Thinking Participatory Design work-shops in the presence of cosmopolitics

This paper is a written version of a presentation held at DASTS 2022 as part of a panel session organized by Mike Michael, Alex Wilkie, Michael Guggenheim and the author. The idea behind the panel, inspired by laboratory studies in STS, was to propose a focus on workshops as ‘worldbuilding’ events, which implies a close scrutiny of how workshops are constructed and carried out and to what effect. Along the lines of Annemarie Mol’s ontological politics and Isabelle Stengers’ cosmopolitics, workshops are not just spaces in which we explore and experiment with ideas and concepts that may or may not be realized at some point: they shape reality from the get-go. In the paper, I thus discuss Participatory Design (PD) workshops by way of Isabelle Stengers’ cosmopolitical and constructivist thinking. My discussion is based on a few but key publications from the field of PD such as the Handbook of Participatory Design (Simonsen & Robertson, 2012)

Technology Comprehension in a More-Than-Human World

In this article, I wish to unfold the question: "what is technology actually and what characterizes our relation to technology?” and relate it to the technology understanding course, since how we think about and perceive technology, is arguably consequential for how we practice and conduct our lives and societies and for what we consider possibilities, problems, solutions and necessary actions. What I will argue is that we need to challenge a preferred and inherently humanistic and anthropocentric understanding of technology that sees technology as ideally a designed object subject to human control. This is an understanding that has dominated throughout enlightenment and modernity. However, my argument in this text is that it is both inadequate and problematic because it keeps us in a frame of thinking that perpetually reproduces the idea of technological solutions to problems.Digitale teknologier har utvivlsomt en betydelig indvirkning på vores samfund. Derfor er det relevant at indføre faget ”teknologiforståelse” i folkeskolen. Ligeledes er det vigtigt at diskutere kursets indhold, og specifikt hvordan teknologi beskrives og udtrykkes gennem fagets læringsmål. Baseret på feltet videnskab og teknologi (STS) analyserer jeg kursets implicitte teknologiforståelse og argumenterer for, at en forståelse af teknologi som en aktør i en mere-end-menneskelig ver-den er fraværende og bør inkluderes. Dette indebærer en forståelse af teknologi som kompleks, uigennemsigtig og ’uregerlig’. Derved lærer eleverne ikke blot at mestre teknologi men at leve og eksistere i en mere-end-menneskelig verden. Artiklen afsluttes med en ufærdig liste af forslag til, hvordan faget kan videreudvikles. Håbet er, at listen kan inspirere praktikere i folkeskolen til på den baggrund at udvikle egne ideer og læringsaktiviteter. Artiklen er på engelsk

Design and the Social: Intersections between design, critique and STS

From the introduction: The notion of society provided by the French philosopher Gabriel Tarde challenges the idea that society - or rather societies - are exclusively human. Rather, societies are all around, above, below, besides and inside of the human and on a scale ranging from the minuscule to the interstellar, arguably. Such a definition of society is fascinating, since taken for granted notions of society and the social that implicitly rely on society as being exclusively human, become in return destabilized. We are invited to think, study and act the social and society differently. This special issue constitutes an attempt at such an invitation. &nbsp

Digitization and the distance between case managers and placed children in Teledialogue

Public digitization raises concerns that the distance between social workers and citizens will increase. Concerns which are particular prominent when digital technologies are introduced directly into the communication between social workers and citizens. On this background, this article investigates two questions: What exactly constitutes being 'close' or being 'distant' in the specific practices and situations of case managers interacting with placed children. And how are these forms of distance or closeness affected when case managers and children start to communicate through video conferencing, chat and texting. With an outset in Actor-Network Theory and experiences from a research project called Teledialogue, the article illustrates how the practice of case management operates through complex combinations of being close while maintaining distance. Combinations that were transformed by the digital technologies introduced with Teledialogue. Amongst others, it is argued that the distance entailed by video conferencing created comfort for children while allowing case managers to scrutinize facial expressions. It is also argued that in some cases, digital technologies paradoxically helped to build trust by breaking down and being difficult to use. The conclusion being that the consequences of digitization is not simply a matter of either/or between closeness and distance, but rather that digitization for better or worse transforms the ways in which distance and closeness are already present in the specific situations and practices of social work

Design and the Social: Intersections between design, critique and STS

From the introduction: The notion of society provided by the French philosopher Gabriel Tarde challenges the idea that society - or rather societies - are exclusively human. Rather, societies are all around, above, below, besides and inside of the human and on a scale ranging from the minuscule to the interstellar, arguably. Such a definition of society is fascinating, since taken for granted notions of society and the social that implicitly rely on society as being exclusively human, become in return destabilized. We are invited to think, study and act the social and society differently. This special issue constitutes an attempt at such an invitation. &nbsp

