This paper examines how infrastructures organize time in ways that unevenly distribute burden, access, and opportunity across communities. We draw on two ethnographic cases: eviction case filings in Atlanta, part of the state’s legal and housing governance infrastructure, and a sexual healthcare intervention in Chicago, situated within the city’s public health services. We advance HCI’s engagement with temporality by demonstrating how infrastructures sediment layers of political, social, and technical decisions over time. We conceptualize infrastructures as stratified formations where earlier allocations of power become materially and procedurally embedded, configuring present-day experiences of public systems. We define temporal arrangements as the patterned ways infrastructures shape and allocate time, producing unequal demands on who waits, who moves, and who must continually adjust. We describe two temporal arrangements—compression and gaps—to show how systems structure and constrain access to care, support, and basic services. By linking inherited infrastructural logics to everyday temporal burdens, we offer HCI a framework for examining how inequities persist through time.

This studio uses knit textiles in order to engage with questions around data and computing. We aim to explore how we can use data more creatively in data physicalizations, walking away with an understanding of our data as a collaborative art material, as something to “make with”, and not just translate or represent. We will do so by exploring knitting as a medium for encoding our data, and then intervening into it, to explore the many facets of data, and all the things we might want to encode into a physicalization. Through this studio, we hope to broaden ideas around what data is included in physicalizations, how we represent and work with data, and the process of making with data in a physicalization.

This article engages with history as a speculative space for the purpose of critically engaging with discourses around the politics of technology in HCI. Drawing on approaches within critical design and based on evidence from two different projects, we develop an approach, counterfactual actions , that moves beyond the creation of artifacts and towards more situated, embodied, and performative engagements. In one project, Reimaging Work, we used a participatory game to engage stakeholders from social and economic justice organizations in Chicago. The other project, Future Design Studio, invited audience members at a futurist festival to create artifacts from the future and then invited improvisational actors to build worlds around them. We argue that a focus on counterfactual actions supports a more relational approach to understanding the politics of socio-technical systems and infrastructures, allowing participants to gain a meaningful understanding of the ways in which technology could be designed otherwise in line with ethics, values and social justice concerns.

This paper examines the use of cultural probes as a method for fostering collaboration within groups of diverse experts working on creative projects. Using two case examples, we show that probes -- short, oblique, and at times whimsical sets of activity prompts - have boundary object properties that can jumpstart interdisciplinary and cross-functional exchange. The first case explores how social scientists and designers used a smartphone-based scavenger hunt activity to gather insights for a workshop on organizational innovation. The second case examines how artist/scientist pairs utilized probe-like prompts to develop short performances for an arts festival. Drawing together theoretical views on boundary objects and cultural probes, we suggest that designed experiences such as probes can create opportunities for both boundary work and the establishment of common ground, which is increasingly vital in the highly collaborative contexts that define work today.