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Cities are currently being redesigned with sensors and data at their core. Environmental monitoring, crime tracking and traffic mapping are just a few examples of the socio-technical systems that are remaking cities. These systems are emergent sites of politics, values, and ethics where human and nonhuman actors collaborate, negotiate and debate the futures of their cities. One the one hand, they can be used for prediction, measurement and decision-making, but, on the other hand, they can also be harnessed to imagine alternative possible urban futures. Designers have an important role to play in mediating, making sense of, and intervening in these projects, which are at the intersection of the work of a variety of stakeholders including governments, business and citizens. This article draws on science and technology studies (STS) to think through ways designers can evolve existing human-centered design (HCD) methodologies to contend with socio-technical complexity at a time of great economic and environmental crisis. In particular, this article argues that it is necessary to create and explore methodologies that decenter the human and take the nonhuman seriously in order to meaningfully engage in the design of cities with more responsible, accountable, and ethical ways of engaging with emerging technologies.

This article offers a disabled perspective on the ways in which AI systems (and their failures) are experienced by offering an account of living with a “smart” medical device for over ten years. By bringing together autoethnographic vignettes with transcribed data from machines and examples from crip making practice, the article illustrates the ways in which the body is rendered into both a hopeful and harmful testbed. The article proposes that the field of design take a “critical data studies” perspective to better understand the social consequences of technology.

While much feminist STS has focused on science and laboratories as sites of critical engagement, feminism and feminist theory has introduced alternative sites of knowledge production and engagement. This essay draws on new materialism and feminist theories of nature, embodiment and technology in order to analyze the disabled cyborg body as an epistemic site of feminist science. In particular, I analyze my own experience of adopting and using networked technologies—specifically, an insulin pump and glucose monitor--to manage Type 1 diabetes and the kinds of scientific practices that I engage in on a daily basis. These technologies and practices deserve attention in terms of what they can teach us about common discourses around science, innovation and infrastructure and, ultimately, about ourselves. 

The role and embodiment of the designer/artist in making publics is significant. This special issue draws attention to reflexive practices in Art & Design, and questions how these practices are embedded in the formations and operations of publics, grounded in six cases of participatory design conducted in the United States, India, Turkey, England, Denmark, and Belgium. From these design practices, typologies of participation are formulated that describe the role of the designer. These typologies describe different and sometimes conflicting epistemologies—providing designers with a vocabulary to communicate a diversity of participatory settings and supporting reflexive practices.

How might rich, critical and nuanced concepts from Science and Technology Studies (STS) be integrated into art and design practice? Conversely, how might methodologies from art and design practice be introduced into STS? This chapter argues that trading zones between STS and design allow for the development of hybrid vocabularies that can support the emergence of new disciplines and fields of study that are better suited to understanding complex socio-technical systems in more visual and tangible ways. Specifically, we argue that by working with STS theories in multiple formats and media - from narratives, stories and films to objects, prototypes, visualizations and images - it is possible to create hybrid entities that trouble traditional binary categories. In particular, in this chapter, we are particularly interested in trading zones around theories of the posthuman and the more than human.

This work explores studies from around the world show how the social media tools of Web 2.0 are shaping engagement with cities, communities, and spaces. This title examines how this increasingly open, collaborative, and personalizable technology is shaping not just our social interactions but new kinds of civic engagement.

This dissertation examines the forms of organizing that occur when code—digital information, networks and interfaces—meets place. Over the past decade since the mainstream adoption of the Internet, there has been a growing body of scholarship about the role of media, communication and information technology in enabling the work of virtual organizations. However, the role of place has been significantly under-theorized. During the same period, our homes, offices and cities have become populated with a wide variety of mobile and wireless technologies—mobile phones, wireless fidelity (WiFi), radio frequency identification tags (RFID) and wireless sensors—that make up an invisible digital information layer in physical space. In order to describe emerging socio-technical arrangements, this dissertation analyzes the people and organizations for whom WiFi networks, and the spaces that they inhibit, play an important role. These include, for example, freelancers coworking from a Starbucks Coffee in New York, hacktivists innovating open source wireless protocols in a basement in Berlin and social entrepreneurs building bottom-up mesh networks in San Francisco. Drawing on theories from communications and science and technology studies, this dissertation applies network ethnography to analyze themes of social construction, sociality and locality. This dissertation argues that mobile and wireless technologies enable an ad-hoc, community or peer-to-peer form of organizing that is deeply embedded in physical location in contrast to current notions of virtual organizations. The concept of codescapes—the integration of digital networks with physical space—is developed to capture the emerging modes of communication, collaboration and innovation that are occurring at the intersection of technology and place. This conceptual refraining of forms of organizing is essential in order to understand the ways in which organizations, architecture, policies and technologies themselves are being reshaped.

Cellular senescence is a stress response with broad pathophysiological implications. Senotherapies can induce senescence to treat cancer or eliminate senescent cells to ameliorate ageing and age-related pathologies. However, the success of senotherapies is limited by the lack of reliable ways to identify senescence. Here, we use nuclear morphology features of senescent cells to devise machine-learning classifiers that accurately predict senescence induced by diverse stressors in different cell types and tissues. As a proof-of-principle, we use these senescence classifiers to characterise senolytics and to screen for drugs that selectively induce senescence in cancer cells but not normal cells. Moreover, a tissue senescence score served to assess the efficacy of senolytic drugs and identified senescence in mouse models of liver cancer initiation, ageing, and fibrosis, and in patients with fatty liver disease. Thus, senescence classifiers can help to detect pathophysiological senescence and to discover and validate potential senotherapies. Identifying senescence is complicated by a lack of universal markers. Here, Duran et al. use nuclear morphology features to devise machine-learning classifiers that detect senescence in cell lines and liver sections of patients and mouse models of aging and disease.