Platforms, scales and networks: meshing a local sustainable sharing economy

The “sharing economy” has promised more sustainable use of the world’s finite resources, exploiting latency and promoting renting rather than ownership through digital networks. But do the digital brokers that use networks at global scale offer the same care for the planet as more traditional forms of sharing? We contrast the sustainability of managing idle capacity with the merits of collective local agency bred by caring-based sharing in a locality. Drawing on two studies of neighbourhood sharing in London and analysis of the meshing of local sharing initiatives, we ask how ‘relational assets’ form and build up over time in a neighbourhood, and how a platform of platforms might act as local socio-technical infrastructure to sustain alternative economies and different models of trust to those found in the scaling sharing economy. We close by proposing digital networks of support for local solidarity and resourcefulness, showing how CSCW knowledge on coordination and collaboration has a role in achieving these ends

CARE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF HACKER IDENTITIES, COMMUNITIES, AND SOCIETY

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Informatics and Computing, 2016Recent scholarship in Human-Computer Interaction, science and technology studies, and design research has focused on hacker communities as sites of innovation and entrepreneurship, novel forms of education, and the democratization of technological production. However, hacking practices are more than new technical practices; they are also political, value-laden, and ideological practices. The significances of these underlying commitments is less understood not only in academic research, but also within the communities themselves, which tend to profess a libertarian ethos often articulated as apolitical. In this dissertation, I investigate how the process of developing a hacker identity within a hacker community is influenced not only by technical skill, but also by care and community maintenance practices. By studying their projects, community interactions, and social policies, I explore how the broader hackerspace movement unintentionally but systematically excludes broader participation. I leverage several qualitative methods to create a well-rounded account of the hacker identity development process, including: an interview study of hackers’ projects; a 19-month ethnography in a hackerspace; and an analysis of the most-discussed issues on the international hackerspaces.org Discuss listserv. I analyzed these data through a lens informed by care ethics, foregrounding the interdependent, nurturing relationships hackers develop, and explicating the duties to care that are felt and acted on—but rarely discussed—in these spaces. I present results suggesting that developing a hacker identity can be a vulnerable process, and is both supported and made difficult by the social environment in these communities. While critical to a hackerspace’s success, care and maintenance practices are often overshadowed by rhetoric of self-empowerment and independence. As a result, it becomes difficult for women and minorities to join and fit in, despite members’ best intentions. These results have implications for research on hackerspaces, for hackerspaces themselves, and for analyses of care in such communities

Warm Solutions: Medical Making & Collaborative Infrastructure for Care

Making, as an activity and culture, enables people to participate in technological innovation at non-traditional sites. In healthcare settings, medical makers undertake activities as a part of routine, professional care practice. Their collaborative process occurs at the intersection of centralized healthcare systems and decentralized maker technologies with reflexive opportunities for human-centered design. In my research, I propose a critical view of medical making as an opportunity to reposition the power to participate in design within traditional healthcare practice. I develop my thesis from multiple efforts in a wide ecosystem of medical makers across private and public practice, STEM institutions, academic research labs, and non-profit groups. I apply Science and Technology Studies (STS) and HCI theories to analyze stakeholder efforts in relation to long-term patient-centered care infrastructure. Embedded in practice, infrastructure becomes visible in relation to its use. In my dissertation, I develop an understanding of how stakeholders in healthcare settings and networks influence care infrastructure with maker technologies. I do this by foregrounding the norms, values, and expertise related to stakeholder participation across three sections. First, I re-locate the site where physician-led making begins from labs to the bedside – as safe, reliable, small-scale prototypes. Second, I re-frame the importance of medical making, with lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, when grassroot- and institutional makers repaired temporary manufacturing breakdowns by creating reliable medical supplies. Third, I re-center the role of point-of-care medical makers, highlighting present-day nurse contributions as makers and contrasting their historically undocumented contributions in routine care. My research work culminates in a discussion of the human infrastructure, in addition to information systems, required to design environments for innovation based on the case study of medical making. For HCI researchers, this work first diversifies design values of novelty to include healthcare values of safety, reliability, and verifiability in collaborative systems, and second, extrapolates lessons from medical making to build fair, equitable, and sustainable infrastructure for collaboration between experts and non-experts. From these value-driven insights, I hope my work further contributes practical, methodological, and ethical implications for multiple stakeholders including policymakers and researchers.Ph.D

Material geographies of the maker movement : community workshops and the making of sustainability in Edinburgh, Scotland

Recent years have seen the emergence of a novel type of community space around the world, labelled variously as makerspaces, hackerspaces, hacklabs, Fab Labs, and repair cafés. These workshops, often known collectively as the ‘maker movement’, have inspired considerable speculation regarding their potential to prefigure a more sustainable economy, including a shift to localised and participatory forms of production and consumption (Smith and Light, 2017). Until recently, the social scientific work on such spaces has been sparse, especially in-depth ethnographic work, though scholars are increasingly turning their attention to them, particularly in the fields of design and science and technology studies. This thesis, a practice-led ‘enactive ethnography’ drawing from three case study workshops in Edinburgh, Scotland, explores the question of sustainable development and maker spaces along two main axes: firstly, the emergence of sustainable practice in such spaces, and secondly, the relevance of such spaces to the cultivation of human wellbeing. The thesis is the first examination of such spaces drawing from developments in social theory towards relational materialism, more-than-representational approaches, and a focus on social practice. It draws a number of conclusions. Firstly, that claims of an undifferentiated global ‘maker movement’ may be exaggerated: the grassroots participant-led creation of such spaces results in irreducible diversity and local differentiation. Secondly, while claims about the potential of such spaces for reconfiguring global production and consumption are overstated, when viewed from a practice-oriented perspective, the communities of practice populating such sites comprise potent and potentially-valuable crucibles of knowledge and materials. And thirdly, trying to move away from individualistic conceptions of wellbeing, the case studies provided evidence for the shared workshops playing a crucial role in the contingent emergence of participant wellbeing. These findings are further developed in tandem with a posthuman reading of maker practices, contributing to timely scholarly debates on ‘making’ and ‘craft’