Computational tools for fabrication often treat materials as passive rather than active participants in design, abstracting away relationships between craftspeople and materials. For craft communities that value relational practices, abstractions limit the adoption and creative uptake of computational tools which might otherwise be beneficial. To understand how better tool design could support richer relations between individuals, tools, and materials, we interviewed expert woodworkers, fiber artists, and metalworkers. We identify three orders of convivial relations central to craft: immediate relations between individuals, tools, and materials; mid-range relations between communities, platforms, and shared materials; and extended relations between institutions, infrastructures, and ecologies. Our analysis shows how craftspeople engage and struggle with convivial relations across all three orders, creating workflows that learn from materials while supporting autonomy. We conclude with design principles for computational tools and infrastructures to better support material dialogue, collective knowledge, and accountability, along with richer and more convivial relations between craftspeople, tools, and the material worlds around them.

Credit scoring is an increasingly central and contested domain of data and AI governance, frequently framed as a neutral and objective method of assessing risk across diverse economic and political contexts. Based on a nine-month ethnography of credit scoring practices in Nairobi, Kenya, we examined the sociotechnical and institutional work of data science in digital lending. While established regional telcos and banks are leveraging proprietary data to develop digital loan products, algorithmic credit scoring is being transformed by new actors, techniques, and shifting regulations. Our findings show how practitioners construct alternative data using technical and legal workarounds, formulate risk through multiple interpretations, and negotiate model performance via technical and political means. We argue that algorithmic credit scoring is accomplished through the ongoing work of alignment that stabilizes risk under conditions of persistent uncertainty, which takes epistemic, modeling, and contextual forms. Extending work on alignment in HCI, we show how alignment operates as a two-way translation, where models are made “safe for worlds” while those worlds are reshaped to be “safe for models.”

Policies significantly shape computation’s societal impact, a crucial HCI concern. However, challenges persist when HCI professionals attempt to integrate policy into their work or affect policy outcomes. Prior research considered these challenges at the “border” of HCI and policy. This paper asks: What if HCI considers policy integral to its intellectual concerns, placing system-people-policy interaction not at the border but nearer the center of HCI research, practice, and education? What if HCI fosters a mosaic of methods and knowledge contributions that blend system, human, and policy expertise in various ways, just like HCI has done with blending system and human expertise? We present this re-imagined HCI-policy relationship as a provocation and highlight its usefulness: It spotlights previously overlooked system-people-policy interaction work in HCI. It unveils new opportunities for HCI’s futuring, empirical, and design projects. It allows HCI to coordinate its diverse policy engagements, enhancing its collective impact on policy outcomes.

Emancipation is fundamentally a work of unmaking, as it entails undermining, dissolving, and undoing oppressive structures. This paper offers an account of a frequently misunderstood unmaking movement, Luddism. The Luddites were a loosely organized collective of nineteenth century English textile makers who destroyed machines that were replacing their skilled labor and leading to deteriorating working conditions. In this account, we show that the goals and tactics of Luddism have significant alignments with current HCI work in the areas of unmaking and social justice. Through articulation of six characteristics of unmaking in Luddism - practical and symbolic, community-engaged, emancipatory, selective, antagonistic, and enduring - we identify potential limits and opportunities in HCI research and design practice, as currently construed. In doing so, we build upon and extend prior HCI research to suggest unmaking as emancipation, a new category of unmaking around issues of social justice.

This paper examines craft's foundational relations to materials, techniques, and collaborative modes of teaching and learning, and these can be called upon to strengthen and extend computational craft as practiced in fields like CSCW and HCI. Drawing from literature in HCI, craft studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS), we explore craft's modern formation at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution across three formative sites: Scandinavian Slöyd, British Arts and Crafts, and Japanese Mingei. From this review we identify three key (and still evolving) features: craft's accountabilities to natural materials and local ecologies; craft's holistic ways of making with 'head, heart, and hand'; and craft's distinctly collaborative and embodied styles of teaching and learning. We then show how these lessons can be applied to contemporary practices and pedagogies of computational making. We argue that doing so can help to rebalance computation's ecological ties and relations, recenter its practice on a sensorially rich and 'whole-self' concept of making, and support more collaborative modes of teaching and learning that are inclusive, relational, and heterogeneous.

