ESRC PROJECT

"BEYOND TRANSLATION"
Nina has been awarded a Fellowship for 3 years to develop and write about INCITE's studio practice and to investigate further how social research is used in the design of new technologies.

This project builds on INCITE's existing industry collaborations and will look at the ways knowledge is created and represented as social research collaborations such as the ones we have undertaken in the last 5 years.

Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), the fellowship work will focus on three issues:

(1) How scientific and technological knowledge is represented, for example through visual models.

(2) The traffic between academic researchers and those in industry, as funders, collaborators or 'end users' of social research.

(3) How innovative methods
involving visual and material practices can be developed in dialogue with STS. For this final strand of the project Nina will be engaging in extensive studio practice in an attempt to develop a body of work for an exhibition at the end of the fellowship.

The aim of the fellowship as a whole is to develop new analytic framings of the work which INCITE has been doing, but also to be in dialogue with corporate ethnographers and others
interested in discussing issues of 'translation' and/or questioning this metaphor.

PEOPLE

AIM researchers
Goetz Bachmann, Britt Hatzius and Sebastian Olma are all working with Nina on the Cultural Intermediaries project. See the blog for updates on their research.
There is also a new and developing project page about their work.

EVENTS/CONFS/TALKS

2008
Design & Social Sciences II
All seminars will take place in the CSISP seminar room, WT1204, from 4pm - 6pm.

16 January: Alex Wilkie. 'Prospecting users: user-centered design & commercial social science'

30 January - Matt Ward. 'Disruption, disturbance & deviation: towards a definition of design's critical practice'

20 February - Matt Watson. 'Product design & the practices of everyday life'

5 March - Jennifer Gabrys. 'Museum of failure: Electronics, obsolescence and archives'

19 March - Mike Michael & Bill Gaver. 'Design & social sciences:
what, where, when next & how?'

2007
Design & Social Sciences
A CSISP seminar series on ‘Design and Social Science’ aims to explore these points of contact through a range of discussions that address such key topics as theory, practice, research, user, object, product, audience etc. Though the immediate objective is to enhance mutual understanding across disciplinary practices, it is also hoped that this series can serve as a platform for opening up interdisciplinary research futures. All seminars will take place in room 1204, Warmington Tower.

Speakers include:
William Gaver | Dept of Design
Tobie Kerridge | Dept of Design
Mike Michael | CSISP, Dept of Sociology
Terry Rosenberg | Dept of Design
Nina Wakeford | Dept of Sociology


INCITE - at Goldsmiths.
INCITE has moved from the University of Surrey to Goldsmiths College, University of London.

2006TASA - The Australian Sociological Association Conf.
Kat presented a paper reporting on her Intel/INCITE wireless study at UWA, Perth, on 5th December.

Wireless tech seminar at the University of Sydney [UniS]
Melissa Gregg (UQ) and Gerard Goggin (UniS) invited Genevieve Bell and Kat to talk at their Wireless Cultures and Technologies workshop on at the University of Sydney, on 1st December.

Launch of the Virtual Knowledge Studio, Amsterdam
Nina has been invited to participate in a panel discussion for The Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences, a new research centre of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), on 11th October at the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam.

MACS at the University of Queensland [UQ]
Kat was invited by Mel Gregg to speak about 'Working with industry' to MACS - Media and Communication Studies - at UQ on 6th October.

EPIC 2006
Nina presented a paper entitled "Powerpoint and the Crafting of Social Data" at the 2nd annual conference of Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference held at Intel in Portland, Oregon, 25-26th September. The proceedings will be published by the American Anthropological
Association.

Midpoint report to Intel
Kat was invited by Genevieve Bell to present a series of midpoint reports to research and business groups at Intel, in Portland, OR, in July. The one year Intel/INCITE funded research project looks at the influence of new wireless technologies on domestic practices. The official title is: Domestic Space and Interfaces for Located Mobility; Wireless infrastructures and the changing nature of domestic culture in Australia.

Future Directions of Feminst Technoscience
Following a successful set of seminars funded by the ESRC in 2004-05 on the Future of Feminist Technoscience Studies, INCITE sponsored a workshop on 8th February for researchers interested in networking and planning a new set of collaborations.

Intel fieldwork: Edges
kat spent three weeks in January doing fieldwork in Australia with Genevieve Bell (Intel). See the blog for stories and pics.

2005
Studio workshop
INCITE held a workshop at the studio in November 2005. Sandeep, Martin and Kat presented on the current state of their research to Nina and Genevieve Bell (Intel).

UNiS: MSc Conference 2005
Nina organised the 2005 MSc Conference in Bournemouth, 19-21 November. The Theme - Doing it for ourselves: Revisions and renewals in social science ethodology. Kate and Kat ran a session about innovative online methodologies and Nina, Kat and Vicky talked about the INCITE/RCA collaboration held in May 2005.

EPIC 2005
Nina was on the advisory council for EPIC [Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference] held in Redmond, WA. She curated a session on Methods and Kris presented a paper - Who we talk about when we talk about users in the Theory Session (14-15 November).

AoIR 6
Kat attended and presented a paper on blogging and research methods at AoIR 6.0 [Association of Internet Researchers] in Chicago (5-9 October). See the blog and flickr for pics.

Photos Leave Home
Kris presented an update of his ESRC funded study of personal photography on the internet to the Soc dept and special guests from BBC, RCA and PDD (7 September).

Goldsmiths conference
New Scholar Symposium: (Re)Creating: Metholodgies, Practices, Concepts at Goldsmiths. Nina presented a keynote lecture (1-3 September)