TY - GEN
T1 - Entangled ethnography
T2 - 2019 Halfway to the Future Symposium: Exploring the Past, Present, and Future of HCI and Design-Based Research, HTTF 2019
AU - Murray-Rust, Dave
AU - Gorkovenko, Katerina
AU - Burnett, Dan
AU - Richards, Daniel
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - In this work, we develop a vision for entangled ethnography, where constellations of people, artefacts, algorithms and data come together to collectively make sense of the relations between people and objects. This is grounded in New Materialism’s picture of a world understood through entanglement, through resonant constellations, through a multiplicity of unique individual viewpoints and their relationships. These perspectives are especially relevant for design ethnography, in particular for research around smart connected products, which collect data about their environment, the networks they are a part of, and the ways they are used. However, we are concerned about the current trend of many connected systems towards surveillance capitalism, as data is colonised, machinations are hidden, and a narrow definition of value is extracted. There is a key tension that while design, particularly of networked objects, attempts to go beyond human centeredness, the infrastructures that support it are moving towards a less than human perspective in their race to accumulate and dispossess. Our work tries to imagine the situations where participants in networked systems are richly engaged, rather than exploited. We hope for a future where human agency is central to a respectful and acceptable collaborative development of understanding.
AB - In this work, we develop a vision for entangled ethnography, where constellations of people, artefacts, algorithms and data come together to collectively make sense of the relations between people and objects. This is grounded in New Materialism’s picture of a world understood through entanglement, through resonant constellations, through a multiplicity of unique individual viewpoints and their relationships. These perspectives are especially relevant for design ethnography, in particular for research around smart connected products, which collect data about their environment, the networks they are a part of, and the ways they are used. However, we are concerned about the current trend of many connected systems towards surveillance capitalism, as data is colonised, machinations are hidden, and a narrow definition of value is extracted. There is a key tension that while design, particularly of networked objects, attempts to go beyond human centeredness, the infrastructures that support it are moving towards a less than human perspective in their race to accumulate and dispossess. Our work tries to imagine the situations where participants in networked systems are richly engaged, rather than exploited. We hope for a future where human agency is central to a respectful and acceptable collaborative development of understanding.
KW - Biography of artefacts
KW - Ethics
KW - Ethnography
KW - Ethnomining
KW - Object oriented ontology
KW - Surveillance capitalism
KW - Thing ethnography
KW - Third wave HCI
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85076819407&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3363384.3363405
DO - 10.1145/3363384.3363405
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85076819407
T3 - ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
BT - HTTF 2019 - Proceedings of the Halfway to the Future Symposium 2019
PB - Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Y2 - 19 November 2019 through 20 November 2019
ER -