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Paper short abstract

This paper argues that by uncovering the human-machine complexity of a navigation system, we can uncover the various layers of understanding, misunderstanding, and ignorance among engineers, their managers, and their machines, when building such systems.

Paper long abstract

How is my car seeing the road? How is it processing what is happening around it? Who is also helping me drive? Today's car ride entails a multitude of computer-mediated maneuvers and routing procedures, with a car processing probe data such as road traffic and car speed. Behind the software that helps navigate the car, sit a team of software engineers who attempt to optimize a route - helping reduce the number of factors that can affect how a car gets from point A to B. Oftentimes, these engineers and other stakeholders involved in building such systems, understand only a fragment of its complexity. How do they hold it together? How do they avoid failure?

Based on 2 years of situated ethnography in a large mapping and navigation software company in Berlin, this paper zooms in on the multiple layers of understanding, misunderstanding, and ignorance in building a technical system. Where does 'knowing' a system begin and end? How much can we understand within the complexity of a computational system? In what moments do developers leave things up to chance? How do these barriers of understanding challenge hierarchical structures of power (such as power between a worker and a manager), or more experienced developer and a less experienced one?

This paper argues that in uncovering the human-machine complexity of a navigation system, we can reveal the various thresholds of understanding among engineers, their managers, and their machines.