Problematizing the user in user-centered production: A new media lab meets its audiences
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the widespread implementation of ‘participatory’, ‘user-led’, and ‘user-centered’ principles in both the practice and study of technology production, it has become commonplace to treat users as partners in design. This paper is critical of that trend, arguing that the users of a technology in development must first be treated as objects rather than agents of social construction. It draws from a case study of a publicly funded British production-research laboratory in educational new media that was carried out during its first year of existence. The case study highlights some of the tensions and contradictions between the discourse and practice of user-centered design during an uncertain period in a project. By extending Callon’s concept of problematization to include the putative users of technologies in development, this study shows how producers distinguish and mediate between users and partners; how they sustain the notion that there is a group of users ‘out there’ whose existence and requirements can be substantiated prior to the creation of specific technical choices; and how user involvement in and of itself is used for the strategic purpose of enticing partners and asserting their control over the production process. By doing so, the paper affords insight into the practitioners’ belief in the need to gain ever more refined knowledge of specific users, and their recourse to their own experience as a necessary alternative.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it