critical techno-cultural practice?
agre concludes his chapter saying that "A critical technical practice will, at least for the foreseeable future, require a split identity -- one foot planted in the craft work of design and the other foot planted in the reflexive work of critique." he focuses strongly on grounding such a practice in both the history of the discipline and in daily practice. however, in talking about AI he is describing a uniquely american grounding. of course it is not wholly unreasonable given the history of AI, but when considering in our case ubicomp i think such a narrow view is problematic. culture needs to be taken in to account, and not just the culture of the discipline itself. bell et al. solve this somewhat by attempting to "make strange" our everyday world and thus help us get a handle on how deeply ingrained our cultures are and sengers et al. take this further by helping us to use design to disrupt these notions. it seems though that these new "discoveries" occur on a "per-culture" basis - but how can we fold this back in to what agre was getting at? how can we begin to have a cross-cultural dialogue about these matters? what is the same enough to share and what is different enough to draw boundaries? can all ubicomp work be put under one umbrella or do we end up with "american ubicomp" "european ubicomp" not to mention asian, african, south american and so on... ?