[Petit Fours #440] On found poetry, sociotechnical remantling, and utopian epistles
Hi, all! This week, I want to share a few selected highlights from the Aarhus decennial conference:
#1 I finally managed to create an opportunity for redacted poetry! Marisa Cohn kindly came along to our workshop and shared some of the work she’s done with colleagues at the ETHOS lab, including GDPR poetry. And then, we redacted parts of the EU AI Act until we were left with found poems.
#2 The session I’ll most remember from this conference was sparked by Utopian epistles: computing [codesign] crises, a critique that took the shape of a set of letters, written by Pelle Ehn: “The Aarhus decennial conference on computing is turning fifty. Between November 2024 and February 2025 (and finally in May 2025) the author, a conference “veteran”, wrote ten letters addressing younger generations of participants and the theme of the sixth conference on computing [x] crisis. With a special focus on codesign, participation and democracy, the letters are predominantly musings on critical matters related to the first fifty years of the conference, but there are also perspectives reaching half a century back before the 1975 conference as well as fifty years ahead of the 2025 conference. Most letters have a specific emphasis on a broad tension like memory and nostalgia, labor and capital, collaboration and conflict, democracy and autocracy, war and peace, history and future, narrative and truth, thinking and acting. Being letters they stand as they were originally written at a specific time. Minor corrections regard misspellings, a few factual errors and for the sakes of brevity and discretion a few omissions. As letters they reach out for (critical) replies, discussions, other stories and perspectives. The vision is an ongoing epistolary public exchange on computing [codesign] crisis.“
#3 Richmond Wong presented a thoughtful paper, entitled Towards Creating Infrastructures for Values and Ethics Work in the Production of Software Technologies, with direct relevance (and connections) to the research we’ve been undertaking in our WASP-HS project: “Recognizing how technical systems can embody social values or cause harms, human-computer interaction (HCI) research often approaches addressing values and ethics in design by creating tools to help tech workers integrate social values into the design of products. While useful, these approaches usually do not consider the politics embedded in the broader processes, organizations, social systems, and governance structures that affect the types of actions that tech workers can take to address values and ethics. This paper argues that creating infrastructures to support values and ethics work, rather than tools, is an approach that takes these broader processes into account and opens them up for (re)design. Drawing on prior research conceptualizing infrastructures from science & technology studies and media studies, this paper outlines conceptual insights from infrastructures studies that open up new tactics for HCI researchers and designers seeking to support values and ethics in design.“
#4 I also look forward to reading Eric Baumer and Vera Khovanskaya’s paper on Sociotechnical Remantling: “This paper critiques “non-use” as a conceptual orientation to research. To do so, we draw on historical materialism to argue that the negation at the heart of “non-use” becomes subsumed into, and ultimately reinforces, the centrality of use and users. Through prior literature and two case studies, we enumerate specific ways that the concept of non-use narrows analytic attention and outline the consequences of that narrowing. As an alternative, we develop remantling as an orientation that directs attention to the social relations, subjectivities, and temporal conditions through which technologies and practices take shape, while simultaneously highlighting how research contributes to bringing these phenomena into being. We then reconnect this line of thinking with recent allied work—reflecting on the conditions that shape how critique becomes possible, challenging the progress narratives that typically animate HCI research, and highlighting the uneven risks and capacities involved in pursuing more politically expansive research.“
-A