Caring for the “next billion” mobile handsets: opening proprietary closures through the work of repair

ICTD is profoundly interested in the “next billion” users, and how to leverage technology to improve their everyday lives. In this paper we ask how the concept of care might be generatively extended to the ‘lives’ of the “next billion” mobile handsets. Drawing on a growing literature on repair in ICTD and HCI, and theories of care from the social sciences, this paper makes two central contributions. First, our ethnographic study of mobile phone repair in downtown Kampala, Uganda provides new insights into how technologies are sustained in developing contexts, with a special focus on how independent technicians in informal repair shops circumvent the proprietary closures that limit their work. Second, we show how attending to care in ICTD contexts can help us locate immediate forms of technical work (here, repair) within wider moral and political orderings. Thinking about repair and care together opens up new possibilities for ICTD to engage with the materiality of technologies over longer temporal horizons, beyond privileged moments of design and adoption

The richness of designing for eco-social change: creative practice, transformative futures and living within limits

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the influential Club of Rome report Limits to Growth, which used computer modelling to show that, on a finite planet, current human resource use cannot ultimately be sustained. In this paper we use the anniversary as an opportunity to reflect on the framing of limits in HCI. Following recent work in design and social science, we ask whether the idea of limits is an effective way to imagine, prompt and manage cultural change in participatory, sustainable HCI. Drawing from our experiences investigating participatory creative practice in the CreaTures project, we suggest that limits-led framings could be usefully held in tension with ideas of abundance. As researchers and practitioners of sustainable design, our job is often asking others to use less – whether that involves consuming fewer materials, less energy; or indeed even ‘un-making’ particular practices. We argue that directive change can be reconceptualised as ‘eco-social’ transformation: a fusion of care-infused ecological and social sensibilities to create existential change that would impact lifestyle and political choices (and technology use), turning to potentially abundant human resources of imagination, reflection and solidarity. We offer the example of The Hologram, a feminist economist healthcare art project situated online, to illustrate this potential

Re-Calibrating DIY: Testing Participation across Digital Sensors, Fry Pans and Environmental Media

An increasing number of low-cost and do-it-yourself (DIY) digital sensors for monitoring air quality are now in circulation. DIY technologies attempt to democratize environmental practices such as air quality sensing that might ordinarily be the domain of expert scientists. But in the process of setting up and using DIY sensors, citizens encounter just as many challenges for ensuring the accuracy of their devices and the validity of their data. In this article, we look specifically at the infrastructures and practices of DIY digital sensing. Through an analysis of urban sensing in London as an environmental media practice, we consider the specific techniques and challenges of calibrating DIY digital sensors for measuring air pollution in order to ensure the relative accuracy and validity of data. We ask: How are DIY calibration practices expressive of particular political subjects and environmental relations—and not others? And how might we re-calibrate DIY as a digital practice and political commitment through engagements with the multiple genealogies and counter-genealogies of citizen-led inquiry

Urban Sensing

Sensors are a vital part of environmental monitoring within scientific study. The Citizen Sense project democratises these technologies through instruments for mass observation, enabling engagement with environmental issues, both locally and further afield. Frackbox was designed to be covertly placed at the intersections between Pennsylvanian citizens’ homes and nearby fracking sites in the United States. These structures (which at first glance appear to be the standard road-side US mailbox) contain a kit which monitors air pollutants and volatile organic compounds. Members of the Pennsylvanian community, working with the kits in 2014, were able to collect enough evidence to unlock an additional $1.6 million of state funding towards further environmental monitoring. The Dustboxes are a series of low-tech air pollution data collectors, housed in a ceramic case resembling an air pollutant particle. Residents of Deptford in London were able to borrow these devices for free from their local library to measure air pollution in their own areas. Each Dustbox streamed real-time data to an online platform, available for all to view at: citizensense.net The New Observatory transforms FACT in Liverpool into an observatory for the 21st century, bringing together an international group of artists exploring new and alternative modes of measuring, predicting, and sensing the world

Genetic consequences of selection cutting on sugar maple (Acer saccharum Marshall)

Selection cutting is a treatment that emulates tree-by-tree replacement for forests with uneven-age structures. It creates small openings in large areas and often generates a more homogenous forest structure (fewer large leaving trees and defective trees) that differs from old-growth forest. In this study, we evaluated whether this type of harvesting has an impact on genetic diversity of sugar maple (Acer saccharum Marshall). Genetic diversity among seedlings, saplings, and mature trees was compared between selection cut and old-growth forest stands in Québec, Canada. We found higher observed heterozygosity and a lower inbreeding coefficient in mature trees than in younger regeneration cohorts of both forest types. We detected a recent bottleneck in all stands undergoing selection cutting. Other genetic indices of diversity (allelic richness, observed and expected heterozygosity, and rare alleles) were similar between forest types. We concluded that the effect of selection cutting on the genetic diversity of sugar maple was recent and no evidence of genetic erosion was detectable in Québec stands after one harvest. However, the cumulative effect of recurring applications of selection cutting in bottlenecked stands could lead to fixation of deleterious alleles, and this highlights the need for adopting better forest management practices

