In this paper, we examine the work of data annotation. Specifically, we focus on the role of counting or quantification in organising annotation work. Based on an ethnographic study of data annotation in two outsourcing centres in India, we observe that counting practices and its associated logics are an integral part of day-to-day annotation activities. In particular, we call attention to the presumption of total countability observed in annotation - the notion that everything, from tasks, datasets and deliverables, to workers, work time, quality and performance, can be managed by applying the logics of counting. To examine this, we draw on sociological and socio-technical scholarship on quantification and develop the lens of a 'regime of counting' that makes explicit the specific counts, practices, actors and structures that underpin the pervasive counting in annotation. We find that within the AI supply chain and data work, counting regimes aid the assertion of authority by the AI clients (also called requesters) over annotation processes, constituting them as reductive, standardised, and homogenous. We illustrate how this has implications for i) how annotation work and workers get valued, ii) the role human discretion plays in annotation, and iii) broader efforts to introduce accountable and more just practices in AI. Through these implications, we illustrate the limits of operating within the logic of total countability. Instead, we argue for a view of counting as partial - located in distinct geographies, shaped by specific interests and accountable in only limited ways. This, we propose, sets the stage for a fundamentally different orientation to counting and what counts in data annotation.

This paper responds to sustainable HCI’s call to design long-term participatory projects with grassroots communities to counter the local effects of climate change and support more viable practices. We contribute a methodological approach to participatory speculative design as a series of interrelated experiments in living, working in symbiosis with a food-growing community moving towards collective resilience and food sovereignty. As an example of sustainability research within HCI, community food-growing has predominantly focused on collaborative acts of growing rather than disagreements, divergences and frictions. Limited attention has been paid to the challenges of effectively negotiating collaborative, sustainable speculative futures in this context. This paper reports on a workshop series on sustainable community food-growing using situated participatory speculation to address potential tensions when working collaboratively towards socio-technical alternatives.

The relationships that constitute the global industrial food system tend towards two dominant values that are creating unsustainable social and environmental inequalities. The first is a human-centered perspective on food that privileges humans over all other species. The second is a view of food as a commodity to be traded for maximum economic value, rewarding a small number of shareholders. We present work that explores the unique algorithmic affordances of blockchain to create new types of value exchange and governance in the food system. We describe a project that used roleplay with urban agricultural communities to co-design blockchain-based food futures and explore the conditions for creating a thriving multispecies food commons. We discuss how the project helped rethink algorithmic food justice by reconfiguring more-than-human values and reconfiguring food as more-than-human commons. We also discuss some of the challenges and tensions arising from these explorations.

Environmental concerns have driven an interest in sustainable smart cities, through the monitoring and optimisation of networked infrastructures. At the same time, there are concerns about who these interventions and services are for, and who benefits. HCI researchers and designers interested in civic life have started to call for the democratisation of urban space through resistance and political action to challenge state and corporate claims. This paper contributes to an emerging body of work that seeks to involve citizens in the design of sustainable smart cities, particularly in the context of marginalised and culturally diverse urban communities. We present a study involving co-designing Internet of Things with urban agricultural communities and discuss three ways in which design can participate in the right to the sustainable smart city through designing for the commons, care, and biocultural diversity.