Transmitting Insulin: The Design and Look of Insulin Delivery Devices as Technologies of Communication
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
In this article, we examine how insulin pens and pumps – two major devices for delivering insulin, the anabolic hormone used to treat Type 1 diabetes – are designed to conceal and fashion insulin delivery around their appearance as key communication technologies. Insulin pens and insulin pumps transform the aesthetics of insulin delivery away from the medicalized appearance of syringes toward that of beautiful technological artifacts. They both hide and draw attention to their status as technological artifacts and their medical use through a set of desirable, though sometimes incongruous, device aesthetics. Deliberately marketed around their resemblance to pens or pagers, insulin delivery devices are examples of skeuomorphs that “materialize the metaphor” of writing instruments and telecommunication tools into their design. We analyze how diabetes education and marketing materials present insulin delivery devices through skeuomorphic performances of use that uphold norms of concealment in diabetes self-management in conditions of social and medical surveillance. Drawing on patents, educational and marketing materials, and our own experiences with these devices, we argue that the skeuomorphic design of these devices morally regulates the embodied performance of diabetes.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 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