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This paper explores how conceptions of societal impact are produced and performed during academic computer science research, by leveraging critical technical practice while building a digital agriculture networking platform. Our findings reveal how everyday practices of envisioning and building infrastructure require working across disciplinary and institutional seams, leading us as computer scientists to continuously reconceptualize the intended societal impact. By self-reflectively analyzing how we accrue resources for projects, produce research systems, write about them, and maintain alignments with stakeholders, we demonstrate that this seam work produces shifting simulacra of societal impact around which the system’s success is narrated. HCI researchers frequently suggest that technical systems’ impact could be improved by motivating computer scientists to consider impact in system-building. Our findings show that institutional and disciplinary structures significantly shape how computer scientists can enact societal impact in their work. This work suggests opportunities for structural interventions to shape the impact of computing systems. 

Rural infrastructure is known to be more prone to breakdown than urban infrastructure. This paper explores how the fragility of rural infrastructure is reproduced through the process of engineering design. Building on values in design, we examine how eventual use is anticipated by engineering researchers building on emerging infrastructure for digital agriculture (DA). Our approach combines critically reflective technical systems-building with interviews with other practitioners to understand and address moments early in the design process where the eventual effects of DA systems may be being built-in. Our findings contrast researchers’ visions of seamless farming technologies with the seamful realities of their work to produce them. We trace how, when anticipating future use, the seams that researchers themselves experience disappear, other seams are hidden from view by institutional support, and seams end users may face are too distant to be in sight. We develop suggestions for the design of these technologies grounded in a more artful management of seamfulness and seamlessness during the process of design and development. 

This paper provides insight into the use of data tools in the American labor movement by analyzing the practices of staff employed by unions to organize alongside union members. We interviewed 23 field-level staff organizers about how they use data tools to evaluate membership. We find that organizers work around and outside of these tools to develop access to data for union members and calibrate data representations to meet local needs. Organizers mediate between local and central versions of the data, and draw on their contextual knowledge to challenge campaign strategy. We argue that networked data tools can compound field organizers' lack of discretion, making it more difficult for unions to assess and act on the will of union membership. We show how the use of networked data tools can lead to less accurate data, and discuss how bottom-up approaches to data gathering can support more accurate membership assessments.