On violating the standards of one’s occupation

There are some things that you don't do in an occupation. This might be using lots of glue instead of dowels for a carpenter or nesting several windows into each other if you are an interface designer. These things might be rationally explained: The carpenter might say they want to …

read more ...

Agre’s Surveillance and Capture, 26 Years later

This is an edited text based on a talk Lisa Conrad, PhD and me gave at the EASST 2020 in the panel on classic Science and Technology Studies (STS) papers. I think the text is also interesting for computer scientists, design researchers and privacy researchers, so I post it here …

read more ...

Knowledges which are not abstract

Whether in books or Wikipedia: A lot of knowledge is presented and edited as text. There is the assumption that this text reflects something about the world (if it is true and not wrong because of deceived senses, bad research, or lying). Such text can be written by a person …

read more ...

Mutual Learning in Participatory Design

I came across participatory design when I was wondering how software like Mediawiki, Firefox or LibreOffice could be produced: The software is understood as being created by by different groups of people: employees, hired by the software’s supporting organizations, volunteer programmers, and user communities with various degrees of involvement …

read more ...

Use of artifacts in design projects

This post started as a presentation I gave to a group of computer science students in a HCI class as an invited practitioner. My first intention was to “talk about work”, show some currently worked-on projects and introduce to the order and mess of roles, projects and tasks in software …

read more ...

What do plans to do?

"The view, that purposeful action is determined by plans, is deeply rooted in the Western human sciences as the correct model of the rational actor."

– Lucy Suchman in Human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions, p. 27

Plans are deemed to be important. But what do plans do? And what do …

read more ...