Devious Design: Digital Infrastructure Challenges for Experimental Ethnography

Abstract

Diverse disciplinary communities approach design with diverse design logics design directives informed by critical theoretical commitments that are to be translated into material form. Recounting the design of a digital humanities platform, this paper shows how design logics of existing digital infrastructure can at times be out of sync with those of a design community seeking to leverage it. I argue that, in such situations, a designer should do more than simply “make do” with available infrastructure; the designer should instead design deviously – leveraging infrastructure in ways that undercut its logics. This suggests that reflective design involves reflecting, not only on design practice, but also on the logics of the infrastructure available to designers.

Open Ethnographic Archiving as Feminist, Decolonizing Practice

“…13 For more on this aspect of PECE, see M. Fortun et al, 2017;Poirier et al, 2014;Poirier, 2017. 14 This is similar to many of the cases described in Estalella and Criado (2018).…”

Afterword: From Number Politics to Infrastructure Politics

“…Such a move could future-proof research on everyday data practices while avoiding extractivist forms of engagement with the field and at the same time contributing to raising awareness about the challenges of number politics after datafication. This might require embracing scenario thinking, 'circumventing' context to tactically build community, or even practising 'devious design' (Poirier 2017) at the field site. But it might empower us to partake in the '"dance" in which our structure of possibilities is generated' (Winograd and Flores 1986: 163).…”

Trans Embodiment, Fitness Wearables and the Queer Pleasures of Datafication

“…The OTF subreddit curates distributed expertise and collective tinkering with technologies and metrics, tinkerings that will continue long after rollouts of new algorithms or technologies; they are in fact constitutive of these things. As Boellstorff (2013: 104) suggests, queer potential for resistance to surveillance, ‘lies in the dialectic [of surveillance and recognition], not through some pure, imagined oppositional stance or project’ (see also Poirier, 2017). Algorithms and digital technologies that embed them are framed as revolutionary and innovative, always on paths of improvement towards perfection.…”