Object-Oriented Publics

Abstract

Social computing-or computing in a social context-has largely concerned itself with understanding social interaction among and between people. This paper asserts that ignoring material components-including computing itself-as social actors is a mistake. Computing has its own agenda and agencies, and including it as a member of the social milieu provides a means of producing design objects that attend to how technology use can extend beyond merely amplifying or augmenting human actions. In this paper, we offer examples of projects that utilize the capacity of object-oriented publics to both analyze the conditions and consequences around existing publics and engage with matters of concern inherent to emerging publics. Considering how computing as an actor contributes to the construction of publics provides insight into the design of computational systems that address issues. We end by introducing the idea of the object ecology as a way to coordinate design approaches to computational publics.

Join the Park!

“…Therefore, this strategy promises to offer park users opportunities for participation closely related to their daily activities they already execute in the park, their so-called park practices [20,44]. In accordance with Jenkins et al [18], this strategy considers the process of involving park users in the community from an object-oriented publics perspective, in which both human actors and technological artefacts contribute to the interaction between the park community and the park user. Using digital services to tailor content to the personal interests of the park user might work for park communities, to provide a more personalised process of becoming involved, based on the intentions and motivations of the specific park user [36].…”

Fruit Are Heavy

“…If we look to scholarship on other contexts and practices of environmental sensing, there is no clear answer [17,18,49]. Following from work that explores how sensing technology constructs hybrid-more than humanassemblages of knowledge and action [17,18,19,37,52], we hypothesize that while sensing technologies certainly affect what and how we know, they do not necessarily inhibit practices of commoning. Indeed, within the research on diverse economies that looks specifically at foraging, some authors note that one of the characteristics of foraging is that it sensitizes foragers to recognizing and appreciating the limits of human agency and the different forms of agency expressed through human/nonhuman encounters, which includes trees and bushes and also the multiple factors of the built environment that affect foraging [51].…”

Design through collective action / collective action through design

“…Turning to design to work through contemporary social, political, and economic issues requires new ways of constituting collective action, ways that actively seek to engage participation through multiple subjectivities, not simply through the standard humancentered position of the user. In fact, it may be that we need to more radically decenter the human and consider objects' roles within publics and within the frame of civic entanglements [13,14]. Just as McCarthy and Wright argue that participation in co-design projects is not about turning everyone into a designer [15], but rather about incorporating and empowering multiple subjectivities to participate equally in a project of design, considering how computing encounters the world through a plurality of subjectivities-human and nonhuman-may reveal "user" to be the least important of these subjectivities.…”