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 attempts to (re)theorize the nature and role of hope in collaborative and interventionist CSCW and HCI projects. Building on work in anthropology, STS, CSCW and HCI, and extended reflection on the 3Dprintability project - a multinational collaboration dedicated to the 3D printing of prosthetics in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia - it advocates for a more pluralistic and action-oriented understanding of hope built around moments of collaborative reopening, repetition and resetting. It then argues for a more robust and open-ended HCI method of hope that can change the way interventionist projects are conceived, documented, evaluated, and communicated, both in the HCI literature and in more public-facing accounts.

Design has been used to contest existing socio-technical arrangements, provoke conversations around matters of concern, and operationalize radical theories such as agonism, which embraces difference and contention. However, the focus is usually on creating something new: a product, interface or artifact. In this paper, we investigate what happens when critical unmaking is deployed as a deliberate design strategy in an intergenerational, agonistic urban context. Specifically, we report on how youth in a six-week design internship used unmaking as a design move to subvert conventional narratives about their surrounding urban context. We analyze how this led to conflictual encounters at the local senior center, and compare it to the other, making-centric proposals which received favorable feedback but failed to raise the same important discussions. Through this ethnographic account, we argue that critical unmaking is important yet overlooked, and should be in the repertoire of design moves available for agonism and provocation.

Recent work in HCI has shed light on structural issues of inequality in computing. Building on this work, this study analyzes the relatively understudied phenomenon of caste in computing. Contrary to common rhetorics of ‘castelessness,’ we show how computing worlds in India and Indian diasporic communities continue to be shaped and inflected by caste relations. We study how, when and where Dalits (formerly ‘untouchables’) encounter caste in computing. We show how they artfully navigate these caste inscriptions by interpreting, interrupting and ambiguating caste and by finding caste communities. Drawing on the life stories of 16 Dalit engineers and anti-caste, queer-feminist and critical race theories, we argue that a dynamic and performative approach to caste, and other forms of inequality in HCI and computing, emphasizes the artfulness and agency of those at the margins as they challenge structural inequality in everyday life. Lastly, we suggest practical ways of addressing caste to build more open and inclusive cultures of global computing.

This paper describes how village-level officials, relatively new to the Internet, use popular digital platforms on smartphones to supplement and extend long-standing patterns of information control and authoritarian power in rural Cambodia. They use these tools to monitor local affairs, report to the central government, and promote local government activities, practices which intimidate villagers and encourage their political withdrawal and self-censorship. This paper makes three contributions to the literature on networked authoritarianism and rural governance. First, technological changes currently underway in the Cambodian rural bureaucracy reflect a generational transition, as long-standing officials struggle to use new media easily or effectively, leading to new anxieties and breakdowns for these traditional holders of power. Second, bureaucratic information practices in these villages rely on material practices ranging from paper, face to face meetings, and loudspeakers, to new tools such as Facebook and smartphones - underlining significant continuities in mechanisms of bureaucratic power and control. Third, networked authoritarian practices conjure for villagers the historical links between information control and violence, and the effectiveness of these tactics on chilling speech is often rooted in villagers' memories of fear.

This paper explores the nature and potential of improvisation as a method for learning and teaching in CSCW and HCI. It starts by reviewing concepts of improvisational learning in classic and more recent work in educational theory, art and music, and HCI that emphasize the reconstructive, materially-driven, error-engaged, transgressive, and collaborative nature of human learning processes. It then describes three pedagogical interventions of our own in which improvisational techniques were deployed as methods of teaching and learning. From this integrated study, we report specific pedagogical conditions (socio-material evaluations, multi-sensory practices, and making safe spaces for error) that can support improvisational learning, and three common challenges of HCI pedagogy relevance, assessment, and inclusion that improvisational methods can help to address.

