Research project Digitisation, data-driven production, and artificial intelligence are reshaping how things are made and understood. Established design frameworks can no longer address the new dynamics and complexity. This research programme explores the conceptual and methodological approaches needed to understand these shifts and to support responsible design action.
This research programme investigates the notion of platformed relations. These arise when digitally connected things create value for users through use, while also generating data that produces additional value for other stakeholders. The economic incentives tied to this data generation strongly influence the kinds of use offered to people, shaping interactions to encourage ever‑expanding streams of behavioural data.
Digitisation now stretches into every area of life and society, relating to everything from our own bodies to public space and societal infrastructures. Digital connected things now powerfully shape our forms of life. There is a pressing need to ask not only what is technically possible, but what is desirable in terms of how it might support diverse good lives and possibilities for collective flourishing that are sustainable over time. One of the most significant aspects of contemporary sociotechnical systems is that they are powered by enormous amounts of data and driven by economic imperatives to extract profitable insights (typically in the form of predictions about behaviour). There is thus a direct connection between the role and function of things people use and the operations of the larger systems in which they are embedded. At the same time, these things now have quite active forms of artificial intelligence, agency, and capacities to sense and respond. They do not just sit still waiting for humans to pick them up and put them to use, but actively adapt to and invite particular kinds of use. Often, the use that is encouraged is powerfully shaped by the economic imperatives of larger platforms that reward effective prediction and control.
Everyday connected things have become key sites for the production of data, enabling corporate platform operators to predict, nudge, and control in service of enormous profit. These dynamics have been conceptualised in terms of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019), platform capitalism (Srnicek 2017), data markets that reinvent capitalism (Mayer-Schönberger and Ramge 2018), data colonialism (Couldry and Mejias 2019), platform society (vanDijck, Poell, and deWaal 2018), and computing the everyday (Alaimo and Kallinikos 2017). Given both current practices and developmental trajectories as well as the possible legitimate benefits of data-driven processes, these overall practices and dynamics seem likely to continue in some form for the foreseeable future. There are still a wide range of possibilities for exactly how this happens—some potentially desirable, others far less so. However, there are what might be seen as certain baseline requirements for platform companies’ social licence to operate legitimately. These arguably include some version of meaningful informed consent and reasonable freedom of choice when it comes to the aspects of one’s life that are rendered as data, and to what purposes and for whose value that data is utilised. There is thus a need to figure out good ways of negotiating and configuring modes of value generation for multiple parties, as well as their governance and ongoing negotiation and development over time.
While there are key roles for regulation here, and for resistance and activism, there are also significant challenges for design. There is a need for desirable alternatives adequate to the sociotechnical complexity at hand that would enable people who use these things to be able to negotiate their participation in data economies in ethically-informed and effective ways. Rather than independent use occurring after point of sale, engagement with connected things entails ongoing relations over time between producers and consumers, generators and users of behavioural data (Wiltse 2020). The things themselves are fluid assemblages (Redström and Wiltse 2019): constantly changing over time and in response to contexts, and assembled from a variety of physical and digital, local and networked components. Significantly, end users of these things are often themselves used, subject to exploitation and the subjects of real-time tests and operations aimed at optimising their behaviour for others’ ends. These dynamics might be driven by technocratic assumptions paired to powerful economic incentives rather than an evil and power-hungry villain. Yet they are still profoundly anti-democratic (Zuboff 2019) and may also challenge the human capacity for self-direction and choosing of desired ends, even as they can make the means of many everyday activities dramatically easier (Gransche 2020).
The research thus aims to investigate these dynamics of fluid assemblages by linking properties of things and available modes of interaction with and through them to the ways in which they mediate interaction and participation in larger platforms, thereby also mediating platformed relations among various actors and interests as one of their primary (but backgrounded) functions. There are two parts to this. The first relates to how these platformed relations can be negotiated (or not) by end users, while the second considers the broader political implications of enrolling people into particular sociotechnical systems and modes of value generation through the things they use as part of everyday practices. The key question that comes into view then is: If the things we design and deploy entail political gatherings where decisions are made that shape or even determine forms of life (Heidegger 1971; Winner 1986; Binder et al. 2011), how might the connected things and platforms we now live with be ethically (re)designed to support (posthuman) sociotechnical futures worth wanting (Vallor 2016)?
