Critical Technical Practices

The term "critical technical practice" was coined by Phil Agre in his landmark book Computation and Human Experience, which described the development of his own critical technical practice in his Ph.D. work on autonomous agents and planning at the MIT AI Lab.   The Narrative Intelligence Reading Group at the MIT Media Lab picked up the baton, developing many approaches to AI and interfaces which incorporated ideas from media theory, ethnomethodology, and cultural studies.  Electronic artists  who build systems (i.e., artworks) that incorporate a critical perspective on technology, are another important force in the area.

People:

• Phil Agre is the inventor of the term "critical technical practice" and an important founder of the field.
• Chris Csziksentmihalyi  builds technical artefacts that could have existed in an alternate history of technology.
• Kerstin Dautenhahn's work is an eclectic mix of robotics, `pure' AI, and influences from philosophy, phenomenology, and philosophy of science.
• Natalie Jeremijenko is a design engineer and technoartist, whose pieces use technology to intervene in cultural debates.
• Brenda Laurel uses a deep understanding of the cultural placement of computational artefacts in order to design appropriate soft- and hardware.
• Michael Mateas work is an Expressive AI: an AI-based art practice, or an art-based AI practice.  It integrates philosophical and cultural analysis with ground-breaking technical development in a practice of generating artworks.  His piece Terminal Time  - a collaboration with technoartist Paul Vanouse and documentary filmmaker Steffi Domike - is both a successful, interesting art project and the first example of interesting automatic story generation.
• Simon Penny does beautiful interdisciplinary work in art and robotics, including robotic artwork and cultural critique of computational science.
• Warren Sack combines interests in language, psychoanalysis, art, and computational technology (among many others).
• Phoebe Sengers (i.e., me!) integrates cultural studies and computer science to understand and build technical systems as cultural artefacts.

Please email me if you would like to be added to this list.
 

Further reading:

• Phil Agre's "the soul gained and lost" contains musings on a possible productive relationship between AI and the humanities.
• Michelle Kendrick and Robert Markley's article "From Tool to Artifact: The New Cultural Study ofScience" gives an overview of the cultural studies of science as well as some idea of what it might mean to do cultural studies and science at once.