Large-scale data systems play a central role in how state bureaucracies come to know and manage citizens. Such systems are endemically uneven in implementation, producing distributed and exclusionary consequences that are among their most important effects. These systems also operate as infrastructures in the rich and complex sense of the term that has been a core contribution of CSCW to the wider computing and social science fields. Building on James Scott's work on 'seeing like a state', we conceptualize 'seeing like an infrastructure' as a more supple analytic perspective that maps the distributed work and uneven consequences through which designers, bureaucrats, and users (here, citizens) assign or claim representation in the consequential data systems that increasingly shape and define citizenship. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork into Aadhaar, India's biometrics-based identification project, and studies of infrastructure, marginalization, and citizenship in CSCW and allied fields, we argue that this perspective provides crucial insight into the strategies and mechanisms by which effective access to the basic rights and entitlements of citizenship are granted, claimed, and at times undermined. More specifically, we show how challenges in implementing Aadhaar's three key processes-enrollment, seeding, and authentication-give rise to a spectrum of resolution in which the rights and entitlements of 'high-resolution citizens' are expanded, while those of 'low-resolution citizens' are curtailed.?

This paper explores computing education as a potential site for intercultural learning and encounter in post-conflict environments. It reports on ethnographic fieldwork from the Nairobi Play Project, a constructionist educational program serving adolescents aged 14-18 in urban and rural multi-ethnic refugee communities in Kenya. While the program offers programming and game design instruction, an equal goal is to foster interaction, collaboration, dialogue and understanding across cultural backgrounds. Based on fieldwork from two project cycles involving 5 after-school classes of 12-24 students each, we describe key affordances for encounter, important resistances to be managed or overcome, and emergent complications in the execution of such programs. We argue that many important accomplishments of intercultural learning occur through moments of friction, breakdowns, and gaps -- for example, technical challenges that produce sites of shared humour; frictions between intercultural activities and computing activities; acts of disrupting order; and unstructured time that students collaboratively fill in. We also describe significant complications in such programs, including pressures to adopt norms and practices consistent with dominant or majority cultures, and instances of intercultural bonding over artefacts with xenophobic themes. We reflect on the implications of these phenomena for the design of future programs that use computing as a backbone for intercultural learning or diversity and inclusion efforts in CSCW, ICTD, and allied fields of work.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two different teaching hospitals that deployed the da Vinci surgical robot, this paper traces how the introduction of robotics reconfigures the sensory environment of surgery and how surgeons and their teams recalibrate their work in response. We explore the entangled and mutually supportive nature of sensing within and between individual actors and the broader world of people and things (with emphasis on vision and touch) and illustrate how such inter-sensory dependencies are challenged and sometimes extended under the conditions of robotic surgery. We illustrate how sensory (re)articulations and compensations allow the surgeon and surgical teams to adapt to a more-than-human sensorium and conclude by advocating new forms of sensory-aware design capable of enhancing and supporting embodied sensory conditions both individually and across teams.

This paper integrates theory, ethnography, and collaborative artwork to explore improvisational activity as both topic and tool of multidisciplinary HCI inquiry. Building on theories of improvisation drawn from art, music, HCI and social science, and two ethnographic studies based on interviews, participant observation and collaborative art practice, we seek to elucidate the improvisational nature of practice in both art and ordinary action, including human-computer interaction. We identify five key features of improvisational action -- reflexivity, transgression, tension, listening, and interdependence -- and show how these can deepen and extend both linear and open-ended methodologies in HCI and design. We conclude by highlighting collaborative engagement based on 'intermodulation' as a tool of multidisciplinary inquiry for HCI research and design.

The trustworthiness of data science systems in applied and real-world settings emerges from the resolution of specific tensions through situated, pragmatic, and ongoing forms of work. Drawing on research in CSCW, critical data studies, and history and sociology of science, and six months of immersive ethnographic fieldwork with a corporate data science team, we describe four common tensions in applied data science work: (un)equivocal numbers, (counter)intuitive knowledge, (in)credible data, and (in)scrutable models. We show how organizational actors establish and re-negotiate trust under messy and uncertain analytic conditions through practices of skepticism, assessment, and credibility. Highlighting the collaborative and heterogeneous nature of real-world data science, we show how the management of trust in applied corporate data science settings depends not only on pre-processing and quantification, but also on negotiation and translation. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for data science research and practice, both within and beyond CSCW.

