Emerging political narratives on Malawian digital spaces

Social media platforms are being considered new podiums for political transformation as political dictatorships supposedly convert to overnight democracies, and many more people are not only able to gain access to information, but also gather and disseminate news from their own perspective. When looking at the situation in several sub-Saharan African countries, it becomes clear there are various challenges restricting social media and its palpable yet considerably constrained ability to influence political and social changes. Access to the internet, or lack thereof, is a recognised social stratification causing a “digital divide” thanks to existing inequalities within African and several other societies throughout the world. This article reports on a study that analysed a popular Facebook page in Malawi using a discursive online ethnographic examination of interactions among social media participants seeking to determine the level of activism and democratic participation taking shape on the Malawian digital space. The study also examined potential bottlenecks restraining effective digital participation in Malawi. The article argues that while social media's potential to transform societies is palpable, keeping up with the pace of transformation is no easy task for both digital and non-digital citizens. The study demonstrated social media's potential but also highlighted the problems facing online activists in Malawi, including chief among them digital illiteracy. Therefore, the digital sphere is not a political podium for everyone in Malawi as shown by the analysis of digital narratives emerging from the country's online environment, which opens its doors to only a tiny fraction of the population

In the Technological Footprints of Urbanity: A Socio-political History of Water and Sanitation in Nairobi, 1899-2015

While History of Technology as a discipline has developed more strongly in the Global North, a huge lacuna exists in the Global South, particularly in Africa. In addition, the few texts that have given attention to the South have more often than not continued to bracket these localities and the experiences of its peoples as either a historical or lacking agency. The over-emphasis on the perspective of the colonizers rather than the colonized that is evident in most of the literature has led to inconclusive typologies common to many syntheses of Africa’s past especially its urban experiences. In many instances, the dichotomous and a symmetrical analysis results into the African practices of the city being reduced to a colonial perception of disorder. To envision Africa’s cities only in terms of their colonial and postcolonial relationships may preclude a fuller understanding of the multifaceted ways in which they have engaged with the larger world. Furthermore, most studies on technology and infrastructure to be particular have employed dominant paradigms like the theory of Large Technical Systems (LTSs) and propagated the imagination of most urban spaces within the lenses of the ‘networked city model’. These theoretical frameworks have produced incomplete narratives that see the South as chaotic, disorderly and operating on the brink of collapse. It is this fact that has driven contemporary social science and technology studies to call for a departure from the ‘old’ to a new scholarship that acknowledges the localities in the South as not only ‘sources for data’ but also as ‘sites for theorization in their own right’. What is needed in history of technology is a shift from focusing on ‘origin and invention’ to ‘use, meaning and effect’ so as to avoid the reproduction of knowledge that continues to ‘privilege’ the North. Towards the development of Global History of Technology, the gap needs to be bridged by giving attention to the historical particularities of the Global South rather than the South being approached as exceptional. It is on this backdrop that this study of Nairobi was undertaken. Moving between the formal level of engineering and planning and the informal level of daily practice, the dissertation investigated how urban water and sanitation technologies were adopted, appropriated, and contested by various actors. Archival investigations in Nairobi, London and Oxford (UK) and oral accounts of users were employed and analyzed qualitatively. By departing from the dominant LTS perspective, the study zeroes in on the role of users as participants in the making of the histories of the city and as non-passive recipients of migratory ideas and ideals, especially in the process of procuring their daily needs. Technical infrastructural artifacts are looked at as multilayered and possessing a powerful political and economic nature that determines their access and ‘allocative’ role. Nairobi’s water and sanitation socio-spatial outlay was unbundled to reveal a quilt of a heterogeneous techno-scape. Nairobi, like any city in the world has its urban materialities embodying aspirations of various actors but historically, its engineer sociologists continue to define both the characteristics of the technical artifact and the social universe in which they are to function. As a colonial city and an urban space, Nairobi was loaded with imprints of social differentiation, social control and domination and the post-colony has seen elitist ideals augmented in parallel with a rapidly expanding group of urban poor. However, much as infrastructure supply has for several years followed a variegated path, this study sought to push the boundaries beyond the conventional asymmetries of race, class and ‘legal’ versus ‘illegal’ as explained through the formal and informal binary that is common in Urban Studies. It is not enough to conclude that the deployment of key infrastructures adheres to racialized (later elitist or class) planning. Rather, the question of access is informed by many factors that include the political nature of artifacts themselves and people as non-passive recipients; the cost-recovery component of ‘modern’ infrastructure projects as juxtaposed to the socio-cultural constructs of water and sanitation provisioning. Nairobi in retrospect attains a techno-collage or patchwork of modalities of provisioning that affirms the heterogeneous nature of most urban spaces. Furthermore, juxtaposed against the ‘splintering urbanism’ thesis, this work reverses the narrative by pointing out that the Global South cities have traditionally been fragmented and ‘splintered’ in terms of their socio-technical topologies. Nairobi for instance has from its foundation been marked by a quilt of different socio-technical arrangement of water and sanitation provision that combine both top-down approaches that are characterized by highly centralized municipal governance and bottom-linked modalities. These include shallow wells, boreholes, rain-water-harvesting, cesspits, and pushcarts amongst others. There are also ‘mediative’ hybridized arrangements like the ‘spaghetti’ pipes and standpipes cum water kiosks. The centrality of some of these methods from below, as espoused in this study, has witnessed a process of streamlining. This is acknowledged by the utility companies through public-private partnerships that combine the large and the small to plug into the technological gaps existing especially in the informal settlements that are melting pots of both technological innovation and contestation. Heterogeneity and ‘decentered’ or devolved small scale modalities of provision have been and will always remain a permanent marker of most cities as their history goes hand in glove with that of the cities themselves. Nairobi’s checkered sociotechnical outlay is as old as the city itself. Perhaps, as the writing of a Global History of Technology takes center stage, future scholarship needs to focus more on the multilayered nature of human and knowledge flows that go beyond the North-South binary to encompass South-North, South-North-South, South-South amongst many other shifts and counter-shifts, as we grapple with the challenge of knowledge production on histories of technology that is highly representative

