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Abstract Government-run geological surveys have increasingly facilitated exploration for potential mines by inviting novice prospectors to sift through old datasets prior to visiting physical sites, a process known colloquially as desktop prospecting. In northern British Columbia, Canada, some novices have developed sophisticated techniques for analyzing promising signs in these data and narrativizing their own desktop prospecting labor within broader environmental and economic shifts playing out across rural Canada. This article examines how efforts to vernacularize simulation-based geological expertise into new forms of work-from-home labor is transforming the ways settler entrepreneurs articulate attachments to rural areas. This growing interdependence of entrepreneurial web-based prospecting and extractivism writ large underscores a fundamental transition in how government ministries and developers relate the development of mines to the making of homes. Computer modeling tools have transformed prospectors’ relations with people and places by altering where and how they conduct day-to-day work. The valorization of model-work as an accessible, democratizing practice has also shaped how prospectors discern what kinds of homes bear the risks of mineral exploration labor. With free maps and simple analytical software in hand, BC-based geotechnical institutions insist, individual prospectors might yet play critical roles in luring mineral exploration companies back to the region after a decades-long decline in mining activity. As climate change renders regional timber extraction uncertain and mining industry restructuring continues apace, settler prospectors’ homemaking aspirations are turning inward toward domestic spaces of labor—some of the few spaces where precariously employed resource workers can still maintain illusions of control.
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Weaving by Touch: A Case Analysis of Accessible Making
The rise of maker communities and fabrication tools creates new opportunities for participation in design work. With this has come an interest in increasing the accessibility of making for people with disabilities, which has mainly emphasized independence and empowerment through the creation of more accessible fabrication tools. To understand and rethink the notion of accessible making, we analyze the context and practices of a particular site of making: the communal weaving studio within an assisted living facility for people with vision impairments. Our analysis helps reconsider the material and social processes that constitute accessible making, including the ways makers attend to interactive material properties, negotiate co-creative embodied work, and value the labor of making. We discuss future directions for design and research on accessible making while highlighting tensions around assistance, collaboration, and how disabled labor is valued.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1901456
- PAR ID:
- 10180389
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CHI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 15
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376477
