Whose Time Counts? Temporal Arrangements in Sociotechnical Infrastructures

Paper Title

Whose Time Counts? Temporal Arrangements in Sociotechnical Infrastructures

Publication Info

• Topic area: Temporal inequities in public sociotechnical infrastructures
• Keywords: temporality, sociotechnical systems, public infrastructure, inequality, HCI, compression, gaps, sedimentation, eviction, sexual healthcare

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Public infrastructures, such as courts and clinics, embed historical inequities that unevenly distribute temporal burdens, creating challenges in access to essential services. Existing HCI research lacks a framework to analyze how these temporal dynamics impact marginalized populations.
• Significance: Understanding how time is organized and distributed in public systems is critical to addressing systemic inequities in access to housing, healthcare, and other vital services.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work in HCI and Science and Technology Studies (STS) has explored rhythms, trajectories, and infrastructural timescales but has not fully addressed how historical sedimentation shapes temporal inequities. This paper builds on these insights to examine how inherited temporal arrangements perpetuate disparities.

Solution

• Proposed approach: Introduction of the concept of temporal arrangements to analyze how infrastructures shape and allocate time, producing inequities through patterns of compression and gaps.
• Novelty:
  1. Extends HCI’s engagement with temporality by conceptualizing infrastructures as historically sedimented systems that shape temporal experiences.
  2. Introduces compression and gaps as distinct temporal arrangements that reveal how inequities are structured and lived.
  3. Provides an empirically grounded framework based on ethnographic case studies in eviction and sexual healthcare.
  4. Offers design recommendations for addressing temporal inequities in public systems.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  1. Ethnographic fieldwork in two cases: eviction filings in Atlanta and sexual healthcare interventions in Chicago.
  2. Diagramming as an analytic method to trace temporal patterns, actors, and interactions.
  3. Application of STS concepts like sedimentation and power-chronography to analyze historical and institutional temporal dynamics.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Identified two temporal arrangements:
    1. Compression: Urgent demands and structural forces collapse into narrow decision-making windows, as seen in Atlanta’s seven-day eviction appeal process and Chicago’s 15-minute contraceptive consultations.
    2. Gaps: Temporal disconnections where systems fail to align, creating uncertainty and delays, such as Atlanta’s court portal outages and Chicago’s fragmented sexual health information.
  • Temporal burdens are disproportionately borne by marginalized populations, such as tenants and youth, while institutional actors benefit from stabilized time.
• Advantage over baselines: Unlike prior HCI work that focuses on organizational rhythms, this framework highlights how historical sedimentation shapes temporal inequities at institutional and individual levels.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Case 1: Atlanta eviction filings involved navigating fragmented legal and technical systems under compressed deadlines.
  • Case 2: Chicago sexual healthcare revealed gaps in information and trust, shaped by historical disinvestment and systemic mistrust.
  • Metrics: Qualitative analysis of field data, diagrams, and participant observations.
• Limitations and future work:
  • The framework focuses on two specific cases, which may not generalize across all public infrastructures.
  • Future work could explore additional temporal arrangements and apply the framework to other sociotechnical contexts, such as education or transportation.

Summary

This paper introduces temporal arrangements as a framework to analyze how public infrastructures distribute time and perpetuate inequities. Through ethnographic case studies in eviction filings and sexual healthcare, the authors identify two key patterns: compression, where urgent demands are concentrated into narrow windows, and gaps, where systemic misalignments create delays and uncertainty. These findings highlight the historical sedimentation of inequities in public systems and provide actionable insights for designing more equitable sociotechnical infrastructures. By foregrounding time as a site of justice, the paper invites HCI researchers and practitioners to address temporal burdens in public-facing systems.