Entanglements of creative agency and digital technology : a sociomaterial study of computer game development

Digital technology, with its distinctive characteristics that result from the fundamental process of digitalization that underpins it, is seen as fundamentally altering processes of creativity. However, we currently have limited understanding of creativity in relation to the development of digital technology. Computer game development, with its combination of esthetic, affective and cultural use features and highly sophisticated digital technologies, is a valuable setting for investigating these issues. In this paper, we explore how computer games are shaped through the interplay between the creative intentions of developers and the digital technologies involved in their production and playing. Drawing on in-depth studies conducted at three leading computer game development studios and a leading producer of the software system used in game development, this paper shows how the game developers' creative ideas for imagined novel game-playing experiences relate to a) the development of relevant digital technologies, and b) the emergence of new game development practices. The article goes on to propose a view of creativity as an on-going flow that, following an initial ‘creative impulse’, ripples through the sociomaterial entanglements of a particular setting, reconfiguring them in the process and spreading out in time and space in often unexpected ways

Sociomateriality in Action

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an enforced ‘big bang’ adoption of working from home, involving the rapid implementation and diffusion of digital collaboration technologies. This radical shift to enforced working from home led to substantial changes in the practice of work. Using a qualitative research approach and drawing on the interview accounts of 29 knowledge workers required to work from home during the pandemic, the study identified five sociomaterial practices that were significantly disrupted and required reconfiguration of their constitutive social and material elements to renew them. The paper further shows evidence of the ongoing evolution of those sociomaterial practices among the participants, as temporary breakdowns in their performance led to further adjustments and fine-tuning. The study extends the body of knowledge on working from home and provides a fine-grained analysis of specific complexities of sociomaterial practice and change as actors utilize conceptual and contextual sensemaking to perceive and exploit possibilities for action in their unfolding practice of work. Against the backdrop of the increasing adoption of hybrid working in the aftermath of the pandemic, the paper offers four pillars derived from the findings that support the establishment of a conducive working from home environment

Building an Apparatus: Refractive, Reflective, and Diffractive Readings of Trace Data

We propose a set of methodological principles and strategies for the use of trace data, i.e., data capturing performances carried out on or via information systems, often at a fine level of detail. Trace data comes with a number of methodological and theoretical challenges associated with the inseparable nature of the social and material. Drawing on Haraway and Barad’s distinctions among refraction, reflection, and diffraction, we compare three approaches to trace data analysis. We argue that a diffractive methodology allows us to explore how trace data are not given but created through the construction of a research apparatus to study trace data. By focusing on the diffractive ways in which traces ripple through an apparatus, it is possible to explore some of the taken-for-granted, invisible dynamics of sociomateriality. Equally important, this approach allows us to describe what distinctions emerge and when, within entwined phenomena in the research process. Empirically, we illustrate the guiding methodological principles and strategies by analyzing trace data from Gravity Spy, a crowdsourced citizen science project on Zooniverse.org. We conclude by suggesting that a diffractive methodology helps us draw together quantitative and qualitative research practices in new and productive ways that allow us to study and design for the entwined and dynamic sociomaterial practices found in contemporary organizations

“I Work All Day with Automation in Construction : I am a Sociomaterial-Designer”

Originality/Value This research showcases how sociomaterial perspectives can inform automation in construction.Peer reviewe

Encounters with Authority: Tactics and negotiations at the periphery of participatory platforms

Digital participatory platforms like Wikipedia are often celebrated as projects that allow anyone to contribute. Any user can sign up and start contributing immediately. Similarly, projects that engage volunteers in the production of scientific knowledge create easy points of entry to make contributions. These low barriers to entry are a hallmark feature in digital participatory labor, limiting the number of hoops a new volunteer has to jump through before they can feel like they are making a difference. Such low barriers to participation at the periphery, or edges of participatory platforms, have presented a problem for organizational scholars as they wonder how such projects can achieve consistent results when opportunities to train and socialize newcomers are constrained by a need for low barriers. As a result, scholarship has focused on answering the question of newcomer learning and socialization by examining how newcomers make sense of their new digital workspaces rather than focus on how institutional constraints are imposed. In this research, I draw on a growing body of scholarship that pushes against the perception of openness and low barriers on digital participatory platforms to unpack the constraints on participation that newcomers confront and, in particular, to show how such constraints resemble characteristics of institutionalized newcomer onboarding tactics. To approach this question, I conducted 18 months of participant observation and conducted 36 interviews with experts, newcomers, and project leaders from the crowdsourced citizen science platform Planet Hunters and the peer produced encyclopedia, Wikipedia. I analyzed my data using a grounded theory research design that is sensitized using the theoretical technology of Estrid Sørensen’s Forms of Presence as a way to pay attention to the sociomaterial configurations of newcomer practice, attending to the actors (both human and nonhuman) that play a part in the constraints and affordances of newcomer participation. By drawing on Sørensen’s Forms of Presence, the analytical focus on the newcomer experience shifts from looking at either top-down institutional tactics of organizations or bottom-up individual tactics of newcomers to thinking about the characteristics of relationships newcomers have with other members and platform features and the effects of these relationships as they relate to different opportunities for learning and participation. Focusing on the different ways that learning and participation are made available affords the exploration of how the authority of existing practices in particular settings are imposed on learners despite the presence of low barriers to participation. By paying attention to the sociomaterial configuration of newcomer participation, my findings unpack the tactics that newcomers encounter at the periphery, or edges of participatory platforms, as well as how they find their work being included or excluded from the platform. I use the findings to develop a taxonomy of encounters that describes how newcomers can participate in a self-guided experience as the existing literature describes, but also experience moments of guided and targeted encounters. What this taxonomy of encounters suggests is that the periphery of participatory platforms can be at once an open space for exploration and experimentation but also a well-managed space where, despite low barriers to initial participation, a newcomer must negotiate what I describe as the guardrails of participation that define the constraints and affordances that shape their experience

