The Social Life of Spacecraft: Robotic Systems in Organizational Context

Janet Vertesi
Link-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow
Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts
Lecturer in Sociology
Princeton University

Thursday, February 23, 2012
TSRB Banquet Hall
Lunch served at 11:30 a.m.
Talk will begin promptly at Noon

HCI as a discipline exhorts us to be aware of the "cultural" assumptions or context of a technological system that might lend nuance to its design, implementation and maintenance. But how does organizational context affect a system's  deployment and use? In this talk, Janet Vertesi presents ethnographic insights from two NASA planetary missions to show the importance of social organization to coordinating work at a distance, managing robotic resources, sharing data, and simply "doing science" on other planets. As technologies move into ever more spaces of social life, Vertesi argues that this organizational focus presents implications for system design and study not just in outer space, but down to earth too.