The policy knot

In CSCW and information science research today, the worlds of design, practice, and policy are often held separate, speaking to different audiences, venues, and fields of expertise. But many growing areas of CSCW work, including mobile, cloud, and social computing, run into problems precisely at this intersection. This paper presents a model for understanding processes of change and emergence in social computing in which policy, practice, and design show up in the form of complex interdependencies, or knots, that collectively determine the shape, meaning, and trajectory of shifting computational forms. We then apply this model to two recent social computing controversies: the 2011 privacy scandal surrounding the location-aware mobile app Girls Around Me; and controversies surrounding the 2010 launch of the Google Buzz social network. We argue that better attention to the mutually constitutive relations between design, practice and policy can expand the reach, depth, and impact of CSCW scholarship.