THE ENTANGLEMENT OF INFLUENTIAL TECHNOLOGY CHANNELS IN PRACTICE AND DESIGN

Design for academic practice is an important phenomenon in Higher Education. This is the practice through which informal, non-professional designers operating in a variety of roles in academic institutions carry out the design of systems, resources, activities and processes that are intended to enhance academic practice. Despite its importance, the area has not received sufficient attention in studies of academic practice, quality enhancement and digital transformation. This thesis argues that the absence of insight into how designers for academic practice engage with digital technology in their design practice contributes to the mismatch between the ambitions for digital transformation in higher education and the reality of how digital technology is used in higher education. This research has developed an approach to address this issue and enhance how designers for academic practice engage with the digital technologies that are enacted in the practices of lecturers in an academic institution. This approach adopts a novel theoretical lens developed for this research, termed Influential Technology Channels, that produces a model of technology use in everyday practice and provides access, through the existing use of technology, to the enactment of academic practice. This model is used alongside another contribution from this research, practice-based personas – a modelling method that represents the diverse collections of technology use that constitute academic practice, and thus enables designers for academic practice to navigate and engage with the diversity of practice in the population of lecturers in the academic institution. Using this approach to design for academic practice, the form of design characterised and investigated in this research, informal designers are supported to achieve a greater understanding of the audience for which they are designing and explore designs that build upon existing, diverse, situated practice in ways that would not otherwise be possible. Through the implementation of an instrumental case study, this research demonstrates how these methods provide the meaningful connections between design and practice that can support digital enhancement and digital transformation initiatives on a broad scale, enabling designers to better engage with diverse people, practices and uses of digital technology as they seek to enhance academic practice

Who Cares? Exploring the Concept of Care Networks for Designing Healthcare Technologies

Dealing with a chronic condition often involves daunting tasks and the participation of multiple people in care. Previous literature has documented collaboration between patients, clinicians, close relatives, friends, and paid carers. However, collaboration in care has been mostly examined as the work of dyads, such as patients and clinicians. In this workshop, we will explore the concept of care networks, which can better account for the numerous human and non-human actors and roles that compose care. We invite designers, researchers, and practitioners to participate in a full-day workshop in which we will reflect on empirical studies and theoretical accounts of care networks, and put forward an agenda for better acknowledging care networks in the research around healthcare technologies and systems

Diversity in Computer Science

This is an open access book that covers the complete set of experiences and results of the FemTech.dk research which we have had conducted between 2016-2021 – from initiate idea to societal communication. Diversity in Computer Science: Design Artefacts for Equity and Inclusion presents and documents the principles, results, and learnings behind the research initiative FemTech.dk, which was created in 2016 and continues today as an important part of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen’s strategic development for years to come. FemTech.dk was created in 2016 to engage with research within gender and diversity and to explore the role of gender equity as part of digital technology design and development. FemTech.dk considers how and why computer science as a field and profession in Denmark has such a distinct unbalanced gender representation in the 21st century. This book is also the story of how we (the authors) as computer science researchers embarked on a journey to engage with a new research field – equity and gender in computing – about which we had only sporadic knowledge when we began. We refer here to equity and gender in computing as a research field – but in reality, this research field is a multiplicity of entangled paths, concepts, and directions that forms important and critical insights about society, gender, politics, and infrastructures which are published in different venues and often have very different sets of criteria, values, and assumptions. Thus, part of our journey is also to learn and engage with all these different streams of research, concepts, and theoretical approaches and, through these engagements, to identify and develop our own theoretical platform, which has a foundation in our research backgrounds in Human–Computer Interaction broadly – and Interaction Design & Computer Supported Cooperative Work specifically