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• Creative activities in the digital era are influenced by technology and digitalization. • Using time-geography, this paper analyses the spatio-temporal aspects of creativity in technologically mediated work. • The findings reveal how certain spatio-temporal practices, termed creative pockets, enhance creativity, while others hinder it. • The paper calls for more geographical studies on everyday creativity of individuals. Creativity is a process where interactions among individuals, resources, and peers bring about novel outcomes. Such processes have fundamentally changed in the digital era as creative activities are increasingly conducted along technologically mediated practices in spatio-temporally multifaceted contexts. This paper investigates the impact of such transformations on creativity by examining the spatial, temporal, and socio-material elements of creative processes. Drawing upon the literature on creativity and economic geography, and utilising Hägerstrand's time-geography framework, this paper presents a geographical approach to studying the creative processes on an individual level. Specifically, the concepts of projects and pockets of local order are employed to investigate spatio-temporal practices, routines, social interactions, and techno-material relationships during creative work. The empirical material involves nine Finland-based computer scientists. Mixed methods, including interviews, research diaries, and space-time maps, are used to document their everyday creative work. The results show three essential pockets where creative work is best advanced: pockets of flow, pockets of insight, and pockets of creative bundles. The findings further reveal how such pockets are disrupted and prevented in the everyday work of our participants due to spatio-temporal fragmentation, accelerating work-pace and ensuing feelings of time-pressure and digital congestion. The implications of the study extend to creativity management, the future of work in knowledge-intensive and creative professions, and the use of geographical methods in empirical process studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we investigate the evolution of the birdfeeder and analyze it as a multispecies technology, a technological artefact that has co-evolved between multispecies interactions of humans, the target species of the feeding, and unwanted visitors. We use close reading as a method to examine pictures, design descriptions, photos and text sources published in Finnish magazines and newspapers from the late nineteenth century, when birdfeeders were first discussed, until the late twentieth century, with the aim of analyzing how birdfeeder designs and models have changed in relation to various (and especially unwanted) visitor species. Birdfeeders are visited not only by species that humans want to feed but also by several unwanted visitors, such as birds, mammals, bacteria and the weather. Being inspired by posthumanism and Science and Technology Studies (STS), we ask what the role of unwanted visitors has been as co-designers of technological artefacts, here the birdfeeder. Our article discusses the broader subject of how people welcome or exclude other beings from shared environments. We argue that it is vital for environmental humanities scholars to study artefacts and technology and vice versa, for design studies and STS scholars to examine non-humans. We hope to encourage other researchers to ponder how animals, and unwanted users in general, participate in designing technology and artefacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pervasive integration of digital platforms into daily life has amplified their perceived indispensability. This study investigates the factors influencing this perception across countries with contrasting platform landscapes, focusing on platform quality and usage patterns. We conducted surveys in Finland and Korea, countries representing distinct platform ecosystems. The results revealed higher perceived indispensability in Korea than in Finland, with usefulness and habitual platform use emerging as significant predictors of indispensability in both countries. However, the specific aspects of platform quality influencing this perception diverged. In Finland, the platform's comprehensiveness and security risk significantly impacted indispensability, while social interaction features played a negligible role. Conversely, in Korea, social interaction features significantly influenced indispensability, while platform comprehensiveness and security risk were non-significant. These findings underscore the multifaceted nature of digital platform indispensability, shaped by the interaction of platform quality and usage patterns. The contextual variations highlighted by our cross-country comparison suggest that a one-size-fits-all approach to platform regulation or user education may be ineffective. Future research should explore these cultural and platform-specific nuances to devise tailored policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]