Research Project as Boundary Object: negotiating the conceptual design of a tool for International Development

This paper reflects on the relationship between who one designs for and what one designs in the unstructured space of designing for political change; in particular, for supporting “International Development” with ICT. We look at an interdisciplinary research project with goals and funding, but no clearly defined beneficiary group at start, and how amorphousness contributed to impact. The reported project researched a bridging tool to connect producers with consumers across global contexts and show players in the supply chain and their circumstances. We explore how both the nature of the research and the tool’s function became contested as work progressed. To tell this tale, we invoke the idea of boundary objects and the value of tacking back and forth between elastic meanings of the project’s artefacts and processes. We examine the project’s role in India, Chile and other arenas to draw out ways that it functioned as a catalyst and how absence of committed design choices acted as an unexpected strength in reaching its goals

D-WISE Tool Suite for the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse

Under the umbrella of the D-WISE project, manual and digital approaches to discourse analysis are combined to develop a prototypical working environment for digital qualitative discourse analysis. This new qualitative data analysis tool, called D-WISE Tool Suite, is built up in a process of close exchange by the two teams from humanities and informatics and focuses on developing central innovations regarding the availability of relevant Digital Humanities (DH) applications. Bridging the gap between structural patterns detected with digital methods and interpretative processes of human meaning making is at the core of the collaborative approach of anthropological studies and computer linguistics in the D-WISE project, which innovates both informatics technology of contextoriented embedding representations and hermeneutic methodologies for discourse analysis in the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD). In this paper, the intertwining of the two paradigms Human-in-the-loop and AI-in-theloop will be presented by outlining the concept of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) in the D-WISE Tool Suite with its AI-empowered features and established modes of feedback-loops and the supported functions for facilitating SKAD

Situated encounters with socially engaged art in community-based design

With the increased relevance of digital technologies in civil life comes the challenge of how to design research for citizen engagement. Drawing from three reflexive case studies presenting socially engaged arts (SEA) projects, we describe how, as artists, collaborators and researchers, we engaged in socially inclusive community-based projects. We argue that our roles required us to be both flexible and to adopt critical openness in practices of collaborative social facilitation. We conclude with insights to inform community-based research and enable nurturing and inclusive engagement in research design for the exploration of near-future digital technologies

Ambidexterity Through the Lens of Conventions? A Qualitative Study on Personal Virtual Assistants

Personal virtual assistants (PVAs) are demanded to effectively fulfil and support employee’s tasks in organizations. Today, PVAs are mainly trusted to take over simple administrative tasks, thus, limiting their potential long-term impact on employees and entire organizations. To overcome this shortcoming, we introduce the pragmatic perspective of the Economics of Conventions (EC) to analyze and understand employees’ plural motives and behaviors that may explain sustained or fragmented potential PVA use in organizations, especially taking the organizational challenge of ambidexterity into account. In doing so, we provide a deepened understanding of PVAs’ capabilities and give propositions for their organizational implementation and use. We also offer new avenues for future research by calling for a more holistic theoretical foundation of organizational artificial intelligence solutions that consider and represent organizations and their employees in their complexity, respectively their plural orders of worth

The Mundane Computer: Non-Technical Design Challenges Facing Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence

Interdisciplinary collaboration, to include those who are not natural scientists, engineers and computer scientists, is inherent in the idea of ubiquitous computing, as formulated by Mark Weiser in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, ubiquitous computing has remained largely a computer science and engineering concept, and its non-technical side remains relatively underdeveloped. The aim of the article is, first, to clarify the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration envisaged by Weiser. Second, the difficulties of understanding the everyday and weaving ubiquitous technologies into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it, as conceived by Weiser, are explored. The contributions of Anne Galloway, Paul Dourish and Philip Agre to creating an understanding of everyday life relevant to the development of ubiquitous computing are discussed, focusing on the notions of performative practice, embodied interaction and contextualisation. Third, it is argued that with the shift to the notion of ambient intelligence, the larger scale socio-economic and socio-political dimensions of context become more explicit, in contrast to the focus on the smaller scale anthropological study of social (mainly workplace) practices inherent in the concept of ubiquitous computing. This can be seen in the adoption of the concept of ambient intelligence within the European Union and in the focus on rebalancing (personal) privacy protection and (state) security in the wake of 11 September 2001. Fourth, the importance of adopting a futures-oriented approach to discussing the issues arising from the notions of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence is stressed, while the difficulty of trying to achieve societal foresight is acknowledged

Wicked Solutions: SDGs, Research Design and the “Unfinishedness” of Sustainability

preprint / pre-printThe appearance of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) marked the first time a global body has attempted to manage the planet’s future in its entirety, linking together urgent, overlapping and contradictory existential threats. The goals newly treated the world as an interlinked system, where relations are as important as components, and problems and solutions evolve together, acknowledging a more entangled trajectory for sustainable Development work. Through this lens, it becomes clear that all answers to how we live are provisional and shifting. Thus, we need more than new knowledge, products or policies from our research; we need to consider how different disciplinary efforts combine, take on life of their own, and nurture new configurations in a dynamic system. This paper invites us to rethink the making of viable futures, in the context of this reframed Development discourse, using design theory and approaches to complexity. It seeks to contribute by proposing HCI tools to manage the new uncertainties this introduces into the design of experts’ research work. Using ideas of “unfinishedness” and the concept of “wicked solutions”, it addresses the incommensurability and contingency to be found in knowledge-making and problem-solving, with an agenda of socio-ecological renewal