Hello, my name is Ben Hanrahan and today I'm
going to present our paper on "Agency and Extraction
in Emerging Industrial Drone Applications,"
where we had Rwandan farm workers
and the surrounding community members construct imaginaries
around drones that were being developed and prototyped
and beginning to be deployed on a local farm.
The background and the setting of this work
is that we began this work with a specific partner and that's
partner was the owner of a flower farm.
The flowers that they grew in these on this farm
was a particular type of flower that was very prized in Japan
and there are very few places that can be grown.
The owner himself was a Japanese fellow
who was concerned about the perception of these drones that
were being developed by a third party corporation that
were being tested on his farm.
Generally, it's important to know that at this moment
the Rwandan government is highlighting technology
as a means to modernize.
And that zip line is a particularly prominent example
like it features on the news things.
And what supply does is it's a drone company that transports
blood and medication to rural hospitals among other things
that heavily informs people's attitudes towards drones
in Rwanda.
One other thing that informs attitudes towards drones
and particularly farming automation
is there is a bit of a history of failed automation
and there are all these like broken down tractors
that people can see and this inform their response.
So here are the drones--
and the bigger picture are the ones
that we took around with us, when
we interacted with the community, the farm
workers, and the farm staff.
And they were meant to be an approximation
of the drone in the smaller picture which
is the one that they're actually using and testing out
on the farm.
So it's prototype.
So as the farmers and community members
all the workers and the community members
were constructing their imaginaries.
They were asking us a lot of questions, right,
about what the exact parameters of these things
are as, they imagined how they would be used.
And these questions almost felt like you were being interviewed
by the participants, right.
So they would ask the interviewers, who's
controlling the drones, who owns them, their goal,
can we repair them, right.
They're terribly concerned with being
able to repair them as part of the sort of failed automation
before.
They want to know how much it costs to repair what they're
able to get parts for them.
Who's going to benefit from them, right?
Are they really expensive or are they meant for us or are
they just meant for outside farmers.
They were really trying to figure out,
what was going on, right.
They'd seen the drones around.
There was a direct line of sight to see
what was going on in the farm and a lot of the workers
themselves had seen them.
With due to language barriers and all these things
they hadn't interacted much with the people actually use.
They're also concerned about their safety
and the security of their jobs, of course, right.
So is that going to spray pesticides here,
or is it going to run into us, who's driving it,
and the farm workers themselves, the casual workers,
where worried about them their job being displaced.
However, as we were analyzing the data
we really saw that what they didn't ask us
and what they didn't talk about said a lot as well.
So nobody asked about the value of the data being
extracted, right.
They were all aware that data was being extracted,
they talked about pictures and audio files
and tracking workers and stuff but they didn't really
think about the data that was being extracted and its value.
And they didn't properly realize and we only
realized this on in retrospect which jobs were actually
in danger, right.
So they're used to thinking that jobs
that were the more manual labor were in danger
but in fact what this was actually threatening
were the jobs of the farm staff who collected data and did
analysis by paper mostly.
And so what we really want to highlight here
in these imaginaries and studying this type of work
is that you really have to think carefully which we only
really did after the fact about observable and unobservable
functionality.
So it was very useful to have these drones but it was--
we should have made more apparent,
some of the other more unseen functionality.
And the things that did help us with these imaginaries
were understanding the historical and current context
and historical context informs that.
And also helping us to uncover consequences
that they were concerned that and help
us to create these more informed design constraints.