A Modest Proposal: (Possible) Implications for Appropriation

TL;DR

This paper discusses how technology design embeds politics and values, emphasizing the need for the CHI community to prioritize the implications of appropriation in research to address societal impacts.

Contribution

It advocates for integrating discussions of appropriation and societal implications as a core aspect of HCI research and design practices.

Findings

Highlighting the embedding of values in ICT infrastructure

Calling for a social contract between technologists and society

Proposing the CHI community adopt norms for discussing appropriation

Abstract

As technologies are developed and constructed, designers may or may not be aware that they are embedding politics and values into their artifacts. Computer scientists operate and advance their field by building layers of abstraction into software and hardware to reduce the complexity of interfaces, making the artifacts they create zuhanden for others in part by imposing constraints. The increasing reliance of global populations and economies on communication mediated by many information and communications technologies (ICTs) transforms them from applications into communications infrastructure, elevating the importance of considering the values embodied in those infrastructures. I argue that the status quo bias and economic inertia of built-infrastructure requires a reevaluation of research in light of the de facto global technocracy to consider a nouveau social contract between infrastructural theorists, scientists, designers, and engineers and the current and future generations who will be constrained by that infrastructure as it is reified. The CHI community is uniquely situated to establish a norm of including a discussion of the implications of appropriation as first class topic in research output.