2020
Arcadia
CI Researcher Pip Thornton’s Arcadia (2020) comments on the role of digital capitalism in the virtual and physical spaces of modern consumerism. Text from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1939) is fed through Google’s advertising platform and displayed as if the words were commodities on a stock exchange. Prices are based on the economic value of the keywords which buy advertising space on Google’s search results pages. Thornton, P. Exhibition at Fruitmarket Gallery Bookshop (2020). Arcadia (2020) – pip thornton art & research Arcadia (2020) – pip thornton art & research
2019
Understanding the Boundaries between Policymaking and HCI
There is a growing body of literature in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) examining the intersection between policymaking and technology research. However, what it means to engage in policymaking in our field, or the ways in which evidence from HCI studies is translated into policy, is not well understood. We report on interviews with 11 participants working at the intersection of technology research and policymaking. Spaa, A., Durrant, A., Elsden, C. and Vines, J., 2019, May. Understanding the Boundaries between Policymaking and HCI. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-15). https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300314
2019
Subprime Language & the Crash
The idea behind the book, which contains contributions from CI Researcher Pip Thornton, is to ask what would it be like to live in a city administered using the business model of Amazon (or Apple, IKEA, Pornhub, Spotify, Tinder, Uber, and more), or a city where critical public services are delivered by these companies? Collectively, the chapters ask us to imagine and reflect on what kind of cities we want to live in and how they should be managed and governed. Thornton, P. in Kitchin, R., Graham, M., Mattern, S. and Shaw, J., (eds) (2019) How to Run a City like Amazon, and Other Fables. London: Meatspace Press (2019). How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables – Meatspace Press
2019
Newspeak (2019): Return of the Word Police
First exhibited at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, CI Researcher, Pip Thornton's Newspeak (2019) is a critical intervention into the power held by Google’s search and advertising platforms in its monetisation and contextual control of language. The work uses George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to draw parallels between the fictional ideas of thought and language control deployed by Big Brother’s Thinkpol in the novel and the all-too factual power wielded by Google over the dissemination of information in an age of digital and algorithmic governance (Rouvroy, Berns, and Carey-Libbrecht 2013). Newspeak (2019) was awarded an honourable mention in the Surveillance Studies Network biennial art competition (2020) and was also shortlisted for the Lumen Prize in 2021. Thornton P. Newspeak (2019): Return of the Word Police. Surveillance & Society. 2023 Dec 7;21(4):506-10. https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/download/16546/11072 See also: https://www.designinformatics.org/news/newspeak-2019/
2019
Searching For An OxChain: Co-Designing Blockchain Applications For Charitable Giving, Ubiquity
The OxChain project investigated the design of blockchain applications in partnership with a large and traditionally trusted institution, Oxfam. We outline some of the potential opportunities that distributed ledger technologies could offer the charity and development sector as a whole, but focus on the challenges of undertaking co-design work in the context of large institutions. We suggest the need to leverage existing trusted relationships and understand the unique value that such institutions offer. Elsden, C., Symons, K., Speed, C., Vines, J. and Spaa, A., 2019. Searching for an OxChain: Co-designing blockchain applications for charitable giving. Ubiquity: The Journal of Pervasive Media, 6(1), pp.5-16. https://doi.org/10.1386/ubiq_00002_1
2019
Value of Data: Shifting values
This whitepaper commissioned by the Data Marketing Association (DMA), authored by Creative Informatics' Founding Director, Chris Speed and Director of Research and Innovation at Edinburgh College of Art; Ewa Luger, is an introduction to the value of data in the digital economy. Speed, C., Luger, E. 2019. Report for Data & Marketing Association. https://dma.org.uk/article/value-of-data-shifting-values
2019
Recipes for Programmable Money
This paper presents a qualitative study of the recent integration of a UK-based, digital-first mobile banking app - Monzo - with the web automation service IFTTT (If This Then That). Through analysis of 113 unique IFTTT 'recipes' shared by Monzo users on public community forums, we illustrate the potentially diverse functions of these recipes, and how they are achieved through different kinds of automation. Elsden, C., Feltwell, T., Lawson, S. and Vines, J., 2019, May. Recipes for programmable money. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-13). https://doi.org./10.1145/3290605.3300481
2019
Understanding, Capturing, and Assessing Value In Collaborative Design Research
The collection of papers in this special issue respond to a tension between the broadening scope, scale and heterogeneity of collaborative design research, and an ever-growing demand from funders and regulatory organisations for the measurement and benchmarking of the work researchers do (Wilsdon 2016). Whitham, R., Moreton, S., Bowen, S., Speed, C. and Durrant, A., 2019. Understanding, capturing, and assessing value in collaborative design research. CoDesign, 15(1), pp.1-7. https://doi.org./10.1080/15710882.2018.1563194
2019
”Not Adopted’: The UK Orphan Works Licensing Scheme and How the Crisis Of Copyright in the Cultural Heritage Sector Restricts Access To Digital Content
This article is a discussion of how digitizing and disseminating Orphan Works, (those works protected by copyright and for which the copyright holder is unable to be identified or, even if identified, cannot be located), in the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) sector could have the potential to significantly reframe collections across audiences and institutions in the United Kingdom and across the world. Martinez, M. and Terras, M., 2019. ‘Not Adopted’: The UK Orphan Works Licensing Scheme and How the Crisis of Copyright in the Cultural Heritage Sector Restricts Access to Digital Content. Open Library of Humanities, 5(1), pp.1-51. https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.335
2019
Sorting Out Valuation in the Charity Shop Designing for Data-Driven Innovation through Value Translation
Recent work within HCI and CSCW has become attentive to the politics of data and metrics in order to highlight the implications of what counts and how. In this paper, we relate these discussions to the longstanding distinctions made between value and values. Elsden, C., Symons, K., Bunduchi, R., Speed, C. and Vines, J., 2019. Sorting out valuation in the charity shop: Designing for data-driven innovation through value translation. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3(CSCW), pp.1-25. https://doi.org./10.1145/3359211
