Alright, as promised, I will provide you with a little report on my experiences with and impressions of this year’s 4S conference in Sydney, Australia. The conference’s overall theme had been “TRANSnational” STS, something that was well reflected altogether by the conferences content and also by the ‘performance’ of its participants, with many of them traveling very far to make it to the conference venue. The 4S took place, once again, [Read more…]
Ducknography, meetings of diversities, and more STS relata at the EASST 2018
Well, dear readers, the EASST 2018 conference at Lancaster University, England, has already been for a while. However, I want to provide you with a few little impressions on this year’s EASST conference. In regard of the event’s chronology, I put this before my 4S conference report. Now, first of all: What a peculiar, charming and exciting conference venue. [Read more…]
A quick thought on science of science and stories of stories
Before I post a short report on the (spoiler so far: great) 4S conference 2018 in Sydney, Australia, I want to share a thought that had been inspired by a very compelling discussion I had at the conference with Nicholas Rowland and Barbara Bok but also is somehow a product of the whole conference itself and its vibrant discourses. [Read more…]
CHI 2018 – New experiences, old dramas. A field report.
I had the great pleasure of visiting th
is year’s ACM SIGCHI (i.e. ACM’s “Special Interest Group Computer Human Interaction” – while one has to recognize that the common disciplinary term is “HCI: Human Computer Interaction”) conference in Montreal, Canada. The conference took place between the 20th and the 26th of April. So, yes, it’s been a while, but as you will see there was a lot of stuff to process. Anyway, they had invited me to join their “Hacking and making at time-bounded events”-Workshop, which was investigating [Read more…]
When You Win a Hackathon: an Ethnographic Odyssee…
Frequent readers of this blog will remember that I do research on hackathons as (uprising) socio-economic institutions and time-spaces of social creativity and inventiveness. You might also remember that my team and I actually had won an IoT and public transport themed hackathon.
As a result, we have been invited to present our project concept and ideas at the local public transport corporation. This was very exciting, appreciating and, most of all, a great opportunity to shed some light on an issue I mostly had to speculate about: the transition from hackathonian invention to full-scale innovation projects within established organizational contexts. [Read more…]
Exhaustion, Souvenirs, and Openness: A Few Research Notes from my Hackathon Expeditions
In order to study practices of creative software engineering, I have decided to do ethnographies on hackathons. I was at several of such events and have just returned from my last expedition into that peculiar realm of self realization, participation, technical playfulness, and, often claimed by the organizers to be most important, fun. However, there are three experiences from those expeditions, which I want to highlight and share. [Read more…]