Reflections Towards an Ecology of Internet Connectivity: Three Speculative Scenarios Involving Foot Pedals

Paper Title

Reflections Towards an Ecology of Internet Connectivity: Three Speculative Scenarios Involving Foot Pedals

Publication Info

• Topic area: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and speculative design exploring alternative configurations of internet connectivity.
• Keywords: Internet connectivity, speculative design, HCI, infrastructures, social norms, governance, maintenance, repair, inequality, digital detox.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: HCI research predominantly assumes always-on and ubiquitous internet connectivity, overlooking alternative configurations that could embody different social values, politics, and practices.
• Significance: Exploring alternate forms of connectivity can reimagine broader social, political, and economic systems, challenging dominant assumptions and addressing inequalities in access and governance.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research has examined intermittent connectivity, community-based networks, intentional disconnection, and environmentally sustainable internet practices. However, these studies often fail to conceptualize connectivity as a multi-dimensional ecology, leaving gaps in understanding the social, political, and infrastructural arrangements shaping connectivity.

Solution

• Proposed approach: Creation of three speculative scenarios centered around fictional "internet foot pedals" to explore alternative sociotechnical configurations of connectivity.
• Novelty:
  1. Conceptualizing connectivity as a multi-dimensional ecology involving social norms, maintenance, governance, and inequalities.
  2. Using speculative design to critically interrogate assumptions about internet connectivity.
  3. Developing text-based scenarios that foreground sociotechnical arrangements rather than focusing solely on artifacts.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Research-through-design approach using text-based speculative scenarios.
  • Placement of the same artifact (foot pedal) in multiple lifeworlds to explore diverse sociotechnical contexts.
  • Iterative brainstorming and scenario development over six months, varying dimensions such as scarcity vs. abundance, individual vs. collective action, and holistic vs. prescriptive technologies.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Scenario 1 ("The Starlight Diner and Internet Cafe"): Highlights community-based repair and governance of neglected infrastructure, revealing tensions between local practices and external regulations.
  • Scenario 2 ("The Life Away Initiative"): Explores digital detox as a luxury practice mediated by social norms and soft governance, exposing inequalities in access to disconnectivity.
  • Scenario 3 ("Mendoza’s Communal Connectivity"): Demonstrates collective governance of internet access in a rural community, emphasizing communal rituals and tensions with external professional expectations.
• Advantage over baselines: Provides a multi-dimensional conceptual framework for understanding connectivity, moving beyond binary or spectrum-based models to include sociopolitical practices and governance structures.
• Experiments / evaluation: Evaluation based on literary criticism and speculative design principles, focusing on critical, socio-political, and thought-provoking qualities of the scenarios.
• Limitations and future work: Scenarios are limited to North American contexts and alternate presents/near futures. Future work could explore more diverse global contexts, extreme speculative worlds, and first-person perspectives.

Summary

This paper uses speculative design to challenge dominant assumptions of always-on internet connectivity in HCI by presenting three text-based scenarios centered on fictional "internet foot pedals." These scenarios explore multi-dimensional ecologies of connectivity, including social norms, maintenance, governance, and inequalities. Findings highlight alternative sociotechnical arrangements, such as community-based repair, soft governance, and collective decision-making. The work contributes a conceptual framework for analyzing and imagining new configurations of connectivity, offering insights for critical analysis and design in HCI.