Accepted submission for NORDES Doctoral Consortium 2023 (to be published in the Extended Abstracts) My research concerns Designing for Contestable Systems1. Looking into how we can negotiate and contextualise automated decision systems at the front-end and address power imbalances between people and the systems which increasingly intervene to take decisions about our futures. Coming from a background of anarchistic self-organisation, my first inspiration came from the Right to Repair movement. Understanding our bad interactions with automated systems as a form of brokenness provides a less abstract perspective on our relationships with these distant processes and to think of them as repairable. Taking the Repair Café as an example of grassroots activism, I proposed the concept of the Contestation Café (Collins, 2022). A community-based space where the public could come to share experiences about unfair and inappropriate treatment by algorithmic systems and to find support and ways to contest and redesign them. Gatherings around these concerns can create the kind of critical mass which results in systemic change, like the recent backtracking with Apple and John Deere (Purdy, 2022), where large companies were forced to recant their tactics and allow their users to repair and have ownership over how their products are used. In the same way, we can challenge how our data is used and how automated decisions can be repaired, negotiated with and understood. While it is helpful for the general public to have the tools to "punch upwards" at oppressive systems, it is also necessary to provide designers with ways to pass down affordances for these users to contest with their designs. This is where my research intersects with the Nordes theme. Neither the designer or the user should have the sole responsibility for making technology fairer - rather, I believe it should be an ongoing and participatory activity through the interface and through shared conversation. This is where I perceive the blank space to be - in a lack of connection between the primary stakeholders, the users, the designers and the system itself. New design approaches are needed to bridge this space and fill in the blanks. I am exploring agonism as a way to value the struggle between the user, designer and system - to encourage discourse, reconfiguration and to view design as the journey towards solutions that can always be challenged and will never become concrete (Miessen et al., 2012). Within this, I am inhabiting the role of The Fixer, a character who might "know and see different things - indeed different worlds - than the better known figures of "designer" and "user"" (Jackson, 2014), and who could act as a 'contester-on-behalf- of' the bleeding edge of society and for those from more marginalised communities who are often the first affected by new technologies. My next steps will be to look for examples of agonistic design through history, consult with a broad sample of stakeholders involved in contemporary design and technology, and to define a set of values for this design approach which brings design and repair together and opens up a space for contestability, redesign and discourse as an ongoing condition of design.@en

Sensor networks are increasingly commonplace in visions of smart cities and future healthcare systems, promising greater efficiency and increased wellbeing. However, the design of these technologies remains focused on specific users and fragmented by context, overlooking the diversity of needs, wants and values present when technologies, people, and lived realities interact within instrumented spaces. In this paper we present a workshop method – Sensing Care – that can help researchers, interdisciplinary design and development teams, and potentially affected users, to explore what it takes to design for living with sensor technologies that intersect and interact across private and public spaces, through speculative scenarios and role play. Drawing from three deployments of the workshop, we discuss how this approach supports the design of future care-oriented sensor networks, and helps designers understand what it means to live with complex technologies as people traverse diverse contexts.@en

The Contestation Manifesto and its associated paraphernalia are artefacts from a speculative, near-future community action known as the Contestation Café. Being one in a series of research through design projects on contestation, the Contestation Café is a critical, yet also practical, design intervention rooted in how the act of repair has moved through the physical into the digital, and the shared values therein. Tracing the history of electronic repair - from the early valve radios, the invention of the transistor, microchips, programmable devices and through to IoT, connected devices and the “fluid assemblages” that emerge - we can see the shared values of the physical act of repair with the more intangible act of contestation in the digital world of algorithmic systems. Overlaying the values and tactics of the Right to Repair movement with the emerging concerns around data-driven systems we find ourselves examining the Repair Café as a potential model for community contestation and the construction of publics. The Repair Café started in Amsterdam in 2009 and has since spread to 35 countries with over 1700 instances of these cafés. The Repair Café is not intended to be a place where you bring your broken appliances for someone else to repair - rather, it is a place where you learn how to repair and recycle your own products and devices, and - more importantly - a place where you simply learn that things can be fixed rather than thrown out. In a similar spirit, the Contestation Café would be a place for those who feel mistreated by automated decision systems, AIs and algorithms, to bring their broken interactions and their unfair decisions to learn how to contest, push back and reclaim their agency and autonomy. Rather than Repairers, the Contestation Café has a panel of Fixers - people who inhabit the space between designers and users, with a particular knowledge of these systems and how to map and navigate them - who are there to share their experience and knowledge, and to guide the user in the ways of contestation and to become Fixers of their own futures. Although the Contestation Café is a speculative concept based on research into the shared values of contestation and repair, it has developed a life of its own through the process of imagining how it would work and what it would look like. Through the act of writing a manifesto for contestation, the space has manifested itself in the present and is waiting only for the fixers and public to arrive. Plans are already in progress for its first real instance and all of the imagined artefacts presented here will inform this process. https://contestationcafe.org/@en