Addressing the 2023 theme of Global Responsibilities of Engineers, in particular the disproportionate impacts of climate change on communities in remote regions of Alaska, this paper tracks the “social life” of a prefabricated frame assembly system designed for constructing homes in emergency contexts in northern Alaska (Appadurai 1986). An Alaskan housing research center began using this prefabricated system over a decade ago, in a time of crisis caused by major spring flooding in an Alaskan riverine community that has long grappled with housing shortages. The destruction of these homes, along with the possessions of the people living in them, was a tremendous loss to this community. The region’s short building season and dependency on barge and aerial transportation services for shipping in building supplies further compounded these challenges. In response, local and federal agencies came together and decided on a housing design that uses an integrated wall and truss system that could be prefabricated off-site, shipped out, rapidly assembled by volunteer building crews in the affected site, and that facilitated a highly insulated energy efficient home. As a result, this design played a critical role in mediating further disaster. Fast-forward to the present, the housing research center continues to opt for this system for most remote designs, but builders and engineers have begun to debate whether its advantages outweigh some of its logistical challenges. Some argue that its value has been overstated, while others describe it as a practical and affordable method for building energy efficient homes in remote Alaskan communities. Still others have adapted its design to fit their needs, thus producing new variations of the design, while also showing how the design of this building system might be reimagined. A deep dive into this debate provides an opportunity to analyze how both knowledge building and moral stances inform the ways that engineers assume global responsibilities related to communities affected by climate change.
Drawing on three years of ethnographic research among Alaskan engineers, builders, housing advocates, and community stakeholders, this case study reflects what design scholars describe) as the “moralization of technology” through engineering practices (Verbeek 2006: 269). From this perspective, engineering systems may take on multiple meanings and applications, including marking differences in thought, creativity, and moral affinity among experts who are working to addressing affordable housing needs in Alaska. Reflecting on these differences in perspective, this paper tracks the “cultural biography” of this engineered system across time, place, and institutional, cultural, and geographic settings to probe how debates about the efficacy of this prefabricated system come to index varying moral stances and value systems that are deeply qualitative but also very much a part of the technical and materializing processes of the building design (Kopytoff 1986). As a case study, this analysis also can serve as a teaching tool in engineering and interdisciplinary classrooms for examining the integrative nature of ethics and technology as related to a range of human impacts on the environment and marginalized communities.
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This content will become publicly available on April 14, 2024
Alone and Together: Resilience in a Fluid Socio-Technical-Natural System
Disruption to routines is an increasingly common part of everyday life. With the roots of some disruptions in the interconnectedness of the world and environmental and socio-political instability, there is good reason to believe that conditions that cause widespread disruption will persist. Individuals, communities, and systems are thus challenged to engage in resilience practices to deal with both acute and chronic disruption. Our interest is in chronic, everyday resilience, and the role of both technology and non-technical adaptation practices engaged by individuals and communities, with a specific focus on practices centered in nature. Foregrounding nature's role allows close examination of environmental adversity and nature as part of adaptivity. We add to the CSCW and HCI literature on resilience by examining long-distance hikers, for whom both the sources of adversity and the mitigating resilience processes cut across the social, the technical, and the environmental. In interviews with 12 long-distance hikers we find resilience practices that draw upon technology, writ large, and nature in novel assemblages, and leverage fluid configurations of the individual and the community. We place our findings in the context of a definition for resilience that emphasizes a systems view at multiple scales of social organization. We make three primary contributions: (1) we contribute an empirical account of resilience in a contextual setting that complements prior CSCW resilience studies, (2) we add nuance to existing models for resilience to reflect the role of technology as both a resilience tool and a source of adversity, and (3) we identify the need for new designs that integrate nature into systems as a way to foster collaborative resilience. This nuanced understanding of the role of technology in individual and community resilience in and with nature provides direction for technology design that may be useful for everyday disrupted life.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10433160
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
- Volume:
- 7
- Issue:
- CSCW1
- ISSN:
- 2573-0142
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 26
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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