Title
Infrastructure as Creative Action: Online Buying, Selling, and Delivery in Phnom Penh.
Abstract
This paper describes a complex global sales and logistics network based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, which utilizes Internet tools (particularly Facebook) as well as a suite of offline tools such as feature phones, paper receipts, and motorcycles to facilitate the buying and selling of clothes and other commodities. Against the gap or import models that sometimes limit HCI understandings of computational change in non-Western environments, we argue that the consumers, business owners, delivery drivers, and call center staff play active and formative roles in producing this infrastructure, integrating new tools into older cultural practices and determining how they work within the limits and conventions of the environment. We argue that resourceful and imaginative activities such as these constitute a form of creative infrastructural action and are central to the ways that new tools circulate in the world, though they often go unrecognized by HCI as innovation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/3025453.3025889
CHI
Keywords
Field
DocType
Logistics, e-commerce, infrastructure, ethnography, postcolonial computing, ICTD
World Wide Web,Suite,Computer science,Clothing,Human–computer interaction,Ethnography,Feature phone,E-commerce,The Internet,Formative assessment
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.43
14
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Margaret Jack172.17
Jay Chen2605.12
Steven J. Jackson338027.24