New Media in Design and Practice: Social Media Companies in Transnational Circuits

Jordan Kraemer, PhD Student, Department of Anthropology

This project proposes to investigate the transnational links between digital media use in urban Germany, and their design and implementation at technology companies in Silicon Valley, in the United States. As part of a broader dissertation project, this study will examine ethnographically how popular new media sites and services (social networking sites, microblogging feeds, text messaging, and so forth) are targeted towards certain users (such as US-based English speakers, often young, mobile, and middle-class), to compare this process with how new media are taken up by German and European users in unexpected and unintended ways. This phase of the research will consist of structured and semi-structured interviews with designers and programmers at social media companies in Northern California, to situate new media in the context of creative cultural production and consumption, while considering more broadly how geographic scales are generated and experienced through media practices (such as the local, national, and transnational). In this way, this project aims to illuminate how digital and interactive media participate in scalemaking projects at multiple spatial levels, incorporating methods from science studies while speaking to media anthropology, social computing, and cultural geography.

Technology and the Homeless

Marc Sampson, Home of Homeless

Jahmeilah Richardson, PhD student, Informatics

We cannot ignore that marginalized communities, such as the homeless, are users of digital and traditional technologies in urban settings. This research is an exploration of issues surrounding the ecology of technologies encountered by the homeless in Los Angeles County. I will undertake an ethnographic investigation to further our understanding of the relationship between homelessness and technology. This includes focusing on space, time, and materials in homeless survival strategies and routines. I will examine whether the homeless embrace or resist digital and other technologies, how they respond to the constraints and impositions of technologies, how they appropriate them for their use, and whether technologies pose any potential threats to them. The approach will take into account homeless people’s characteristic ways of thinking and acting as they relate to the social settings they inhabit and the artifacts within them. The findings will broaden our understandings of homeless people, and provide resources for informing the design of technologies that may be useful to them.

Online Gaming in South Korea

Stephen Rea, PhD student, Department of Anthropology

My project will look at the economic, political, social, and cultural implications of online computer gaming in South Korea. I am especially interested in the ritual sites of computer gaming in Korea, the PC Bangs, and why there is a marked preference for gaming in these sites as opposed to the home, as well as the aspirational aspect of gaming as a means of play-as-work for young Koreans who aspire to one day be professional gamers. Finally, I am interested in the role of the Korean state in the gaming industry, especially the strain between the public personae of professional gamers and their roles as citizens in regards to compulsory military service.

Making 2.0: Crafting in the Age of the Internet

Julka Almquist, PhD Student, Department of Planning, Policy and Design

Although globalization has spurred the mass production of disposable consumables, digital culture has also spawned a counter-tendency: the return of handicrafts. In Making 2.0, I will conduct an ethnographic study of crafters who use a variety of digital tools to further their creative, economic, social, and political goals, from the design process itself through self-branding, sales, distribution, and social networking. To conduct my research I will employ three data collection methods: archival research, in-depth interviews and participant observation. Within my research I am fundamentally interested in the way in which design expresses and reproduces power, and the ways in which people resist these forms of power and empower themselves through acts of appropriation, reinterpretation, and production. In order to explore the issue of empowerment, I will investigate how crafters use the internet to design, sell and distribute goods while mobilizing and organizing as a group with a distinct social and political agenda (“craftivism”). I will also try to determine how access to a global market affects the way in which the crafters produce their goods. Beyond this I would like to explore how traditional crafts and digital media became bound up with each other (the paradox of handicraft returning by virtue of the virtual). And how “Web 2.0” database driven applications have changed the ways in which vendors produce, market, and distribute their goods.

Digital Design Practice

Lilly Irani, PhD student, Department of Informatics

Following from the Appropriate Technology movement of the 1970s, methods of user- or human-centered design (HCD) has been pursued as a way of responsibly and profitably making interventions and products for development, for sale, or both.  HCDmethods travel across global networks of consultancy services, multinational corporate practices, trade magazines, and institutionalized forms of design education. For example, prominent design consultancy IDEO, sponsored by The Rockefeller Foundation, creates how-to-guides and workbooks for designers working in development contexts. My fieldwork at an Indian design firm working locally and with MNCs will ask what kinds of reappropriations, makings of meaning, resistances, and transformations characterize the projects framed as design in transnational contexts.

Welcome!

Welcome! We’ve set up this blog to share information and foster discussion for the “People and Practices” research initiative at UC Irvine. PAPR@UCI brings together a wide range of researchers from across campus, connecting Informatics, Anthropology, Arts, Humanities, Design, and Education, to name just some. We are connected by an abiding interest in information technology as a site for social and cultural production and the emergence of new forms of practice. This particular initiative is supported by, and conducted in collaboration with, colleagues from the People and Practices Research group at Intel Corporation, and also connected to research going on at Goldsmiths College and other academic centers.

In Fall 2008, we held a campus competition for research projects in this broad research area. Over the next few weeks, we will begin by posting brief summaries of the 17 projects that we were able to support.

If you would like to participate in our discussions, please email papr@uci.edu and we’ll set you up with an account.