Facts

Contact person:
Maria Hellström Reimer
Financer:
  • The Crafoord Foundation
Responsible at MaU:
Maria Hellström Reimer
Affiliated:
  • Per Linde - Senior lecturer in Interaction Design
Time frame:
01 November 2020 - 31 October 2022
Faculty/department:
Research environment :
Research subject:

Project description

The post-doctoral project Knowing from Somewhere highlights the intersection between the expansive technological field of Internet of Things (IoT) and the research field of Interaction design. A central theme for the project is participatory and collaborative technologies and the issue of what role technological interventions – in the project mentioned as hacking – can take on in a data-driven society. Despite the fact that considerable attention has been given to the issue of how knowledge and innovation can be developed through ‘disruptive’ practices, the understanding on grassroots communities in a wider societal perspective remains fairly underexplored.

A starting point for the project is the hypotheses that such informal communities are conditioned by the larger socio-technical structures that they are embedded in, and through the fact that a creative and critical exploration of them can render important knowledge contributions in relation to digitalization and the ethical implications thereof. The project’s purpose is to, through participatory observation and experimental design research together with Swedish ‘hackerspaces,’ develop an understanding for the potential meaning of ’hacking’ as an ethically motivated and technologically driven curiosity in relation to IoT based technologies.

The research questions posed in the project Knowing From Somewhere is to understand what extent hacking can be seen as a kind of knowledge-production and eventually if hackerspaces can contribute to a creative critique of the data-driven/data-enabled society, in favor of a position towards data as being a form of civic empowerment towards a partially automated society. The wider scope is to highlight the gap between established knowledge-production within the field of IoT development and different communities that act on their own initiatives and develop practices so as to maintain or widen their own capacities for civic agency in their everyday life.