Ambient networks: Bridging heterogeneous network domains

Providing end-to-end communication in heterogeneous internetworking environments is a challenge. Two fundamental problems are bridging between different internetworking technologies and hiding of network complexity and differences from both applications and application developers. This paper presents abstraction and naming mechanisms that address these challenges in the Ambient Networks project. Connectivity abstractions hide the differences of heterogeneous internetworking technologies and enable applications to operate across them. A common naming framework enables end-to-end communication across otherwise independent internetworks and supports advanced networking capabilities, such as indirection or delegation, through dynamic bindings between named entities

Community Internet of Things as Mobile Infrastructure: Methodological Challenges and Opportunities

From smart devices to homes to cities, Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have become embedded within everyday objects on a global scale. We understand IoT technologies as a form of infrastructure that bridges the gaps between offline spaces and online networks as they track, transmit, and construct digital data from and of the physical world. We examine the social construction of IoT network technologies through their technological design and corporate discourses. In this article, we explore the methodological challenges and opportunities of studying IoT as an emerging network technology. We draw on a case study of a low-power wide-area network (LPWAN), a cost-effective radio frequency network that is designed to connect sensors across long distances. Reflecting on our semi-structured interviews with LPWAN users and advocates, participant observation at conferences about LPWAN, as well as a community-based LPWAN project, we examine the intersections of methods and practices as related to space, data, and infrastructures. We identify three key methodological obstacles involved in studying the social construction of networked technologies that straddle physical and digital environments. These include (a) transcending the invisibility and abstraction of network infrastructures, (b) managing practical and conceptual boundaries to sample key cases and participants, and (c) negotiating competing technospatial imaginaries between participants and researchers. Through our reflection, we demonstrate that these challenges also serve as generative methodological opportunities, extending existing tools to study the ways data connects online and offline spaces

Infrastructuring for cultural commons

In this doctoral dissertation, I inquire into the ways in which Participatory Design (PD) and digital design endeavors can contribute to wider public access to, and use of, digital cultural heritage. I advocate for an approach according to which digital cultural heritage is arranged and understood as cultural commons, and for more collaborative modes of social care for and governance of the commons. In addition to the empirically grounded findings and proposals contained in six individual research articles, I develop a theoretical framework that combines scholarship on Information Infrastructures, Commons and PD. Against this framework I interrogate how the information infrastructures and conditions that surround digital cultural heritage can be active in constructing and contributing to cultural commons. While doing this, I draw attention to the gap that exists between on the one hand official institutional digital cultural heritage collections, systems and practices, and on the other hand the digital platforms and practices through which everyday people create, curate and share digital cultural works. In order to understand how to critically and productively bridge this gap, I present insights gained from conducting three design research cases that engage both cultural heritage institutions and everyday media users. Building upon this empirical work, and latching on to scholarship on the notion of infrastructuring, I propose four infrastructuring strategies for cultural commons: probing and building upon the installed base, stimulating and simulating design and use through gateways, producing and pooling shared resources, and, lastly, fostering and shaping a commons culture that supports commoning. In exploring these strategies, I map the territory between commons and infrastructuring, and connect these notions to the PD tradition. I do so to sketch the design principles for a design orientation, commons design. I assert that these principles can be useful for advancing PD, and can inform future initiatives, aid in identifying infrastructural challenges, and in finding and confirming an orientation to participatory design activities. Drawing on my practical design work, I discuss requirements for professional designers operating on commons frameworks and with collective action. By doing this, my dissertation not only breaks new theoretical ground through advancing theoretical considerations relevant to contemporary design research, especially the field of PD, but also contributes practical implications useful for professional digital media design practice, especially for designers working in the fields of digital culture and cultural heritage

Dueling Stakeholders and Dual-Hatted Systems Engineers: Engineering Challenges, Capabilities and Skills in Government Infrastructure Technology Projects

An earlier version of this work was presented at the EGOS 2008 Summer Colloquium.Engineering projects that support government enterprises face substantial challenges due to demands from diverse stakeholders and rapidly-changing technologies. In this paper, we present findings from analysis of five case studies of systems engineering projects for large government enterprises. We focus on what can be learned from systems engineers, their essential role, and their engineering practices. As they work to establish interoperability across pre-existing and new technologies - thereby evolving infrastructure - the engineers commonly face “agonistic” tensions between groups of stakeholders. Temporal pacing conflicts are especially prevalent, such as those between stakeholder groups concerned with fast-paced streams of innovation and stakeholder groups concerned with current operations. In response, many engineers are following an evolutionary approach, developing new capabilities for managing projects and individual professional skill sets. The engineers’ adaptive response can be understood as incremental modularization and re/integration of technologies and associated practices across organizational (stakeholder) boundaries. Additionally, engineers are developing new skills of influence to support these capabilities for addressing stakeholder tensions. We close by discussing implications of our findings for the management of infrastructure technology projects, emergent design and engineering of organizational infrastructure, and the changing role of systems engineers