This paper investigates how a teleoperated surgical robot reconfigures teamwork in the operating room by spatially redistributing team members. We report on findings from two years of fieldwork at two hospitals, including interviews and video data. We find that while in non-robotic cases team members huddle together, physically touching, introduction of a surgical robot increases physical and sensory distance between team members. This spatial rearrangement has implications for both cognitive and affective dimensions of collaborative surgical work. Cognitive distance is increased, necessitating new efforts to maintain situation awareness and common ground. Moreover, affective distance is introduced, decreasing sensitivity to shared and non-shared affective states and leading to new practices aimed at restoring affective connection within the team. We describe new forms of physical, cognitive, and affective distance associated with teleoperated robotic surgery, and the effects these have on power distribution, practice, and collaborative experience within the surgical team.

This paper describes a complex global sales and logistics network based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, which utilizes Internet tools (particularly Facebook) as well as a suite of offline tools such as feature phones, paper receipts, and motorcycles to facilitate the buying and selling of clothes and other commodities. Against the gap or import models that sometimes limit HCI understandings of computational change in non-Western environments, we argue that the consumers, business owners, delivery drivers, and call center staff play active and formative roles in producing this infrastructure, integrating new tools into older cultural practices and determining how they work within the limits and conventions of the environment. We argue that resourceful and imaginative activities such as these constitute a form of creative infrastructural action and are central to the ways that new tools circulate in the world, though they often go unrecognized by HCI as innovation.

Problems of marginalization and inclusion are central to HCI scholarship and impact in the world, but are badly named in the binary models of access that currently dominate the field. Building on prior work in ICTD and infrastructure studies, this paper explores the problem of inclusion through historical and ethnographic study of Aadhaar, India's biometrics-based national identification project. We illustrate tensions between Aadhaar users' ability to register, authenticate and successfully deploy their registered identity to participate in the Public Distribution System (PDS), a government scheme that provides subsidized food grains to the Indian poor. We argue that rather than an all-or-nothing state, inclusion in ICTD infrastructures is an ongoing and fragile process, achieved (unevenly) at the seams of multiple interconnected systems. Finally, we show that questions of (effective) inclusion are determined not just at margins of a system (who is in and who is out) but also through the artful and often challenging negotiation of the seams that run through and connect complex distributed infrastructures.

Learning to see through data is central to contemporary forms of algorithmic knowledge production. While often represented as a mechanical application of rules, making algorithms work with data requires a great deal of situated work. This paper examines how the often-divergent demands of mechanization and discretion manifest in data analytic learning environments. Drawing on research in CSCW and the social sciences, and ethnographic fieldwork in two data learning environments, we show how an algorithm's application is seen sometimes as a mechanical sequence of rules and at other times as an array of situated decisions. Casting data analytics as a rule-based (rather than rule-bound) practice, we show that effective data vision requires would-be analysts to straddle the competing demands of formal abstraction and empirical contingency. We conclude by discussing how the notion of data vision can help better leverage the role of human work in data analytic learning, research, and practice.

This paper examines the question of "values in repair" -- the distinct forms of meaning and care that may be built into human-technology interactions through individual and collective acts of repair. Our work draws on research in HCI and the social sciences and findings from ethnographic studies in four sites -- two amateur "fixers" collectives' in Brooklyn and Seattle, USA and two mobile phone repair communities in Uganda and Bangladesh -- to advance two arguments. First, studies of repair account for new sites and processes of value that differ from those appearing at HCI's better-studied moments of design and use. Second, repair may embed modes of human interaction with technology and with each other in ways that surface values as contingent and ongoing accomplishments, suggesting ongoing processes of valuation that can never be fully fixed or commoditized. These insights help HCI account for human relationships to technology built into the world through repair.

This paper investigates emerging practices and infrastructures in global humanitarian relief to argue for logistics as an essential but often neglected component of ICTD and broader HCI work. Logistics -- the artful coordination of human and material flows -- leverages scholarship on "coordination," "articulation" and "infrastructure" to provide insight into the complex role of new IT systems (and HCI as a field) in the global circulation of goods and relations. Drawing on fieldwork with the UNICEF Supply Division, we argue that contemporary logistics operates simultaneously as a form of care and control. We demonstrate that logisticians at Supply traverse messy and dynamic information and material infrastructures, and that effective logistical work must marry and bridge these worlds. Our work extends ICTD and postcolonial computing research by casting light on the nature, experience and ambivalence of the global flows that enable and support HCI work in development and postcolonial settings.

