In this pictorial, I use noticing as a place-based practice to attend to intertwined material, social, political, and temporal dimensions of computing infrastructures. Drawing on visual ethnographic fieldwork in coastal southeast Louisiana, I draw attention to utility poles, an everyday infrastructural form through which electrical and telecommunications networks are installed and maintained. In coastal communities, storms and floods can impair existing aging infrastructure, while what gets restored and updated reflects longer legacies of uneven development. Through images paired with vignettes, I show how connectivity is materially tethered to place, shaped by access, labor, extractive histories, and changing landscapes. The pictorial contributes a visual method for understanding computing infrastructures in the context of ongoing climate and environmental crises and offers ways of understanding and designing infrastructures from situated perspectives.

Digital and computing infrastructures are increasingly vulnerable to the intensifying effects of climate change, with extreme events like hurricanes, wildfires, and winter storms disrupting communication systems for extended periods. These disruptions reflect longstanding inequities in how infrastructures are built, maintained, and distributed. While sustainable computing research has begun to address environmental impacts through energy efficiency and alternative system design, less attention has been paid to how infrastructures fail under climate stress and how these failures are unevenly experienced. In this paper, we present a reflexive ethnographic case study of designing a community-based emergency communication network with a mutual aid community in New Orleans, Louisiana. We use friction as an analytic lens to examine the challenges and tensions that arise when building alternative infrastructures within existing systems. Our findings identify three forms of friction: infrastructural, spatial, and epistemic. We examine how they emerge through interactions with institutional systems, urban environments, uneven expertise, and material dependencies, and how they become generative forces for reimagining relations to infrastructure. These frictions emerge through interactions with institutional systems, urban environments, uneven expertise, and material dependencies. Rather than treating friction as a barrier to be resolved, we argue for “staying with friction” as an ethical and methodological commitment by attending to how friction shapes what can be built, how systems are sustained, and how alternative infrastructures are imagined. For sustainable computing, this means moving toward confronting the histories of disinvestment, exclusion, and infrastructural neglect that shape whose systems fail and whose labor is required to ensure connectivity. By attending to friction, we show how community-based infrastructures are not designed outside existing systems, but are negotiated within them, opening possibilities for more socially just forms of computing.

Peer Reviewed

This paper explores how conceptions of societal impact are produced and performed during academic computer science research, by leveraging critical technical practice while building a digital agriculture networking platform. Our findings reveal how everyday practices of envisioning and building infrastructure require working across disciplinary and institutional seams, leading us as computer scientists to continuously reconceptualize the intended societal impact. By self-reflectively analyzing how we accrue resources for projects, produce research systems, write about them, and maintain alignments with stakeholders, we demonstrate that this seam work produces shifting simulacra of societal impact around which the system’s success is narrated. HCI researchers frequently suggest that technical systems’ impact could be improved by motivating computer scientists to consider impact in system-building. Our findings show that institutional and disciplinary structures significantly shape how computer scientists can enact societal impact in their work. This work suggests opportunities for structural interventions to shape the impact of computing systems.

This paper examines the causes and consequences of legibility as an organizing principle in the design of digital agriculture (DA) systems in the United States. Legibility refers to systems of governance that use simplified understandings of a situation to control and direct action upon it. Legibility in digital agriculture systems occurs at the confluence of two traditions of legibility: the data-driven model common in the design of digital systems, and tactics for the control of nature and labor that have developed in the United States since the foundation of the colonies. Our argument draws from (1) a historical analysis of broader patterns of agricultural technology and racialized land dispossession in what is now the United States and (2) empirical fieldwork that examines the adoption and maintenance of digital agriculture systems in rural New York State. We describe the role that legibility historically has played in the development of agricultural systems in the US, and their consequences for who is able to farm and how. This history raises the questions: What is made legible to whom? In that process, what becomes illegible? While legibility promises transparent and environmentally beneficial control, in our fieldwork we find that the demands of legibility are also restructuring the physical landscape, creating additional invisible labor, producing systems that are brittle to real-world conditions on farms, and creating opaque systems that block people from adapting to their circumstances. In reading our fieldwork together with the historical case, we demonstrate the pressures that are shaping the stakes, subject, and objects of legibility in agricultural technology. As more data-driven systems are used for environmental contexts, the CSCW community needs to extend its ways to understand how data-driven systems impact land, labor, and resources.

In response to recent calls for HCI to address ongoing environmental crises and existential threats, this paper introduces the concept of collaborative survival and examines how it shapes the design of interactive artifacts. Collaborative survival describes how our (human) ability to persist as a species is deeply entangled with and dependent upon the health of a multitude of other species. We explore collaborative survival within the context of designing tools for mushroom foraging and reflect on how interactive products can open new pathways for noticing and joining-with these entanglements towards preferable futures. In addition to highlighting three tactics-engagement, attunement and expansion-that can guide designs towards multispecies flourishing, our prototypes illustrate the potential for wearable technology to extend the body into the environment.

"Field Computing", is an ongoing interdisciplinary research project to design and build wearable devices for use in citizen science applications. The works from this project is derived from the fields of wearable electronics, citizen science and environmental biomonitoring through a critical design perspective. Background and prior research is shared that discusses considerations for technology and design, along with documentation and description of Portable Workspace, an initial project for "Field Computing". Portable Workspace is a wearable that unfolds into a physical computing studio for building hardware in outdoor environments. The current work in progress, Data HarVest, is a wearable tool that collects physical artifacts and contextual data about fungi for scientific surveys. Early prototypes for this tool are then discussed along with design considerations.