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

From distributed coordination to field calculus and aggregate computing

open6siThis work has been partially supported by: EU Horizon 2020 project HyVar (www.hyvar-project .eu), GA No. 644298; ICT COST Action IC1402 ARVI (www.cost -arvi .eu); Ateneo/CSP D16D15000360005 project RunVar (runvar-project.di.unito.it).Aggregate computing is an emerging approach to the engineering of complex coordination for distributed systems, based on viewing system interactions in terms of information propagating through collectives of devices, rather than in terms of individual devices and their interaction with their peers and environment. The foundation of this approach is the distillation of a number of prior approaches, both formal and pragmatic, proposed under the umbrella of field-based coordination, and culminating into the field calculus, a universal functional programming model for the specification and composition of collective behaviours with equivalent local and aggregate semantics. This foundation has been elaborated into a layered approach to engineering coordination of complex distributed systems, building up to pragmatic applications through intermediate layers encompassing reusable libraries of program components. Furthermore, some of these components are formally shown to satisfy formal properties like self-stabilisation, which transfer to whole application services by functional composition. In this survey, we trace the development and antecedents of field calculus, review the field calculus itself and the current state of aggregate computing theory and practice, and discuss a roadmap of current research directions with implications for the development of a broad range of distributed systems.embargoed_20210910Viroli, Mirko; Beal, Jacob; Damiani, Ferruccio; Audrito, Giorgio; Casadei, Roberto; Pianini, DaniloViroli, Mirko; Beal, Jacob; Damiani, Ferruccio; Audrito, Giorgio; Casadei, Roberto; Pianini, Danil

Social ties, homophily and heterophily in urban sustainability transitions: User practices and solar water heater diffusion in China

This paper aims to explore the potential of latecomer cities in sustainability transitions from the demand side. The case study investigates the role of users and their social ties in influencing the popularisation of solar water heaters in a latecomer city Dezhou, in contrast to a more developed counterpart, Beijing. The two cities show vast differences in user preferences towards the low-tech environmental innovation, and the stronger social ties in Dezhou facilitate the diffusion through not only frequent social learning and peer pressure, but also enhancing user-producer trust and relation. These findings suggest that latecomer cities could provide less harsh selection environments for disruptive environmental innovations and their comparatively homogenous social ties could be harnessed to empower niche development

Fielding Design, Design Fielding:Learning, Leading & Organising in New Territories

A framing question; What does (meaningful) collaboration look like in action? led to the search for and identification of a polycontext, a site where advanced collaborative activity is intelligible. This research aims to explore how the epistemic foundations of learning and design theory can adapt to collaborative approaches to organizing, learning and leadership as the macro-economic transition of digital transformation proceeds. Through embedded ethnographic engagement within a learning organization facilitating group-oriented, design-led collaborative learning experiences, a case study investigates multiple sites within a global organizational network whose distinctive methodology and culture provides a setting emblematic of frontier digital economic activity. The organization’s activity generates environments which notionally act as boundary sites where negotiation of epistemic difference is necessitated, consequently distinctive forms of expertise in brokerage and perspective-taking arise to support dynamic coordination, presenting a distinct take on group-oriented learning. Comprising interacting investigation of communities of facilitators and learning designers tasked to equip learners with distinctive forms of integrative expertise, with the objective of forming individuals adept at rapid orientation to contingent circumstances achieved by collaborative organizing. In parallel, investigating narratives of an organization’s formation led to grounded theory about how collaborative activity is enabled by shared reframing practices. Consequently, the organization anticipates and reshapes the field it operates within, the research discusses scalar effects of learning communities on industry work practices. The inquiry interrogates design-led learning and expertise formation apt for transformative activity within and beyond the digital economy. Exploring how methodological innovations within collaborative learning organizations are enacted and scaled, primary perspectives on design-led, group-oriented learning are evaluated alongside relevant secondary theoretic perspectives on collaborative organizing, learning and leading. The study synthesizes contributions that point to expansions of existing learning paradigms and anticipates how collaborative learning by design intervenes with the schematic assumptions at work in individuals, communities and fields. Observational insight, systematic analysis and theoretical evaluation are applied to problematize assumptions underlying social theory to anticipate generational expansions to the design methods field which responds to inadequacies in planning and organizing approaches applied by design. The research attempts to habituate understanding from outside design methods to better equip an explanatory understanding of contemporary design-led learning and expertise formation occurring in modern professional structures, especially in the creative industries. Together, the research investigates how learners navigate challenges of organizing, learning and leading into unseen territories