Drawing on a three-month bookbinding apprenticeship, this paper examines how people's coordination work is tightly bound up in material practices, the union of material arrangements and social relations. Through the construction of a book, I reveal how sensitivities to delicacy, flexibility and delay emerge through detailed engagements with the book, the binders and the workshop environment. From small adjustments of the hand, to the coordination and exchange of materials and tools, the accomplishment of each task rests on how digital and age-old resources are woven into everyday collaborative practice. This approach extends how CSCW frames and mobilizes the material to recognize materials as compositional elements, surfaces and flows. It also contributes to conversations on digital materiality by emphasizing the temporality of material practice. Thus, I use the bookbinding workshop as a resource for understanding the ways materials, techniques, and relationships are continually re-bound in a digital age.
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.
For the dozens of visitors to the 2012 East Bay Mini Maker Faire, many remarkable experiences were ripe for the taking. They could share in hands-on activities while attending a working group on outdoor mosaics, observing a robot-making demonstration, or sitting in on a make-your-own terrarium class. The activity in Studio One was no different: the energy was high and the action perplexing. Children clamored for a chance to use a Phillips-head screwdriver. Adults cut delicate wires and relayed stories of their latest electronic gadgets. A collection of mechanical odds and ends-soldering irons, spray cans, vacuum cleaner heads, and toaster shells-lay distributed across all surfaces of the room. This cluster of activity at the end of the Studio One hallway was as anarchic as all the rest: fast paced, thrilling, and difficult to digest (tdarci 2012). To the handful of people facilitating this work, the pandemonium was familiar and somewhat double-edged. It was the thirty-fifth Fixit Clinic, a public venue for facilitated repair often arranged out of libraries, museums, and community centers located east of San Francisco (see fig. 1). Meanwhile, fifty miles south, the inaugural event of the Palo Alto Repair Café, another public site of repair, was taking place at the Museum of American Heritage (see fig. 2). The two events were not planned to overlap, but, as we will see, this arrangement of concurrent yet separate programs prefigured their common practices and divergent cultural aims. Public sites of repair, such as the Fixit Clinic and the Repair Café, are community-supported events designed to help local residents fix and learn to fix
This paper examines the motivations, activities, and ideals of people organizing feminist hackerspaces: collaborative workspaces developed to support women's creative and professional pursuits. Drawing on interviews, participant observation and archival data collected across the Pacific Northwest over nine months, we show how members of these spaces use small-scale collaborative design and acts of making to work out their place in society in ways that contest widely accepted understandings of hacking, technology, and collaboration. In designing how the space should look, feel, and run, members reframe activities seldom associated with technical work (e.g., weaving, identity workshops) as forms of hacking. In so doing, they shift concerns for women in technology from questions of access (who is included) to questions of recognition (who is visible) while grappling with productive ambiguities in between. We describe lessons these tension present for examining women's relations with technology in CSCW.
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