A presenter sitting at a table with a laptop in front of a large screen displaying a title page of a presentation that reads "De-Territorialising Genetic Pest Control Through a Te Ao Māori Precedent Approach"
Attended and presented at my first conference ( #AusSTS2024) 19th November at the Australian National University in Canberra.
Here's a thread of threads, recapping my updates from the excellent conference of the Australian STS network: people across disciplines exploring the conditions of knowledge production and grappling with the social impacts of science and technology. #AusSTS2024 aussts.wordpress.com/aussts-2024-...
How might we... Engage more closely with the people who use our work? Support creative modeling and remodeling? Imagine imagination?
I've been banging the drum for a while for researchers to treat relations with the people who use our work as carefully as we treat relations with the people we're learning from, our participants and interlocutors. Design research artifacts are a great place to do that engagement. #AusSTS2024
Personas give designers a field of imagination, shaped by the researcher's imagination. Then products like personas can live on in an org long after the person who did the research leaves the scene. The field can go from a helpful frame to a barrier, preventing reimagining. #AusSTS2024
They also create a false impression of completeness. In my example, I was unable (for resourcing and ethics reasons) to make a persona for people with dementia, a big set of aged care consumers. I made a big noise about this in the report, but a designer looking at the set may miss that. #AusSTS2024
This is standard UX/CX/service design stuff, but personas were new to me when I left academia, and can surprise researchers seeing them for the first time. These sets, with their carefully aggregated details, leave a lot out, and obscure the real people they're based on. #AusSTS2024
Personas usually come in sets, based on some kind of model that explains how they differ from each other. In the example above, I plotted personas on a simple triangle, showing how each persona placed different balanced three key priorities differently from one another. #AusSTS2024
Personas are fictional profiles, based on evidence, that represent groups of people who have similar attitudes, behaviours, experiences, and goals. They enable designers or policy-makers to focus on a memorable group of specific 'somebodys,' rather than a generic ‘everybody.’ #AusSTS2024
As an example, I point to a set of personas I developed during a project for the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, an Australian government body. (Incidentally this project won a good design award.) #AusSTS2024 good-design.org/projects/cap...
Design research often takes place under pretty severe constraints: scarcities of money, time, and resources. So you use the research you get to do to develop tools that enable the people who'll use that information to imagine what you would have found if you'd done more research. #AusSTS2024
And my own presentation from #AusSTS2024, which obviously I couldn't do live updates for: "Mapping the borders of imagination: the work of technical objects in design research"
And that’s a wrap on #AusSTS2024! Huge thanks to the organizers, everyone who participated, and you, for following along with me. Off now for a drink with the Top End STS crew. Back soon with a recap of my own paper. 👋
BRW: People use their imaginations to speculate about the hidden and invisible non-places of digital society, to understand the impacts these places have on their everyday experience. #AusSTS2024
BRW: There's concern that data centres may get prior claim on limited local power supplies. "Then on Christmas Eve we cannot use the oven, because Microsoft needs power." #AusSTS2024
BRW: how does land and resource appropriation happen? How are new resource boundaries constructed? Whose cultural practices and collective memories of land and resources are ignored and suffer? What concepts can STS bring to these questions? #AusSTS2024
BRW: These centres are also political nodes, bringing together areas such as resource management, security, and economy, and raising the question of the complicity of all of us who rely on data centres and data companies for everyday life. #AusSTS2024
BRW: Big data centres have enormous impacts: land use, grid pressures, water for cooling, and so on. It can amount to terraforming, impacting natures and populations. So they bring discontent most places they go, and sometimes are developed in something close to secrecy. #AusSTS2024
Final keynote: "Shackled to big tech: De-territorializing Danish Data Centers with STS," from Brit Ross Winthereik (Technical University of Denmark) #AusSTS2024
HSF: The separation between state, market, and community can be non-existent in practice. E.g. in an project in an Indonesian village, all three might be embodied in one person. #AusSTS2024
WR: The energy transition is becoming disruptive, and we're seeing more opposition and disruption. Govt and industry are talking more about social license and benefit sharing. This opens up space for STS interventions. Can transition do more than just decarbonise the status quo? #AusSTS2024
WR: Reducing prices electricity isn't redistributive in itself, because affluent lifestyles can become very energy-intensive. There's less talk about reducing energy use. #AusSTS2024
WR: User-pays approaches to supporting energy infrastructure are inequitable. Self-generators shed responsibility for large-scale infra, raising the burden of support on non-generators. Self-generators then gain responsibility for community infra, which may be private or community-owned. #AusSTS2024
WR: There's an assumption that "community energy" is about people and planet, though that's not always true. We tend to romanticise community agency. It's mostly driven by people with assets: homeowners, who hold environmental ideals and are tech-focused. #AusSTS2024
WR: Infra companies want to retain ownership of the tools they sell, but all research shows consumers want to own the kit in their homes. #AusSTS2024
WR: There's new public energy for government and regulation, e.g. decarbonisation policy and public ownership of new enterprises. #AusSTS2024
WR: Active, informed, involved consumers (sometimes called prosumers) are a new kind of actor in the energy system. We also see collective or community energy groups emerging. The existing system privileges existing players and companies. #AusSTS2024
WR: Energy territory is becoming more complex with the energy transition, with factors like the decentralisation of energy generation (e.g. rooftop solar), large scale infrastructure in new areas (e.g. solar farms and high-voltage transmission). But we still have a centralised grid. #AusSTS2024
Up next: "Navigating new energy territory – STS interventions in energy transition," from Wendy Russell (ANU) #AusSTS2024
HSF: So "energy justice," as an actual ethical goal, is elusive. What matters is that we grapple with these questions continuously, and not follow any single approach uncritically. #AusSTS2024
HSF: Small techs and interventions aren't necessarily more ethical. Smallness can be a legacy of colonial policy and thinking. #AusSTS2024
