Pushing LIMITS: Envisioning beyond the artifact

ABSTRACT

As a pandemic rages and ecosystems around the globe collapse, the LIMITS community-along with the rest of the world-is working to adapt. Some adaptations to adjust to emergencies are easy to imagine. For example, months before in-person conferences were canceled in response to COVID-19, the User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) 2019 conference took significant steps towards hosting a geographically distributed, virtual conference, in part adapting to the global climate emergency. This type of change is conceptually clear, if organizationally challenging. However, many needed changes are conceptually difficult, even in the midst of an existential crisis. It is long-recognized that we need to bridge the separation between scholarly venues and publications that focus on technical aspects of computing systems (i.e., "applied") and those that center social and political aspects of computing systems research and design, particularly when attempting to address complex life-wide problems. Yet, disciplinary crystals (e.g., siloes) remain resistant to change. The authors of this paper contribute to ongoing socio-technical efforts, identifying dominant practices and forces that reinforce the socio-technical divide, and holding up empirical projects that offer promising alternatives. We resist the dominant norm to claim that our contributions to scholarship are original, cutting-edge, or unique. Rather this paper revisits a research paradigm from the past because it remains useful and generative for the computing research communities of the future. Through our inquiry we identify a long-standing tendency to include a pivot-a distinct turn to privilege the design of new digital artifacts-even in papers advocating for more expansive conceptualizations of interactive systems. While acknowledging the importance of the initial design of material artifacts (and their associated infrastructures), we reject the assumption that the ultimate "good"of computing or interactive design research is creating new digital artifacts/tools for the marketplace. We offer four provocations to help us understand why material-based, industry-oriented narratives dominate applied venues of computing. Empirical examples from projects around the world, including work that extends the relational and temporal boundaries of computing design, offer alternative approaches. Fundamentally, we ask readers to consider the type of research that the LIMITS community values and in what ways is this scholarship of value to a world in crisis. How does LIMITs research matter?. © 2020 ACM.