"WHEN IS NOT THE INFRASTRUCTURE": A STUDY OF THE ENTANGLEMENT BETWEEN HUMAN AND SOCIO-TECHNICAL INFRASTRUCTURES

Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Lyu, Yao
- Graduate Program:
- Informatics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- September 18, 2024
- Committee Members:
- Carleen Maitland, Program Head/Chair
Marcela Borge, Outside Unit & Field Member
Priya Kumar, Major Field Member
Jack Carroll, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Mary Beth Rosson, Major Field Member - Keywords:
- Human-Computer Interaction
Infrastructure Studies
Accessible Computing - Abstract:
- Infrastructures are large-scale systems that enable human societies' routines, like power grids which ensure residents’ electricity supply. In 1996, Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder revisited the term “infrastructure” as a conceptual framework for information system studies. With the theoretical foundation built by Star and colleagues, through decades of research of infrastructure in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), numerous scholars have been investigating how relational practices can be arranged to create infrastructures in various contexts. Especially, the last decade has witnessed the rise of a strand of research that focuses on the failure of infrastructure and infrastructure stakeholders' work on resolving the breakdowns in HCI community. This strand pays particular attention to how infrastructure fails to support users' activities or even constraints users' experiences; it also reveals infrastructure stakeholders' technology-mediated interactions and practices that fix infrastructural failures or overcome infrastructural constraints. Speaking to the notion of the “when is infrastructure” proposed by Star, we frame the uprising strand of infrastructure research as the study of “when is not infrastructure.” Joining the study of "when is not infrastructure," this thesis aims to critically examine socio-technical infrastructures, especially the ones supported by emerging information and communication technologies. Specifically, we use three empirical examples to elucidate the three dimensions of the entanglement between human and infrastructure: friction, uncertainty, and inaccessibility. The three examples report the ethnography research of three populations and their interactions with problematic infrastructures, including residents’ adoption of contact tracing infrastructure in a collectivist culture, international travelers’ experiences with travel infrastructure under travel bans, and visually impaired users' interactions with social media infrastructure in their daily lives. The ethnography research involves observation, semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and thematic analysis. The expected contributions of this dissertation are three-fold: 1) by presenting the three empirical research projects, we question the assumption of existing infrastructures by foregrounding why and how infrastructure is not able to support human activities in certain situations; 2) also, we seek a more seamless, transparent, inclusive, and accessible conception of infrastructure by theoretically discussing the infrastructural problems appear in the three empirical examples; 3) lastly, we point out future research plans for infrastructure studies that can be combined with culture studies, crisis informatics, or accessible computing.