Critical Technical Practice as Interdiscipline
Paul Dourish
Informatics
University of California at
Irvine
jpd@ics.uci.edu
INTRODUCTION
We are both trained in Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence (AI) and have moved over the course of our
careers ever closer to the critical social sciences. We are
now senior scholars loosely associated with HumanComputer Interaction (HCI) but maintaining ties as well to
Science & Technology Studies, Design, Media Studies, and
Anthropology. In this work, we have been significantly
influenced and inspired by Agre’s notion of critical
technical practice [1]. One of the flavors of our work is
critical analysis tied deeply to technical understanding;
another (perhaps dwindling) flavor is designing and
implementing computational systems that reflect critical
alternatives to mainstream approaches. One of the goals of
each of our careers has been to get technical conversations
to be more ‘interesting’ where we define ‘interesting’ in
part as including significant critical depth.
We feel, unlike Agre’s experience in AI, this has been fairly
successful in the field of HCI and that conversations we
would consider interesting are now in the mainstream.
Perhaps necessarily in doing so, we have modified our ideas
of what critical technical practices can be and how they can
be fostered since Agre’s original formulation. In this paper,
we’ll reflect specifically on what it means to think of and
institutionally support critical technical practice when
conceived of as an interdiscipline.
MOVEMENT 1: CRITICAL TECHNICAL PRACTICE AS
DISCIPLINE
We start with the recognition that, at least in our
understanding as computer scientists encountering his
work, Agre does not conceive of critical technical practice
as an interdiscipline. This formulation of critical technical
practice as essentially a reformative project remaining
within a technical discipline may sound counterintuitive,
since critical technical practice, both conceptually and in its
historical instantiations, requires engagement between
disciplines: technical disciplines which provide the material
for working out ideas in technical form, and critically
oriented disciplines such as sociology or critical theory
which give traction for illuminating the blindspots of
technical practice and suggesting alternatives to them.
Nevertheless, Agre’s own work on agent systems
demonstrated a desire to reform AI as a discipline, not to do
his own work on the fringes in conversation with other
Phoebe Sengers
Information Science and
Science & Technology Studies
Cornell University
sengers@cs.cornell.edu
fields [2].1 As such we have taken Agrean critical technical
practice not as an attempt to foster interdisciplinarity more
broadly but as an intention to draw critical modes of
thinking into technical disciplines as part of the problemsolving and knowledge-creation processes.
In particular, we see Agre’s formulation of critical technical
practice as intended to reformulate technical disciplines as
simultaneously critical and technical. This would entail a
shift, at least for some technical researchers, from purely
technical modes of work to ones that could switch fairly
seamlessly between technical and critical views on the work
technology does. Certainly it requires for all practitioners
an accounting of the critical aspects of technological design
and analysis. “Reformulation” implies a way to think
different about what is done; “reform” implies perhaps a
more wholescale revision of the enterprise. Critical
technical practice falls somewhere between the two. (Paul
once exasperated a technical colleague by answering the
all-too-common question, “What should I do differently on
the basis of what you’ve told me?” with, “You might well
do just the same, but perhaps for a different reason.”)
Indeed, in some ways we could argue that such reformation
of a technical discipline is exactly what we and our
colleagues have done in HCI – i.e., took a technical
discipline (if HCI counts as ‘technical, which is debatable)
and added a dose of the ‘critical’ to it. This is critical
technical practice broadly construed, since the exact
sequence Agre relates of (1) finding technical impasses; (2)
reorienting them critically; (3) spurring on to new technical
work does not describe the nature of that work very well. In
HCI, such movements between the critical and technical are
sometimes much more deeply intermingled than that
sequence would suggest, and other times practically
impossible to make because of noncommunication between
‘critical’ and ‘technical’ conversations happening
simultaneously within the discipline. Nevertheless, it
would be fair to say that it’s become a place where ‘critical’
It is worth pausing to reflect on the consequences of Agre’s
project. With respect to the question of reformulation and reform,
we should note that Agre’s technical work was wildly successful
within AI, but that success was to Agre’s great chagrin, since he
felt that people appreciated his technical work but not the idea that
he was attempting to express through it. Arguably it was this
mismatch between intent and interpretation that caused him to
seek other areas to explore.
1
and ‘technical’ orientations are in established conversation,
in a way that may be somewhat analogous to what Agre
intended.
MOVEMENT 2: CRITICAL TECHNICAL PRACTICE AS
INTERDISCIPLINE
But more deeply, our sense is that while HCI has become a
more interesting place to be, it’s not where the action is
today when it comes to critical technical practice. To us,
there’s a much more interesting foment going on that’s
running between the disciplines, loosely intersecting with
HCI, Science & Technology Studies, media studies,
software studies, anthropology, design, media art practice,
and communication (and probably other disciplines of
which we are less aware). In part, it is driven by digitalnative scholars in more humanistic disciplines taking
technology construction and the material of computing as a
natural part of their practices. In part, it’s driven by
technological ex-pats like ourselves who find the
conversations and inspirations between the disciplines more
interesting and exciting than those confined within one.
