No abstract

Collaborative design (co‐design) is a design strategy for generating relevant and socially acceptable technologies, and is inherently political by nature of its inclusion of particular groups and interests. This paper explores how to ethically and responsibly prepare for, notice and overcome barriers to including agricultural workers in the co‐design of new agricultural technologies. Drawing from feminist science and technology studies (STS), we offer response‐able mattering as an analytic tool to explore how the COVID‐19 pandemic caused and illuminated existing barriers to inclusion within an Aotearoa New Zealand‐based co‐design project. We argue that addressing barriers to inclusion requires prioritizing relationships and relationship building in technology design projects. This prioritization must account for a multiplicity of relationship building tempos (e.g., the time/pace necessary to ethically establish and maintain research relationships), temporal tensions (e.g., the pace of technology development versus the ability to meaningfully include collaborators), and un/intended relational cuts (e.g., boundaries or barriers affecting relationship building).

No abstract

No abstract

While extensive research has gone into demand response techniques in data centers, the energy consumed in edge computing systems and in network data transmission remains a significant part of the computing industry’s carbon footprint. The industry also has not fully leveraged the parallel trend of decentralized renewable energy generation, which creates new areas of opportunity for innovation in combined energy and computing systems. Through an interdisciplinary sociotechnical discussion of current energy, computer science and social studies of science and technology (STS) literature, we argue that a more comprehensive set of carbon response techniques needs to be developed that span the continuum of data centers, from the back-end cloud to the network edge. Such techniques need to address the combined needs of decentralized energy and computing systems, alongside the social power dynamics those combinations entail. We call this more comprehensive range “carbon-responsive computing,” and underscore that this continuum constitutes the beginnings of an interconnected infrastructure, elements of which are data-intensive and require the integration of social science disciplines to adequately address problems of inequality, governance, transparency, and definitions of “necessary” tasks in a climate crisis.