New multi-modal annotation tools hold the promise of bringing the benefits of face-to-face contact to remote, asynchronous interactions. One such system, RichReview++, incorporates new techniques to improve access to the embedded multimedia commentary and allows users to annotate with new modalities, like deictic gestures. We conducted a series of field deployments of RichReview++ to characterize how these features benefit students using them for activities in the university classroom. Our first deployment investigated the use of multi-modal annotations as a way for instructors to provide feedback on student term papers. Our second deployment used annotations to support peer discussion about assigned readings in a graduate-level course. We found that presenting voice comments as interactive waveforms seems to facilitate students' consumption of the instructor's voice comments. We also found that gestural annotations clarify voice and give annotators a quick and lightweight way to alter the scope of their voice comments. Based on these results, we suggest ways to best leverage multi-modal annotation tools in education environments.

ICTD is profoundly interested in the "next billion" users, and how to leverage technology to improve their everyday lives. In this paper we ask how the concept of care might be generatively extended to the 'lives' of the "next billion" mobile handsets. Drawing on a growing literature on repair in ICTD and HCI, and theories of care from the social sciences, this paper makes two central contributions. First, our ethnographic study of mobile phone repair in downtown Kampala, Uganda provides new insights into how technologies are sustained in developing contexts, with a special focus on how independent technicians in informal repair shops circumvent the proprietary closures that limit their work. Second, we show how attending to care in ICTD contexts can help us locate immediate forms of technical work (here, repair) within wider moral and political orderings. Thinking about repair and care together opens up new possibilities for ICTD to engage with the materiality of technologies over longer temporal horizons, beyond privileged moments of design and adoption.

This paper explores discrepancies between the founding assumptions of mobile and ubiquitous computing in the western world, and the starkly different experiences of mobility and infrastructure to be found in many post-colonial environments. Based on a field study of forced mobility and technology use among populations displaced by the Hatirjheel waterfront development project in Dhaka, Bangladesh, we make two basic arguments. First, we point to the partial nature of assumptions around mobility that frame the imagination of mainstream HCI research, and argue that different and heretofore residual experiences of mobility must also be accounted for in post-colonial and other marginal computing environments. Second, we document four forms of infrastructural experience -- dispossession, reconstitution, collaboration, and repair -- that characterize real-world engagements with infrastructure in such settings. We conclude with implications for HCI research and design, and reflections on how HCI researchers might better account for such experiences in their work.

Standards and protocols play important but under-theorized roles in HCI research and design efforts, including those dedicated to the development of new collaborative infrastructures in the sciences. Building on several years of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines standardization efforts attached to new forms of design and computational development in American ecology. We explore the role that standards play in large-scale research networks; how standards are enacted and enforced in complex interactive systems like science; how standards struggle and fail (and what happens when they do); and how actors work across the gaps that standards leave to produce more effective forms of practice and design. We also argue for the potentially creative role of standards, including contexts in which they function as fulcrums for change and innovation. We conclude with reflections on how HCI researchers might rethink the nature and possibilities of standards and standardization in their own work.

This paper joins a growing body of CSCW and HCI work exploring questions of creativity and collaboration at the intersection of digital and material practices of craft. Drawing on studio visits and interviews with fine art furniture maker Wendell Castle and his team, we investigate one studio's experience with integrating digital fabrication tools into their studio practice, and its implications for the collective organization of work and creativity. We explore how the introduction of new computational and industrial machine objects (here, Computer Numerical Controllers) remediates traditional relations of craft and the forms of human-object value, care, and creativity built around them. We also chart new forms of creative practice and material flow that emerge from this encounter, and show how remediations of craft in the Castle studio may pose questions and opportunities for wider CSCW concerns around craft, creativity, and design.

Problems of temporality in distributed cooperative work have emerged as an important theme of CSCW and HCI work. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork into large-scale infrastructure development in ecology and ocean science and analyses of futurism in science and technology studies to call attention to "anticipation work": the practices that cultivate and channel expectations of the future, design pathways into those imaginations, and maintain those visions in the face of a dynamic world. We advance three basic claims: first, that long term technological development and sustainability in science is guided by complex and distributed forms of futurism; second, that all actors (both individual and collective) orient towards the future (at both temporally close and distant scales); and third, that actors engage in complex and skilled forms of anticipation work -- individual and collective, formal and informal -- that guide and shape the present character and experience of collaborative life.

