As data infrastructures expand globally, the environmental and spatial imaginaries guiding data center development have become standardized, privileging temperate climates, abundant land, and low-cost energy. Singapore presents a paradox: a tropical, land-scarce city-state that nonetheless ranks among the densest data center hubs in the world. This paper examines how state and industry actors co-produce and contest localized sociotechnical imaginaries to legitimize this growth and, in the process, reconfigure what a “data center” is. Using a critical discourse analysis of government policy briefs, industry press releases, and national media, we show how global standards are adapted to Singapore’s resource constraints and how discursive practices position data centers as strategic, investable assets within its urban digital economy. By situating sociotechnical imaginaries in a postcolonial context and linking them to assetization theory, this study advances HCI understandings of data center infrastructure as financialized assets, offering insight into emerging trajectories of global digital infrastructure.

This paper rethinks everyday design by shifting from materially available, physical “surroundings” as design resources to the unsettled, open-ended, and politically entangled “surrounds” as sites of practice. Drawing from ethnographies in New York City and Detroit, we describe how urban communities rehearse alternative ways of living and relating by navigating the interstices of layered infrastructures of governance and development. Rather than locating agency in oppositional acts of resistance or formal interventions, we show how everyday design can unfold through improvisational collectives and situated practices that have yet to be captured or defined by any single layer of dominant infrastructure, but emerge in-between them. We propose surrounds as a generative analytic for understanding the subtle, often fleeting experiments through which people enact alternative relations to governance and order. Positioning everyday design as navigational, rather than apolitical or oppositional, offers HCI new ways to understand the positionalities of design, intervention, and alternatives amid shifting urban sociotechnical conditions.

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.

ABSTRACT The vision of Industry 5.0, which addresses humanistic, adaptable and sustainable method, has evolved rapidly, particularly in digital twin‐driven (DT) utilization in industry, for example, BMW factory and Tata steel. Nevertheless, it is no secret that the development of DT‐powered virtual reality (VR) environments is hard work, which denotes there is untapped potential. Thus, a reusable DT model is required to speed up the creation and scaling of DT‐driven VR environments. The objective of this study is for seeking solutions to make DT‐driven VR contexts faster in an industrial environment. In particular, this study presents a way to develop the settings more effectively. The highlight of this study, and related industrial instances, is the development of safety education for human‐robot collaboration in manufacturing contexts utilizing DT‐driven VR settings. A formwork mode is introduced, which involves specific formworks and the entire framework for disposing the formworks in order to more quickly amend DT‐driven VR environments to satisfy the requirements of a particular instance. The formwork is established applying two different industrial instances from manufacturing scenario.

Trauma, an emotional response to events with lasting impacts, is a significant public health issue influencing technology interactions. This paper focuses on the sixth principle of trauma-informed care—Cultural, Historical, and Gender Issues—by exploring multiple timescales of trauma and generational impacts through two ethnographic vignettes: a trauma-informed healthcare design project in Chicago and environmental advocacy in Borneo, Indonesia. We integrate feminist temporality to understand temporal contingencies in cultural contexts to inform future trauma-informed design and computing work. Our contributions include detailed ethnographic accounts that shift the focus from trauma as an individual event to a historically and communally felt phenomenon, advancing CSCW scholarship by incorporating historicist sensibilities and feminist theorizations of temporality.

Managing error has become an increasingly central and contested arena within data science work. While recent scholarship in artificial intelligence and machine learning has focused on limiting and eliminating error, practitioners have long used error as a site of collaboration and learning vis-à-vis labelers, domain experts, and the worlds data scientists seek to model and understand. Drawing from work in CSCW, STS, HCML, and repair studies, as well as from multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork within a government institution and a non-profit organization, we move beyond the notion of error as an edge case or anomaly to make three basic arguments. First, error discloses or calls to attention existing structures of collaboration unseen or underappreciated under 'working' systems. Second, error calls into being new forms and sites of collaboration (including, sometimes, new actors). Third, error redeploys old sites and actors in new ways, often through restructuring relations of hierarchy and expertise which recenter or devalue the position of different actors. We conclude by discussing how an artful living with error can better support the creative strategies of negotiation and adjustment which data scientists and their collaborators engage in when faced with disruption, breakdown, and friction in their work.

This paper turns to one of HCI's central value systems, i.e. its commitments to usefulness and the ideal that technology enables social progress, productivity, and excellence. Specifically, we examine how the seemingly “positive” ideal to make technology “useful” – i.e. to build systems and devices that advance social and technological progress – masks various forms of violence and injustice such as colonial othering, racist exclusions, and exploitation. Drawing from ethnographic research, we show how design and computing methods from design thinking to agile theory and entrepreneurial approaches in tech production and higher education are the latest techniques in the cultivation of useful bodies on behalf of the state, the corporation, the university, and the economy. Aligning with feminist, critical race and critical computing commitments, this paper offers a genealogical approach to show how injustice and violence endure, despite and because of a narrative of progress and positive change.

The paper offers an ethnographic account of racial and cultural difference as sites to contest dominant practices of computing and technology. Specifically, we focus on how a collective of Indonesian biohackers position the care labor of a generation of women (referred to as Nenek-nenek in Bahasa Indonesia) to retrace the origins and boundaries of their making, hacking, and citizen science practices. The paper's contribution is to bring the study of the political economy of hacking and making into conversation with themes of racial and cultural difference in postcolonial computing across HCI, STS, and design. More specifically, the paper examines how Indonesian biohackers position situated histories and expertise as properly technological. Further, we show how their articulation of Indonesian difference was in turn appropriated by foreign hackers and commentators to envision tech futures against the status quo.