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This article engages with history as a speculative space for the purpose of critically engaging with discourses around the politics of technology in HCI. Drawing on approaches within critical design and based on evidence from two different projects, we develop an approach, counterfactual actions , that moves beyond the creation of artifacts and towards more situated, embodied, and performative engagements. In one project, Reimaging Work, we used a participatory game to engage stakeholders from social and economic justice organizations in Chicago. The other project, Future Design Studio, invited audience members at a futurist festival to create artifacts from the future and then invited improvisational actors to build worlds around them. We argue that a focus on counterfactual actions supports a more relational approach to understanding the politics of socio-technical systems and infrastructures, allowing participants to gain a meaningful understanding of the ways in which technology could be designed otherwise in line with ethics, values and social justice concerns.

The field of science communication is plagued by challenges. Communicators face the difficulty of responding to unjustified public skepticism over issues like climate change and COVID-19 while also acknowledging the fallibility and limitations of scientific knowledge. Our goal in this paper is to suggest a new model for science communication that can help foster more productive, respectful relationships among all those involved in science communication. Inspired by the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, we develop an experience model, according to which science communication consists in people’s experiences with science and the meanings they develop from those experiences. Three principles are central to the model: experience is cumulative, context matters, and audiences have agency. We argue that this model has significant implications both for communication research and practice, which we illustrate by applying it to the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy. We show how science communicators can help to identify and alleviate structural factors that contribute to skepticism as well as fostering opportunities for meaning making around shared experiences.

This article explores Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as an “object of care” for use in examining the relationship between creativity and responsibility in the sciences and beyond. Through three short sketches from different disciplinary lenses—literature, science and technology studies, and feminist studies—readers get a sense of the different ways scholars might consider Shelley’s text as an object of care. Through an analysis and synthesis of these three sketches, the authors illustrate the value of such an object in thinking about broad cultural issues. The article acts as a kind of boundary object by creating distinct, yet overlapping narratives from an object that is owned by many social worlds. The three sketches reveal Frankenstein as a thoughtful consideration about what it means to care for, or fail to care for, one’s creation, rather than as a cautionary tale about the evils of scientific hubris. Although infrastructures at universities often prevent interdisciplinary dialogue, the article concludes that purposeful boundary objects created around objects of care like Frankenstein can help build bridges and create shared meanings for new interdisciplinary spaces.

This article explores entanglements and frictions between labour advocates and their relationship to technologies in future of work narratives in the United States. Drawing on literature from science and technology studies and media studies, we argue that there is an opportunity to move beyond discussions of technology as a ‘black box’ in order to deepen these entanglements and expose the frictions within these discourses. As a means of engaging with the ways in which the future of work is being imagined and opening up discussions around technology, we conducted a one-day participatory design workshop that uses a game in order to reveal the philosophies embedded in labour activism and technology. doi: 10.15307/fcj.26.189.2015 issue 26: Entanglements Activism and Technology

In this article, we examine the way images make arguments about science. The two examples we put forth make arguments about Darwinian theory. Darwin’s theory is a useful example, because the artists make visual arguments in many different ways, and the examples we present here expose the role of aesthetics in making scientific arguments. The first image, Plate 67 from Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature, shown in Fig. 1a, depicts Chiroptera, or bats, evenly spaced on a white field. The second, Charley Harper’s Darwin’s Finches from The Giant Golden Book of Biology, shows 13 finches, also placed next to one another on a white field (Fig. 1b). Although these two images appear to have little in common, they can both be viewed as arguments for some aspect of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. This paper will analyze these images in light of the image-makers and their styles. We will show how these images connect to broader scientific discourses. In doing so, we hope to show that visual style is intimately connected with scientific practice. As we shall see, just as artwork may always be understood in terms of style, to neglect to take account of the style of a scientific image is also to miss something about its content. Aesthetic components are not auxiliary to scientific representation but are required to make sense of images and to understand the scientific discourse they represent.

In this paper we describe MoBoogie, an application that allows users to manipulate and arrange music through movement. MoBoogie is designed to foster experiences in creative expression for children and potentially adults. The application responds to users' movements by changing variables in a continuous stream of music loops. Results from this study suggest that the creative expressions arose in the joint space of movement and music, and did not primarily have to be in one form or the other. This allowed users with limited experience in dance and music making to be creative in such forms of expression.