Effective use of spectrum is essential to the forms of mobile, ubiquitous, and social computing that increasingly shape and define CSCW research. This paper calls attention to the key policy processes by which the future of wireless spectrum -- and the forms of technology design and use that depend on it -- is being imagined, shaped, and contested. We review CSCW and HCI scholarship arguing for infrastructure and policy as important but neglected sites of CSCW analysis, and separate lines of work arguing for "sociotechnical imaginaries" as key sites and outcomes of technology policy and design. We then turn to histories of U.S. spectrum regulation, before analyzing ongoing FCC policy actions around incentive auctions and unlicensed spectrum use. We argue that such processes are central to the imagination and future of mobile computing; and that CSCW can benefit from adding such policy concerns to its traditional repertoires of design and use.

Practices of technology repair in developing country contexts play crucial and often overlooked roles in supporting ICTD goals of access and sustainability. They also constitute complex and neglected sites of technical skill, knowledge, and learning. Building on original ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores the explicit, tacit, and social knowledges that shape practice and expertise in the mobile phone repair markets of urban Bangladesh. We document forms of learning and collaboration central to the production and innovation of repair skills and knowledge, and show how these processes operate at the intersection of global knowledge flows and local efforts to access, contextualize and situate that knowledge. We conclude by arguing for repair as an underappreciated site of third-world technical practice and expertise, and reflecting on how ICTD research might better take such practices into account.

Acts of technology maintenance and repair constitute important and often overlooked moments in the operation of complex interactive systems. They also provide fresh insight on a series of problems -- innovation, learning, and sustainability -- long core to HCI concern. This paper builds on original ethnographic fieldwork in the repair markets of Dhaka, Bangladesh to advance three basic arguments: first, that repair activities in such locations reveal novel and significant forms of craft-based knowledge and innovation; second, that repair work is embedded in local and transnational flows that connect local practices to global networks and institutions; and third, that taking repair work seriously can cast new light on problems of learning and sustainability in the design and operation of complex interactive systems. We conclude with observations that relate our repair-based findings back to problems in interactive systems research and design.

Public sexual harassment has emerged as a large and growing concern in urban Bangladesh, with deep and damaging implications for gender security, justice, and rights of public participation. In this paper we describe an integrated program of ethnographic and design work meant to understand and address such problems. For one year we conducted surveys, interviews, and focus groups around sexual harassment with women at three different universities in Dhaka. Based on this input, we developed "Protibadi", a web and mobile phone based application designed to report, map, and share women's stories around sexual harassment in public places. In August 2013 the system launched, user studies were conducted, and public responses were monitored to gauge reactions, strengths, and limits of the system. This paper describes the findings of our ethnographic and design-based work, and suggests lessons relevant to other HCI efforts to understand and design around difficult and culturally sensitive problems.

This paper describes an integrated program of theoretical, ethnographic, and building work meant to explore post-humanist alternatives to questions around HCI creativity and design. We review recent theories in the humanities, social sciences, and HCI that argue for different ways of framing the relationship between human agents and the object world around them. We then describe a program of ethnographic work with artists who feature found and broken technologies as central methods and topics of work. Finally, we describe an installation and self-study project of our own, 'Scale,' that extends these lines of analysis through collaborative acts of building with broken and discarded technologies. We argue that such integrated programs of work offer one useful model for leveraging the theoretical, ethnographic and material dimensions of HCI work; and that the distinct 'propensities' of found and broken objects can challenge and extend HCI notions of creativity and design itself.

In CSCW and information science research today, the worlds of design, practice, and policy are often held separate, speaking to different audiences, venues, and fields of expertise. But many growing areas of CSCW work, including mobile, cloud, and social computing, run into problems precisely at this intersection. This paper presents a model for understanding processes of change and emergence in social computing in which policy, practice, and design show up in the form of complex interdependencies, or knots, that collectively determine the shape, meaning, and trajectory of shifting computational forms. We then apply this model to two recent social computing controversies: the 2011 privacy scandal surrounding the location-aware mobile app Girls Around Me; and controversies surrounding the 2010 launch of the Google Buzz social network. We argue that better attention to the mutually constitutive relations between design, practice and policy can expand the reach, depth, and impact of CSCW scholarship.

