Image: Midjourney
Research project Digitalisation has changed the character of many everyday interactions. Use of digital connected things means participation in data-driven ecosystems in which end users are often the ones being used. This research programme explores the conceptual and methodological approaches needed to understand these shifts and to support responsible design.
This research programme examines how connected products and services draw people into data-driven ecosystems, where everyday use supports platform logics of prediction, control, and value extraction. It develops concepts and methods to show how designed interactions invite particular behaviours and shape relations between users, platform owners, and other stakeholders. The aim is to support responsible alternatives, including ways for people to negotiate participation and for designers to contribute to ethical, democratically governed sociotechnical futures.
Digitalisation 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 to deliver effective prediction and control based on behavioral data. 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 simply accepting opaque and often exploitative terms of service. This research project thus aims to investigate these dynamics 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)?
This research programme has been set up in connection to the EU-funded DCODE MSCA network, in particular the work package on democratic data governance.
