Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds

This paper introduces “infrastructural speculations,” an orientation toward speculative design that considers the complex and long-lived relationships of technologies with broader systems, beyond moments of immediate invention and design. As modes of speculation are increasingly used to interrogate questions of broad societal concern, it is pertinent to develop an orientation that foregrounds the “lifeworld” of artifacts—the social, perceptual, and political environment in which they exist. While speculative designs often imply a lifeworld, infrastructural speculations place lifeworlds at the center of design concern, calling attention to the cultural, regulatory, environmental, and repair conditions that enable and surround particular future visions. By articulating connections and affinities between speculative design and infrastructure studies research, we contribute a set of design tactics for producing infrastructural speculations. These tactics help design researchers interrogate the complex and ongoing entanglements among technologies, institutions, practices, and systems of power when gauging the stakes of alternate lifeworlds

A Voice of Process: Re-Presencing the Gendered Labor of Apollo Innovation

From Ada Lovelace to Margaret Hamilton, retelling the stories of previously unrecognized women can broaden histories of technology and challenge the dominant imaginary of innovation today. These figures remind us that women can be—and always have been—part of computing. Yet, their significant accomplishments represent a small fraction of women’s contributions to technology. Women, and especially working class women of color, have consistently done the work just below the surface of discovery. However, the data comprising their experiences remains thin, keeping those figures on the scientific margins. This essay explores how communication studies can integrate expanded methods of media archeology to address issues of representation in the absence of remarkable personal narratives. We present the case study the Apollo Guidance Computer’s woven core memory, a history that is “re-presenced” through a participatory workshop that engages participants in collaborative acts of weaving. In an appeal to the tactics of design, this recuperation opens an indeterminate past to illuminate the networks of labor called into being by technological artifacts. We argue that integrating these methods can produce new, feminist histories of material practices—bringing people and places into the present along with their associated artifacts

Optophonic Reading, Prototyping Optophones

This article details the contributions of blind readers to the development, design, and marketing of the optophone, a text-to-tone transcription machine introduced in the early twentieth century. We combine archival research with prototyping to investigate the dimensions involved in past coding and decoding practices. If archives provide testimonial fragments about individual use, 2D to 3D translation helps scholars to more broadly characterize optophone reading and understand technical affordances. See http://amodern.net/article/optophonic-reading/