Bedö, Viktor
E-Mail-Adresse
Geburtsdatum
Suchergebnisse
MealSense: A fiction about datafication and algorithms in commoning food
Commoning is on the rise as a socio-economic practice advancing the outlook of more just food systems. While smaller commoning operations can predominantly rely on informal arrangements, tracking and monitoring the conditions of the use of resources becomes vital for larger operations. This paper explores the datafication of hunger, pleasure, ingredients, cooking and spoiled food for crafting imaginaries of commoning-based algorithmic food futures. To address not only frictions around datafication but also gainful proposals, the paper mobilizes concepts of ‘unwieldy data’, ‘good enough data’, and ‘minimal feasible datafication’. It uses fiction writing as a method to amalgamate scholarly references in the field of citizen sensing and smart city critique with preliminary learnings from a speculative city-making project into an infrastructural proposal. The text aims to prompt a wider debate about the potentials and pitfalls of algorithmic governance and datafication in infrastructures for the urban-scale distribution of material resources, such as food.
I Am a Nettle: Approaching More-than-Human Service Design
The workshop title ‘Data Interactions In The More-than-Human Smart City’ on the first reading suggests questions about sensor types, algorithms, interfaces, devices, apps, mobility solutions and what they afford to hedgehogs. I would argue that the workshop goes far beyond that in not only investigating knowledge embodied in design, but the frontiers of the knowable for designers’ bodies.
Re-Imagining Commoning Infrastructures and Economies
It is overwhelming to think there are no alternatives or the system is too big for design to generate impact. Commoning is seen as an alternative socio-technic and technological possibility of sensing and computing power promise some possibilities. Material Commons have logistic aspects, thus distribution and challenge infrastructures and market-based economic models. But we are lacking the means of translating the possibilities of technologies into concrete mechanisms and design principles that carry the values of commoning. This paper suggests the creation of imaginaries in combination with situated playful exploration to contribute the evoking what is on the fringes. It proposes a playful (street and video call) exploration format building on a fictional algorithm drive infrastructure for distributing rescued food and draws preliminary reflections about future uses of this and similar formats in designing alternative worlds.
Three-Tier Garden: More-than-Human Choreographies in the Post-COVID City
The Three-Tier Garden is a more-than-human design research project exploring shared urban gardens as places for healing and recovery from the traumatic ruptures caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. It builds on the rapidly growing interest among urban residents in engaging with natural environments, particularly during the period of restrictions. It explores design opportunities for individual and collective posttraumatic growth by strengthening the sense of belonging and grounding, primarily through what we call mutual choreographies: how gardens and gardeners shape each other’s lives through the temporal and socio-spatial infrastructures of the garden.
Making Everyday Things Talk: Speculative Conversations into the Future of Voice Interfaces at Home
What if things had a voice? What if we could talk directly to things instead of using a mediating voice interface such as an Alexa or a Google Assistant? In this paper, we share our insights from talking to a pair of boots, a tampon, a perfume bottle, and toilet paper among other everyday things to explore their conversational capabilities. We conducted Thing Interviews using a more-than-human design approach to discover a thing’s perspectives, worldviews and its relations to other humans and nonhumans. Based on our analysis of the speculative conversations, we identified some themes characterizing the emergent qualities of people’s relationships with everyday things. We believe the themes presented in the paper may inspire future research on designing everyday things with conversational capabilities at home.
Unmaking. Against General Applicability
As belief in the applicability and efficacy of DIY production, open-source, and method sharing has broadened to include institutional hackathons and open-data-fueled and civic 'maker weekends', taking stock and articulating how certain approaches 'work' or 'do not work' within maker culture – and for progressive and expansive creator cultures more generally – continues to be essential. 'Making' is a key concept that frames a host of more specific practices, lending characteristic manual/moral, communal/communicational, aesthetic/ethical, and enacted/ economic inflections and values. Even simple historical, traditional, technological, or digital acts of object and media creation, of art and design, but also of writing and thinking itself, can be recast as 'making'. What is it that happens to the thinking and doing of such activities, when such recasting is desired, chosen, projected, enforced, or assumed?
IoT Cards for Predictive Food Rescue
The IoT Cards for Predictive Food Rescue explores specificities of commoning- and care-based data-driven infrastructure through the lens of prototyping cards. The cards were developed by an experimental design project investigating the predictive distribution of rescued food and the inherent friction between heterogenous situated cooking habits and city-wide infrastructure. The cards present themselves as a subversive extension pack for the IoT Service Kit, a third party open-source prototyping toolset for IoT service design.
Predictive Tech in Scaling Material Urban Commons
Scaling Material Urban Commons is a speculative city-making project investigating automated logistics for commoning material urban commons, such as rescued food. It postulates that some forms of material commons require different forms of beyond-hyperlocal scale commoning. The project critically investigates and prototypes technological and sociotechnical conditions for city-wide commoning of material urban commons, using a predictive-algorithm-based system emulator that orchestrates pickup and drop-off of rescued food in Basel and London. Introducing predictive technology shifts the site of commoning closer towards an algorithm- driven platform, which raises following key questions: What frictions emerge from changing scale in commoning? How to reconcile predictive technologies with local, idiosyncratic food cultures? How to engage in commoning with algorithmic agents in participatory settings? By addressing these questions, the project aims at creating imaginaries of commoning-based smart city alternatives.
Toys for conviviality. Situating ccommoning, computation and modelling
This article explores the use of agent-based modelling as a critical and playful form of engagement with cooperative housing organizations. Because of its inherent complexities vis-à-vis decision-making, commoning is a well-suited field of study to explore the potential of humanities-driven experimental design (media) research to provoke critical reflection, problem-finding and productive complication. By introducing two different agent-based models, the interdisciplinary research team discusses their experience with setting up parameters for modelling, their implications, and the possibilities and limits of employing modelling techniques as a basis for decision-making. While it shows that modelling can be helpful in detecting long-term results of decisions or testing out effects of unlikely yet challenging events, modelling might act as a discursive practice uncovering hidden assumptions inherent in the model setup and generating an increase of scientific uncertainty. The project “ThinkingToys for Commoning” thus argues for a critical modelling practice and culture, in which models act as toys for probing alternative modes of living together and explor- ing the constructedness of methods. In countering late forms of capitalism, the resulting situated and critical practice provides avenues for enabling more self-determined forms of governance.