Knowing War

This commentary reflects on contributions to the pariss special issue Datawar. My readings highlight the implications of war’s remediations for practices through which it is rendered knowable. Critical engagement with martial epistemologies requires an articulation of the irremediable locatedness and partiality of knowledge practices, and the fallacy of data-solutionism as the latest promise of an end to ‘the fog of war.’ I conclude with some reflections on the possibilities that these writings suggest for counter-knowledges that might further destabilize military logics, to open spaces for modes of relation not based on the violence of claims to omniscience

Agile methods for agile universities

We explore a term, Agile, that is being used in various workplace settings, including the management of universities. The term may have several related but slightly different meanings. Agile is often used in the context of facilitating more creative problem-solving and advocating for the adoption, design, tailoring and continual updating of more innovative organizational processes. We consider a particular set of meanings of the term from the world of software development. Agile methods were created to address certain problems with the software development process. Many of those problems have interesting analogues in the context of universities, so a reflection on agile methods may be a useful heuristic for generating ideas for enabling universities to be more creative

After interaction

Interaction turns on the outmoded idea that there is a natural separation between people and things. Technologies have always been about producing dense, interconnected relationships of humans and non-humans. Seeing design as performing expansive networks of relations opens up possibilities beyond the human-computer interactions. The relations go much deeper than any discrete interactions between user and machine. Extensive investigations have also demonstrated how cognitive capacities can extend beyond the individual's mind and into the interactions between people

Autonomy in Weapons Systems. The Military Application of Artificial Intelligence as a Litmus Test for Germany’s New Foreign and Security Policy

The future international security landscape will be critically impacted by the military use of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. With the advent of autonomous weapon systems (AWS) and a currently unfolding transformation of warfare, we have reached a turning point and are facing a number of grave new legal, ethical and political concerns. In light of this, the Task Force on Disruptive Technologies and 21st Century Warfare, deployed by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, argues that meaningful human control over weapon systems and the use of force must be retained. In their report, the task force authors offer recommendations to the German government and the German armed forces to that effect

Four Kinds of Reproducibility in Scale Analysis

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68060/2/10.1177_001316445501500416.pd

Research Project as Boundary Object: negotiating the conceptual design of a tool for International Development

This paper reflects on the relationship between who one designs for and what one designs in the unstructured space of designing for political change; in particular, for supporting “International Development” with ICT. We look at an interdisciplinary research project with goals and funding, but no clearly defined beneficiary group at start, and how amorphousness contributed to impact. The reported project researched a bridging tool to connect producers with consumers across global contexts and show players in the supply chain and their circumstances. We explore how both the nature of the research and the tool’s function became contested as work progressed. To tell this tale, we invoke the idea of boundary objects and the value of tacking back and forth between elastic meanings of the project’s artefacts and processes. We examine the project’s role in India, Chile and other arenas to draw out ways that it functioned as a catalyst and how absence of committed design choices acted as an unexpected strength in reaching its goals

Practices of readiness: punctuation, poise and the contingencies of participatory design

How do we ready ourselves to intervene responsively in the contingent situations that arise in co-designing to make change? How do we attune to group dynamics and respond ethically to unpredictable developments when working with ‘community’? Participatory Design (PD) can contribute to social transitions, yet its focus is often tightly tuned to technique for designing ICT at the cost of participatory practice. We challenge PD conventions by addressing what happens as we step into a situation to alter it with others, an aspect of practice that cannot be replicated or interchanged. We do so to argue that practices of readiness are constituted by personal histories, experiences, philosophies and culture. We demonstrate this political argument by giving reflexive accounts of our dimensions of preparation. The narratives here are distinct, yet reveal complementary theories and worldviews that shape PD ontologies. We have organized these around the qualities of punctuation and poise as a way to draw out some less easily articulated aspects of PD practice