Discomfort in the making of technologies: (re-) choreographing agency

Abstract

We invite CSCW scholars to collaboratively explore \textit{discomfort} in the practices of technology design and production. As technology practitioners, we are often believed to have responsibility for the development of technology, yet building of technology is always a collective enterprise. We are inviting the workshop participants to explore the collective, embodied, experiential and ecological nature of technology production with the help of choreography-inspired techniques. The first part of the workshop will be devoted to the sharing of participants' submissions. In the second part, with the help of body-based exercises, we will articulate the discomforts of building and researching technology in the age of surveillance capitalism. The main workshop goal is to facilitate community building among the tech practitioners and researchers, who share the experience of discomfort around topics such as ecological crisis, post-colonialism, and social (in)justice. Our second goal is to explore the limits of individual responsibility in small and large scale technology production. Our third goal is to create a shared data base of methodologies of exploring discomfort and, more broadly, the embodied nature of technology.