Levedygtige nutider

Denne artikel tager afsæt i et hverdagseksempel der viser, at sundhedsapps har utilsigtede konsekvenser. Eksemplet fungerer som en udfordring for hvad vi kan forestille os og håbe på i forhold til teknologi. Artiklens centrale undersøgelsesspørgsmål er: Hvordan kan vi med afsæt i en triviel indsigt om sundhedsapps udvikle en forståelsesramme for at forestille os sunde fremtider? Artiklens overordnede argument er at teknologi forandrer – ikke forbedrer eller forværrer - en given situation. Dette forhold stemmer overens med en amoderne forståelse som foreslået af den franske videnskabs- og teknologiantropolog Bruno Latour. En amoderne forståelse indebærer at en fremskridtstanke baseret på at teknologi anskues som instrument for menneskelig handlen, ikke lader sig opretholde. I stedet stilles vi i en anden situation, hvor vi er forbundne til og aktører i at producere komplekse og overraskende tilstande som overskrider vores beherskelse. Men denne tilstand åbner også op for mangfoldige forbindelser og mulige måder at (sam-)eksistere på, som synes mere adækvate og moderate og tilbyder levedygtige nutider. Artiklen er relevant for praktikere og forskere i sundhedssektoren, fordi den tilbyder en radikalt anderledes forståelse af sundhedsvæsnet og dets problematikker, end de gængse og derfor forhåbentligvis også kan inspirere til nye tilgange og initiativer, såvel i den enkelte konkrete praksis, som på et mere overordnet styringsmæssigt og politisk niveau. I den henseende er artiklen i sig selv et forsøg på at bidrage til sunde fremtider og levedygtige nutider i sundhedsvæsnet

Experimenting with experiments : An introduction

From the introduction: This special issue is dedicated to the exploration of experiments and experimentation. It follows a PhD. course entitled “Exploring and performing experiments” that we organized at Department of Digital Design and Information Studies in spring 2019. The course was attended by 12 PhD fellows, and during the course we and the participants decided to produce a special issue based on the participants’ PhD research projects. The literature for the course included a variety of texts and research articles focusing on experiments mainly from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). The readings included the work of Ian Hacking, Andy Pickering, Bruno Latour, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Isabelle Stengers, Shirley Strum and Brian Eno among others. In the call for papers for this issue authors were asked to draw on the literature in the field of STS in order to explore the role of experiments and experimentation in their own projects, and to consider their articles as vehicles for bringing insights from STS to their own fields. The spirit of this special issue is thus one of ‘STS pollination’ by bringing STS to other fields, rather than necessarily being contributions to STS itself. Hopefully it will generate novel insights and contributions and perhaps cross-pollinatio

Data: a cosmopolitical approach

In this paper, we propose a cosmopolitical approach to, and under­standing of, data, based on the work of Isabelle Stengers. This entails appreciating data as constituted through multiple actors and actions, and, accordingly, as something capable of producing unanticipated, surprising consequences. Cosmopolitics helps us think about data, and datafication, as actors in a more-than-human world in ways that transgress a common and widespread perception of data as either neutral, objective and representational or as socially constructed, perspectivist and endowed with human politics. The argument is thus that data and datafication change practices and can bring forth novel layers and qualities of those practices. We explore data through a cos­mopolitical approach using two empirical examples generated during 2013-2017, where the authors carried out ethnographic fieldwork in a project on governing and managing healthcare data. We conclude by proposing the term cosmo-data-politics and discuss the implications of this neologism

Engaging the data moment: An introduction

All of the contributions to this special issue are occupied with how to engage data otherwise. This otherwise indexes the rich variety of approaches to data beyond what we are currently witnessing. Whether through the development of politically and ethically relevant forms of data experiments, or the construction of alternative visions of the much-critiqued data infrastructures of powerful platform providers, all the articles reflect upon how we - as scholars and citizens - can live and work with data in ways amenable to diverse, critical, and ethical forms of social existence. This introduction intervenes in this debate in its own particular way, principally by considering what it means to characterise the contemporary as a data moment. The term data moment, we argue, works as a conceptual device calling for more ethical-political engagement with data practices. At the same time, it also retains a temporal inflection. Moments, we claim, are not sequential steps in a linear process, but are themselves productive of, and products of, temporal orders. Moments are also saturated in affect, we argue, and it is such affects that contribute to how particular forms of meaning emerge with/as data. By embracing the compelling empirical, theoretical and ethical challenges of this data moment our ambition with this special issue is to make a modest contribution to how scholars can engage data in the present, while also shaping a future where data are treated critically, ethically, and reflexively