MRL Papers at ECSCW 2017

In this paper we examine the notion of privacy as promoted in the digital economy and how it has been taken up as a design challenge in the fields of CSCW, HCI and Ubiquitous Computing. Against these prevalent views we present an ethnomethodological study of digital privacy practices in 20 homes in the UK and France, concentrating in particular upon people’s use of passwords, their management of digital content, and the controls they exercise over the extent to which the online world at large can penetrate their everyday lives. In explicating digital privacy practices in the home we find an abiding methodological concern amongst members to manage the potential ‘attack surface’ of the digital on everyday life occasioned by interaction in and with the networked world. We also find, as a feature of this methodological preoccupation, that privacy dissolves into a heterogeneous array of relationship management practices. Accordingly we propose that ‘privacy’ has little utility as a focus for design, and suggest instead that a more productive way forward would be to concentrate on supporting people’s evident interest in managing their relationships in and with the networked world.

We present fieldwork findings from the deployment of an interactive sensing system that supports the work of energy advisors who give face-to-face advice to low-income households in the UK. We focus on how the system and the data it produced are articulated in the interactions between professional energy advisors and their clients, and how they collaboratively anticipate, rehearse, and perform data work. In addition to documenting how the system was appropriated in advisory work, we elaborate the ‘overhead cost’ of building collaborative action into connected devices and sensing systems, and the commensurate need to support discrete workflows and accountability systems to enable the methodical incorporation of the IoT into collaborative action. We contribute an elaboration of the social, collaborative methods of data work relevant to those who seek to design and study collaborative IoT systems.

Games that revolve around user-generated content have been explored mainly from a ludic perspective, leaving the actual practices that are entailed in content production underexplored. What we argue in this paper is that there is an underlying economy in Minecraft’s community, which plays a significant role in the game’s current form. Our ethnographic fieldwork revealed the various aspects of the work of producing in-game content, by teasing out the discrete segments of the arc of work of commissioning, creating and delivering a Minecraft map. The infrastructure this work relies on is fragmented though, with the various accountability systems in place being appropriations by the players themselves. This raises a number of design implications related to how members coordinate tasks and articulate their work.