STS Research Symposium 2021
The STS Research Symposium showcases cutting-edge work going on at Georgia Tech in the field of science, technology, and society (STS). This year's event will feature talks by two graduate students of our STS courses:
Warm Solutions: Centering Nurse Contributions in Medical Making as Innovation
UDAYA LAKSHMI, Human-Centered Computing at the School of Interactive Computing
Making medical devices in healthcare settings engages practitioners in organizational innovation. Nurses improvise physical workarounds at the bedside in response to patient needs. Yet nurse-led problem-solving is rarely centralized in an emerging innovation ecosystem through medical making. In this talk, I will present insights from medical makers in six healthcare makerspaces to understand factors for nurse inclusion in technology design. Findings from 16 multi-stakeholder interviews with 6 facilitators and 10 nurses in the USA, reveal how nurse-led problem-solving is influenced by historical factors. Their contributions, with and without the use of physical prototyping (making) technologies, deepens an understanding of sociotechnical systems in such allotted spaces. I discuss how a nurse's capacity for making is practice-driven to address in-patient discomfort, repair their own practice, and update standardized workflows. Most nurses iterate on low-tech solutions facing barriers to formal collaboration when they attempt to scale up. Their technical capabilities extend from innovation-centered resources (e.g., lab spaces, technologies), often with complete reliance on facilitators who have limited authority in the medical system. I hope to discuss themes around practice-based innovation, participation in technology design, and articulation work for collaborative innovation.
Self-tracking and Selfhood: What Do Data and Design Tell Us about Ourselves?
ELISE LI ZHENG. School of History and Sociology of Science and Technology
New media technologies, especially wearables, smartphones and other monitoring devices are quantifying our bodies and minds into numbers and turning our daily life into data practices. What’s the implication – health, personal, and social – of the datafication of bodies and everyday life? What does the technology allow us to see, show, and understand, and how is it made possible? What are the meanings and values of those numbers, and how are they attached to technological designs and practices through the technological interactions?
In this short talk, I’ll break down the most current research about self-monitoring and self-tracking gadgets, showing some case studies and examples, and present some key sociological inquiries from the area of Science and Technology Studies. At the end, I’ll introduce my own dissertation project and invite discussions and feedback from the audience.
Moderated by: Robert Rosenberger, School of Public Policy
For more info on the IAC STS program see: https://spp.gatech.edu/graduate/certificates/sts
Or contact the STS Coordinator, Robert Rosenberger at: rosenberger@gatech.edu