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Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts
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ItemDesign for Public Librarianship(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2022-04-28) Kozubaev, SandjarThis 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.
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ItemAll data are human: The human infrastructure of civic data(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020-07-27) Peer, Firaz AhmedThis 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.
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ItemCohousing IoT: Designing edge cases in the internet of things(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2018-11-07) Jenkins, ThomasCohousing IoT is a research through design project that considers emerging domestic technologies and their relationship to alternative living arrangements, particularly cohousing communities. Cohousing is a form of semi-communal living where private homes lie around shared space. Each residence is self-sufficient, but together the community can offer social support that would otherwise be absent. Cohousing communities typically feature a common house, which may include an industrial kitchen and large dining area for common meals, large-scale laundry facilities, recreational spaces, or even a wood shop. This domestic arrangement of things makes it clear that traditional assumptions around the smart home fall flat. What would an Internet of Things look like when spread across multiple houses but only one home? Cohousing communities offer a perspective to critique existing IoT practice as well as a site for producing design work that generates site-specific alternatives. In the domestic context, what makes a “home” is an object ecology comprised of all sorts of things: plates, furniture, heating vents, entertainment devices, family members, rugs and more. Cohousing extends this notion to neighbors, shared responsibilities, and so on. This project provides a theoretical foundation for ecological design in order to create community-based domestic objects in novel ways. It describes and classifies the contemporary Internet of Things to provide as a springboard for design prototyping. Finally, it uses this ecological approach to develop speculative Internet of Things devices for cohousing communities.
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ItemDigital naturalism: Designing a digital media framework to support ethological exploration(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2015-08-19) Quitmeyer, Andrew J.This research aims to develop and evaluate a design framework for creating digital devices that support the exploration of animal behaviors in the wild. In order to carry out this work, it both studies ethology’s foundational ideas through literature and also examines the contemporary principles at a rainforest field station through on-site ethnographies, workshops, design projects, and interactive performances. Based upon these personal and practical investigations, this research then synthesizes a framework to support digital-ethological practice. Finally, this framework is utilized to design additional ethological expeditions and activities in order to assess the framework itself. The resulting framework encourages digital technology that supports four key concepts. Technological Agency pushes for devices that promote understanding of their own internal functions. The tenet of Contextual Crafting leads designers and ethologists to create devices in close proximity to their intended use. Behavioral Immersion promotes visceral interactions between the digital and organismal agents involved. Finally, Open-Endedness challenges researchers to create adaptable tools which strive to generate questions rather than answering them. Overall, this research, referred to as Digital Naturalism, explores a developing design space for computers in the wild.
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ItemThe work of user experience design: materiality and cultures in designing(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2015-07-22) Lodato, Thomas JamesAt a computational technology company called LTC, a large array of employees worked together to design the user experience (UX) of a variety of products. The empirical case study explores the relationship amongst the work of UX design, the work setting, and the larger strategic claims being made about the value, efficacy, and importance of design methods. The main research question is: How is the activity of design reflected and constructed by a local culture and material environment? By addressing the way designing occurs in a particular setting, the dissertation unpacks assumptions about setting and ideology within design studies and human-computer interaction. These assumptions impact the legitimacy of design as work, and challenge accepted justifications for the role of design in the development of technological artifacts. A better understanding of design work explores the proliferation of design as a general strategy for problem-solving, while questioning the agenda of this proliferation. The case study follows three accounts of UX design work at LTC. The research connects these accounts to theoretical concerns within design studies and HCI about agency, the setting of design, and the limits on design practice.
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ItemThe dilution of avant-garde subcultural boundaries in network society(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2015-01-12) Jimison, David M.This dissertation identifies the diluting effects that network society has had on the avant-garde subcultures, by first building a framework through which to understand the social structure and spatial production of the historical avant-garde, and then comparing this with contemporary avant-garde movements. The avant-garde is a cultural tradition that originated in modern 18th century Europe and North America, that critically responds to hegemonic power structures and mainstream cultural assumptions. I use the term “avant-garde subcultures” because my research focuses on the entire social group of the avant-garde. Most scholarship on the avant-garde has overlooked the importance that social relations, in particular supportive actors, and collaborative spaces have served in the creativity of the avant-garde. During the past twenty years, as society has shifted into a dependence on networked interactive technologies, the boundaries which protect these avant-garde spaces and social relations were diluted. As a result, avant-garde subcultures have entered a phase of recursively repeating themselves and culturally stagnating. I begin by reviewing the historical avant-garde and subcultures, building an overarching theory that explains that avant-garde is a type of subculture. Using past scholarship that maps the conceptual lineage from early bohemians to 1970s punk rock, I synthesize a set of traits which all avant-garde subcultures exhibit, and which can be used to build their genealogy. I then extend this genealogy to contemporary art practitioners, to prove that the avant-garde tradition continues to this day. Next, I develop a philosophical understanding of the importance of space for hegemonic power structures, based largely on the work of Henri Lefebvre. I explain how avant-garde subcultures produce spaces of representation in the cafes, bars and night clubs they inhabit, which challenge hegemony by being different from normal values and aesthetics. I reference first-hand accounts of these spaces of representation, to show how they enable the collaboration and creative thinking that is most often associated with the avant-garde. The avant-garde protect these spaces through a set of cultural boundaries: fashion, slang, esoteric knowledge, accumulation, and physical space. Manuel Castell's concept of network society depicts how hegemonic power structures have become pervasive, and thus can overcome the boundaries of avant-garde subcultures. As a result, avant-garde subcultures have increasingly become retrogressive and fluid. Some avant-garde practitioners, such as tactical media, have evolved methods for addressing these problems. While these are effective in continuing the avant-garde tradition of introducing difference, there are no adequate methods for producing new spaces of representation. I examine Eyebeam, an arts and technology center, which has since 1997 provided a space for many contemporary practitioners. While unique in its circumstances, Eyebeam has adopted several processes which have enabled it to overcome the diluting effects of network society, thereby providing a potential model for building future spaces of representation.
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ItemCity of atoms: en-racinating media art and public space in Atlanta(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010-04-08) Hicks, CinqueDesigners of information communication technologies (ICTs) in public space often fall into the trap of designing only for the "flaneur," an unembedded mobile subject in the generic global city. They deracinate the experience of space and support the global flâneur as the paradigmatic deracinated subject. In this thesis I propose a specific vision of "en-racinating" media, that is media that takes the specificity of place seriously. A careful consideration of public art can help us in this endeavor by leveraging the artistic notion of "site specificity" in the most culturally grounded meaning of the term. I examining three public digital media/information-based public art works through the lens of urban informatics in order to see how the works do or do not en-racinate experience in a specific city: Atlanta
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ItemWe the undersigned: anonymous dissent and the struggle for personal identity in online petitions(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-02-12) Riley, WillAnonymous signatures pose a significant threat to the legitimacy of the online petition as a persuasive form of political communication. While anonymous signatures address some privacy concerns for online petitioners, they often fail to identify petitioners as numerically distinct and socially relevant persons, Since anonymous signatures often fail to personally identify online petitioners, they often fail to provide sufficient reason for targeted political authorities to review and respond to their grievances. To recover the personal rhetoric of the online petition in a way that strikes a balance between the publicity and privacy concerns of petitioners, we should reformat online petitions as pseudonymous social networks of personal testimony between petitioners and targeted political authorities. To this end, the pseudonymous signatures of online petitions should incorporate social frames, co-authored complaints and demands, multimedia voice, and revisable support.