Like critical technical practice, these conversations take as
a basis the idea that technology is always already deeply
social, and that therefore technical and critical modes of
analysis benefit from being in continuous conversation.
Unlike critical technical practice, these conversations are
not necessarily oriented towards enrolling engineers, and
are more politically conscious and intended to engage a
broad public than Agre was in his instantiation as an AI
researcher.
Recognizing this is already happening, and already very
interesting, the questions we find ourselves asking now are
less intellectual than practical and institutional: how do we
foster the development of that rich conversation between
disciplines in such a way that is intellectually and
institutionally sustainable for scholars in the area, despite
significant differences in what the different disciplines
involved reward as valid accomplishments? How do we
maximize our effectiveness and relevance in informing
future sociotechnical worlds? How do we do so in funding
environments, at least in the US, that preferentially validate
work seen as ‘technical’? Our initial thoughts towards
spurring conversations around these questions follow.
ENGINEERING AN INTERDISCIPLINE
We see two key challenges in thinking about the
institutional arrangements that support the work that we
want to do and the communities of scholars that we want to
build and engage with. The first is to retain
interdisciplinarity as a value – that is, to resist the move to
create disciplinary structures and arrangements, to reject the
identification of canons and to remain open to new
influences and new disciplinary configurations. The second
is to recognise that interdisciplinarity always happens in the
context of a system of disciplines. The goal in some ways is
to live alongside other disciplinary traditions rather than
attempting to take them over.
Thus, while an initial reaction to recognizing a new
emerging area may be to establish The Journal and/or The
Conference of that area, we do not think this is a good idea.
First, we are not all likely to agree on exactly what “this
area” is, how it is constituted, and what conversations
belong at the table; there is thus likely no “one-journal”
solution. Second, even if we were to agree on such a
constitution now, institutionalizing the area as it stands will
necessarily cut off the stream of new ideas and influences
that is an important element of what makes being in the
conversation so exciting. Third, scholars housed in the
relevant different disciplines are rewarded and get
institutional support for different forms of participation. For
example, to be promoted more technically housed
researchers need to publish strongly peer-reviewed papers
at (ideally ACM-associated) conferences, while more
social-scientific or humanistic scholars tend to lack
institutional support for the high registration costs involved
and aren’t rewarded for the huge effort publication at that
type of conferences takes.
For all these reasons, it seems like a more piecemeal
approach of overlapping conferences and journals may be
more appropriate. As a starting point for finding publication
homes and places to keep up with what’s happening, we
would point to these journals: Computational Culture; First
Monday; The Information Society; Information,
Communication, and Society; Big Data & Society; Social
Studies of Science; Science, Technology, and Human
Values; Catalyst; Demonstrations; Design Issues;
International
Journal
of
Design;
Fibreculture;
Transformations; Ctrl-Z; New Media Philosophy; Culture
Machine; Cultural Studies (we welcome additional
suggestions for this list).
As for conferences, the story is a little trickier. Although
there are many interesting conversations happening at
specific disciplinary conferences that can be interesting for
those with a foot in that specific discipline (such as
American Anthropological Association, Society for Social
Studies of Science, or Designing Interactive Systems), at
the moment we find many of the best interdisciplinary
conversations happening at small one-off meetings such as
Digital Labor or Algorithms & Accountability.
Unfortunately, finding out about meetings such as these is
hit or miss and it is not uncommon to discover after the fact
a symposium one wished one had attended. One option for
dealing with the bespoke nature of these meetings may be
to create a central clearinghouse for notifications for such
opportunities (as Agre’s Red Rock Eater was, back in the
day). Still, how exactly to constitute it (mailing lists seem a
little passé?) and make it a lively mechanism rather than
just another voice and obligation in the contemporary
cacophony is not clear.
Finally, and this is another area where we do not have clear
answers, we may need to think about how to create markers
of value for interdisciplinary work that can be better
recognized by home disciplines. For example, a computer
scientist who writes sociology is not likely to become an
ACM Fellow (and promotions can depend upon such
things). A sociologist who writes code is likely to be
similarly inscrutable in mainstream sociology. Not wanting
to become a discipline does not obviate the need for the
social markers of value and attainment that disciplines
provide, and tend to provide preferentially for those at their
centers. In addition to critical technical practices, we may
also need some creative institutional practices to support
one another in the development of our careers.
We look forward to discussing these and other issues with
the other workshop participants.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported in part by the Intel Science &
Technology Center for Social Computing (which has been a
wonderful place to do critical technical practice as
interdiscipline).
REFERENCES
1. Agre, P. (1997). Computation and human experience.
Cambridge University Press.
2. Agre, P. (1997). Toward a critical technical practice:
Lessons learned in trying to reform AI. Bridging the
Great Divide: Social Science, Technical Systems, and
Cooperative Work, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 131-157.