Publications

Publication date: 2015

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...

Publication date: 2015

While some in the CSCW community have researched the values in technology design and engineering practices, the underlying ideologies that reinforce and protect those values remain under-explored. This paper seeks to address this gap by identifying a common ideological framework that appears across four engineering endeavors: the OLPC Project, the National Day of Civic Hacking, the Fixit...

Publication date: 2014

We introduce two case studies that illuminate a particular way of conceptualizing childhood and technology: the East Bay Fixit Clinic and the One Laptop Per Child project. Both cases borrow ideologies of childhood from contemporary American culture and ideas of technological potential from computer cultures. The developers and organizers in these two groups ground the resulting narrative in...

Publication date: 2014

What does it mean to "plan" a technology?  Designs with a footprint in public space are important hybrids, including wired bus stops and rebuilt payphones.  Our goal is to shift from designing technology for a neighborhood by planning technology as part of the neighborhood.  Aging phone booths were purchased in LA's historic Leimert Park.  For six months, residents joined with technologists to...

Publication date: 2014

With the rise of global telecommunications networks, and especially with the worldwide spread of the Internet, the world is considered to be becoming an information society: a society in which social relations are patterned by information, transcending time and space through the use of new information and communications technologies. Much of the popular press and academic literature on the...

Publication date: 2014

Trademark theory implicitly assumes that laws favoring the interests of the producer will inevitably serve the interests of the consumer. Such a claim justifies the way that trademark law privileges the voice of the producer in the marketplace. Historical work has tended to endorse this view, explaining the development of trademarks and trademark law in terms of the information needed for...

Publication date: 2014

In this paper, we investigate the correspondence between student affect and behavioural engagement in a web-based tutoring platform throughout the school year and learning outcomes at the end of the year on a high-stakes mathematics exam in a manner that is both longitudinal and fine-grained. Affect and behaviour detectors are used to estimate student affective states and behaviour based on...

Publication date: 2014

This paper explores issues that come up in practices of breakage and repair through two projects: the 'XO' laptops of One Laptop Per Child in Paraguay and public sites of facilitated repair in California, USA. Collectively drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, 156 interviews, and archival research, we find that breakdown and repair are not processes that designers can effectively...

Publication date: 2013

In the mid-2000s, China began a set of policies to ‘informatize’ the countryside, i.e. to bring Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to rural residents in order to improve their economic conditions. These policies posit the countryside as a world of ‘less,’ compared to urban areas, and they are framed in terms of what people who are at the margins of China’s modernization (migrant...

Publication date: 2013

Technologies have been and are being designed to address varied human needs. Of these, the need for physical and economic well-being is typically considered to trump the need for culture, leisure, fun, and entertainment. Research initiatives in the field of Information and Communication Technology and Development (ICTD) have been in motion to address agricultural, educational, and health care...

Publication date: 2013

Interaction design is the definition of digital behavior, from desktop software and mobile applications to components of appliances, automobiles, and even biomedical devices. Where architects plan buildings, graphic designers make visual compositions, and industrial designers give form to three-dimensional objects, interaction designers define the digital components of products and services....

Publication date: 2013
It is normal to organize our world, but doing so systematically is key and the subject of the book The Discipline of Organizing (TDO). The driving concept is that, while organization of resources is fundamental to library and information science, it is a central issue for many professional fields employing different organizational strategies and descriptive vernacular. To bring the diverse...
Publication date: 2013

In this paper, we revisit a study that has become canonical in ICTD, economist Robert Jensen’s study of mobile phone use in fishing markets in north Kerala. Jensen found that the use of mobile phones to share market price information made fish markets more efficient while also improving producer and consumer welfare. Based on our own ethnographic case study in the region, our goal is to...

Publication date: 2013

The introduction of collective and certification marks to U.S. law in 1946 by the Lanham Act has generally been regarded as an innovative and forward-looking step. Yet these marks had been widely used by individual states since the previous century, and international conventions had long been pushing the federal government to enact measures to protect them. Indeed, it may be stranger that the...

Publication date: 2013

The history of trademarks in California merits acknowledgement in 2013 because that year marks the 150th anniversary of trademark law and registration in the state. The anniversary is further significant because California’s was the first trademark registration law in the country, antedating federal law by seven years. In providing a quick and celebratory overview of the anniversary, this...

Publication date: 2013

Inspired by the successes of India and the Philippines, Kenya has embarked on a road to develop its own information technology (IT)-enabled services sector in contact centers, business process outsourcing, and software development. This chapter examines how Kenya’s IT-enabled services cluster emerged in the first decade. It starts by mapping out concepts from clusters to understand the...

Publication date: 2013

Organizing is such a common activity that we often do it without thinking much about it. In our daily lives we organize physical things--books on shelves, cutlery in kitchen drawers—and digital things--Web pages, MP3 files, scientific datasets. Millions of people create and browse Web sites, blog, tag, tweet, and upload and download content of all media types without thinking “I’m organizing...

Publication date: 2013

This paper discusses three concepts that govern technosocial practices among university students with iPhones. First is the social expectation of constant connection that requires multitasking to achieve. Second is the resulting technosocial pecking order of who gets interrupted or ignored for whom. Third is the way that many students push back against these demands with techno-resistance,...

Publication date: 2012

This dissertation analyzes Californians' information infrastructure after three Bay Area earthquakes: 1868 Hayward Fault Earthquake, 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, and 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake. I use qualitative and historical research approaches, focusing on documents produced by state and local governments, newspapers and letters by Californians. In my analysis, I employ the...

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