Values in Repair

This paper examines the question of “values in repair” – the distinct forms of meaning and care that may be built into human-technology interactions through individual and collective acts of repair. Our work draws on research in HCI and the social sciences and findings from ethnographic studies in four sites — two amateur “fixers’ collectives” in Brooklyn and Seattle, USA and two mobile phone repair communities in Uganda and Bangladesh — to advance two arguments. First, studies of repair account for new sites and processes of value that differ from those appearing at HCI’s better-studied moments of design and use. Second, repair may embed modes of human interaction with technology and with each other in ways that surface values as contingent and ongoing accomplishments, suggesting ongoing processes of valuation that can never be fully fixed or commoditized. These insights help HCI account for human relationships to technology built into the world through repair

The Expression of Power in ICT's Knowledge Enterprise: An Empirical Illustration of Computing's Colonial Impulse

ICT globalization continues to spread hardware, software, and accompanying technologies, so too does knowledges and trainings on those ICTs. This knowledge migration process has been linked by scholars to a ‘colonial impulse’ inherent in computing as a knowl- edge enterprise, which incorporates into broader colonizing forces. Through simultaneous explorations of dual case studies with a tribal ISP in California and an educational organization that works with indigenous First Nations communities in British Columbia, we depict how power circulates in this process, both empowering and disempowering communities. We then offer a brief argument for the need to foreground methods and approaches to disentangling these contradicting forces

Breakdown in the Smart City: Exploring Workarounds with Urban-sensing Practices and Technologies

Smart cities are now an established area of technological development and theoretical inquiry. Research on smart cities spans from investigations into its technological infrastructures and design scenarios, to critiques of its proposals for citizenship and sustainability. This article builds on this growing field, while at the same time accounting for expanded urban-sensing practices that take hold through citizen-sensing technologies. Detailing practice-based and participatory research that developed urban-sensing technologies for use in Southeast London, this article considers how the smart city as a large-scale and monolithic version of urban systems breaks down in practice to reveal much different concretizations of sensors, cities, and people. By working through the specific instances where sensor technologies required inventive workarounds to be setup and continue to operate, as well as moments of breakdown and maintenance where sensors required fixes or adjustments, this article argues that urban sensing can produce much different encounters with urban technologies through lived experiences. Rather than propose a “grassroots” approach to the smart city, however, this article instead suggests that the smart city as a figure for urban development be contested and even surpassed by attending to workarounds that account more fully for digital urban practices and technologies as they are formed and situated within urban projects and community initiatives

The Care Work of Access

Current approaches to AI and Assistive Technology (AT) often foreground task completion over other encounters such as expressions of care. Our paper challenges and complements such task-completion approaches by attending to the care work of access—the continual affective and emotional adjustments that people make by noticing and attending to one another. We explore how this work impacts encounters among people with and without vision impairments who complete tasks together. We find that bound up in attempts to get things done are concerns for one another and how well people are doing together. Reading this work through emerging disability studies and feminist STS scholarship, we account for two important forms of work that give rise to access: (1) mundane attunements and (2) noninnocent authorizations. Together these processes work as sensitizing concepts to help HCI scholars account for the ways that intelligent ATs both produce access while sometimes subverting people with disabilities

saeRS and sarA Act Synergistically to Repress Protease Production and Promote Biofilm Formation in Staphylococcus aureus

Mutation of the staphylococcal accessory regulator (sarA) limits biofilm formation in diverse strains of Staphylococcus aureus, but there are exceptions. One of these is the commonly studied strain Newman. This strain has two defects of potential relevance, the first being mutations that preclude anchoring of the fibronectin-binding proteins FnbA and FnbB to the cell wall, and the second being a point mutation in saeS that results in constitutive activation of the saePQRS regulatory system. We repaired these defects to determine whether either plays a role in biofilm formation and, if so, whether this could account for the reduced impact of sarA in Newman. Restoration of surface-anchored FnbA enhanced biofilm formation, but mutation of sarA in this fnbA-positive strain increased rather than decreased biofilm formation. Mutation of sarA in an saeS-repaired derivative of Newman (P18L) or a Newman saeRS mutant (ΔsaeRS) resulted in a biofilm-deficient phenotype like that observed in clinical isolates, even in the absence of surface-anchored FnbA. These phenotypes were correlated with increased production of extracellular proteases and decreased accumulation of FnbA and/or Spa in the P18L and ΔsaeRS sarA mutants by comparison to the Newman sarA mutant. The reduced accumulation of Spa was reversed by mutation of the gene encoding aureolysin, while the reduced accumulation of FnbA was reversed by mutation of the sspABC operon. These results demonstrate that saeRS and sarA act synergistically to repress the production of extracellular proteases that would otherwise limit accumulation of critical proteins that contribute to biofilm formation, with constitutive activation of saeRS limiting protease production, even in a sarA mutant, to a degree that can be correlated with increased enhanced capacity to form a biofilm. Although it remains unclear whether these effects are mediated directly or indirectly, studies done with an sspA::lux reporter suggest they are mediated at a transcriptional level