Plans and planning assume a central role and challenge of collaborative scientific work, bridging and coordinating often discordant rhythms and events emanating from the organizational, infrastructural, biographical and phenomenal dimensions of collaborative life. Plans align rhythms embedded in local practice with those operating at larger institutional levels, and establish shared temporal baselines around which local choice and action may be calibrated. This paper develops these arguments through ethnographic study of the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a prominent U.S.-based large-scale long-term collaborative research program in the ocean sciences. We emphasize the intersection between rhythms and plans at two crucial moments: formation ('plans-in-the-making'), and enactment ('plans-in-action') across complex fields of practice. Our findings hold important implications for CSCW research and practice around scientific and large-scale collaborative efforts, and for federal science policies meant to support productive forms of cooperation and discovery.

HCI studies of computational change in the sciences have made important design and analytic contributions, to other fields of science and to HCI itself. But some of the longer-term effects and complexities of infrastructural change in the sciences aren't easily captured under short-term, design- or artifact-centered accounts. Drawing on extended ethnographic study of computational development in ecology, this paper explores the relationship between new computational infrastructure and the nature of ecology as a vocation: roughly, the deeply held sense of what it means to 'be' an ecologist, and to 'do' ecology. We analyze in particular the nature of the field and field work as a central site of ecological practice and identity; how new computational developments are remediating this crucial relation; and the emergent vocational values that new and more computationally-intensive forms of ecology may give rise to.

This paper explores the relationship between CSCW studies of scientific collaboration and the larger worlds of science practice and policy they are embedded in. We argue that CSCW has much to learn from debates in science policy, including questions around the changing nature of science and science-society relations that are partly but obliquely referenced in technology- or data-centered accounts of scientific change. At the same time, science policy has much to learn from CSCW -- about design, infrastructure, and the organizational complexities of distributed collaborative practice. We conclude with recommendations for a better integration of the CSCW and science policy literatures around collaboration and new infrastructure development in the sciences, and speculation around what a post-normal cyberinfrastructure -- and post-normal CSCW -- might look like.

This paper explores the nature and centrality of maintenance and repair ('M&R') work in the extension and sustainability of ICT infrastructure in the global South. Drawing from pragmatist traditions in CSCW and the social sciences at large, we develop a concept of 'repair worlds' intended to map the varieties and effects of such maintenance and repair activities. Empirically, our analysis builds on ethnographic fieldwork into local practices of maintenance and repair that have accompanied and supported the extension of mobile phone and computing infrastructure in the Kavango region of northeastern Namibia.

CSCW studies of large-scale distributed practice in the sciences and elsewhere have taught us important things about space and place as props and barriers to distributed collective action, but they have had relatively less to say about time. This paper develops a heuristic of collaborative rhythms and points to the work of temporal alignment as a neglected but crucial element underpinning distributed collective practice in the sciences (and other spheres of collective activity). Specifically, we argue that joint scientific work is organized around four separate registers, or 'rhythms' - organizational, infrastructural, biographical, and phenomenal - and that efforts to align such rhythms constitute an important and under-recognized aspect of collaborative work. The ideas and examples are drawn from our own field studies around IT infrastructure and collaborative practice across a range of scientific fields.

This paper describes an ongoing research project exploring the business practices of mobile entrepreneurs, specifically mobile food vendors, and the potential use of location aware and mobile phone-based application to support their information needs. Mobile food vendors are a ubiquitous phenomenon in the developing world and can be seen hawking their wares in carts, bicycles, or motorcycles. In this paper we report findings from 28 interviews around business practices, challenges, personal histories, and economic wellbeing among mobile food vendors and 10 of their customers from five major Indonesian cities. Based on these findings, we point to characteristics and features of a mobile phone-based application that will enable these vendors to advertise their current location, accept orders from customers, enable customers' recommendation of vendors, and inform fellow vendors of various special events.