HCE Tools

1. Agency

Agency is the ability or capacity to act or exert power. Technology informs the way in which people both perceive and exercise their capacity to exert some degree of control over the sociotechnical relations in which they are enmeshed.

2. Classification

Implicit and explicit social organization of beings and knowledge into discrete categories governed by identifiable principles. Societies produce knowledge and do work (e.g. with technologies) by sorting, ordering, and classifying phenomena in the world. Classification systems inform social order and vice versa.

3. Co-production

Technology and society are mutually constitutive, or, in other words, they depend on one another for the forms they assume: technology makes society what it is, and society makes technology what it is. Or, “Technology is co-produced with society.”

4. Identity / Positionality

Life-shaping and socially conditioned aspects of selfhood, such as gender, race, class, disability status, income, immigration status. Identity is not only about how you see yourself but also how society sees and treats you (positionality). Identity is co-produced with technology.

5. Labor

The socially organized use of human bodies and lifetime to reproduce the material conditions of human life

Asking about labor helps us look to sociotechnical processes of production, working conditions, and how labor is differentially valorized, exploited, and structured in various historical and sociotechnical contexts.

Labor is also a social agent - “organized labor” can be a political force that shapes the conditions under which labor takes place

6. Narratives

Stories in time that express and explain things that matter to people: who they are, how the world is, how things work, what needs to be done, what futures are possible, desirable, or inevitable.

Technology shapes and is shaped by narratives that are at-large in society. Narratives can come to feel natural, but always need to be questioned

7. Performativity

The way that actions that describe the world (language, concepts, metaphors, models, classification systems, measurement systems, predictions, automated decision-making systems) can shape and even bring into being the very phenomena they set out to describe.

8. Power

The asymmetric capacity of an agent to structure or alter the behavior and decisions of other agents, populations, or systems. Technological (computational) power is intertwined with political power.

9. Representation

The way in which one thing is made to "stand for" another. Technologies create representations of people and of social/natural phenomena that do particular work in the world and acquire a life of their own, refiguring the identity and agency of the represented person/phenomena.

10. Sociotechnical Systems

A system in which the actions of people and technologies are intertwined such that it’s not possible to just isolate the “technical part” and deal with on its own.

Large and highly complex sociotechnical systems distribute risks and responsibilities widely and unevenly, and are difficult to regulate. When they fail it is often difficult or even impossible to identify a single human or mechanical cause.

11. Vulnerability

The condition of being exposed to others and to the risk of injury. Vulnerability is central to personhood and the human condition. It is part of every social relationship, and is at the heart of ethics.

Vulnerability is differentially distributed in society: it varies by positionality (race, class, gender, immigration, disability... Technology shapes who becomes vulnerable and how