific local user become equally available for the other users, offering the potential of transfer (and transformation) of business practices between individual organizations.
Paper long abstract:
Urban spaces are increasingly technologically dense environments posing several requirements for urban design. This paper approaches urban design as creative action and examines the creative processes of the development of technologically dense urban environments. The paper builds on recent literature emphasizing that various types of constraints are an inherent part of all creative action. The aim here is to identify the key constraints in the development of technologically dense urban environments and to analyze the urban design practices of dealing with such constraints. Empirically, the study focuses on the development of an area, currently named Baana that cuts across downtown Helsinki. Baana was opened up in 2012 and it is presently a combined walk and cycle-way that was built on old cargo railway tracks. Interestingly, parallel to the design of Baana, an informal group of 17 professional artists, planners, industrial designers, engineers, business people, and researchers developed a detailed alternative for Baana and its surroundings, a design called urBaana. The study analyzes the urban design practices of this informal group and is based both on interviews of the professionals in the group and the design booklet produced by the group. The results refer to and discuss the importance of critical material entities, such as weather, existing urban plans and infrastructure that act as key constraints in the creative design of technologically dense urban environments.