(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2022-04-28)
Kozubaev, Sandjar
This doctoral thesis examines the present and futures of public librarians in the U.S. and the role this institution plays in community and civic life. The goal of the research is to answer the question: how might we design for public librarianship? First, I propose to describe and explain public librarianship through the lens of infrastructures and infrastructuring to help illuminate the breadth and diversity of the work of librarians. In doing so, I also uncover insights about the politics and experience of futures, specifically that futures are socio-material and emerge at different scales through infrastructural relations. Second, I propose a series of design provocations to suggest opportunities for design that supports public librarianship as infrastructuring. The primary contribution of this work is to the study and practice of civic and social design on the example of public librarianship. The secondary contribution is to the study and practice of futures.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020-07-27)
Peer, Firaz Ahmed
This dissertation is grounded in issues related to the publicizing of data, which include issues of equitable access, interpretation and use. By engaging with scholarship from Human Computer Interaction and Science and Technology Studies, I contribute to a better understand of the local values and infrastructural arrangements that are required to build, use and maintain equitable data infrastructures that would enable marginalized communities to benefit from the publicizing of data through dashboards. I do this by taking a participatory design based anthropological approach in which I collaborate with local community leaders in order to foreground their needs and values when reimagining their civic data infrastructure.
Doing so led me to identify the key elements of the human infrastructure that need to be considered when designing civic data infrastructures with resource constrained communities. Bringing these elements of the human infrastructure together and reflecting on how my role as a design researcher changed during the scope of this project, I argue that all data are human, and the way we do justice to them is by identifying and building relationships between the human elements of the civic data infrastructures that we are trying to build. This implies that we focus on identifying the human actors that are crucial to these civic data infrastructures, strengthen their working relationships and prioritize their values and needs by including them in our infrastructuring efforts. I hope this dissertation helps researchers and practitioners move beyond the mere publicizing of data as a strategy for data equity, but instead think about realigning the human elements of the underlying data infrastructure in order to empower communities.