Culture is being ‘appified’. Diverse, pre-existing everyday activities are being redesigned so they happen with and through apps. While apps are often encountered as equivalent icons in apps stores or digital devices, the processes of appification – that is, the actions required to turn something into an app – vary significantly. In this article, we offer a comparative analysis of a number of ‘challenger’ banking apps in the United Kingdom. As a retail service, banking is highly regulated and banks must take steps to identify and verify their customers before entering a retail relationship. Once established, this ‘secured’ financial identity underpins a lot of everyday economic activity. Adopting the method of the walkthrough analysis, we study the specific ways these processes of identifying and verifying the identity of the customer (now the user) occur through user onboarding. We argue that banking apps provide a unique way of binding the user to an identity, one that combines the affordances of smart phones with the techniques, knowledge and patterns of user experience design. With the appification of banking, we see new processes of security folded into the everyday experience of apps. Our analysis shows how these binding identities are achieved through what we refer to as the patterning of finance/security. This patterning is significant, moreover, given its availability for wider circulation beyond the context of retail banking apps.

Exhibition dates: 23 November - 23 February 2020.

In The Air, an air pollution visualisation project led by Nerea Calvillo is exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts as part of the international exhibition “Eco-Visionaries: Confronting a planet in a state of emergency”, opening to the public this Saturday 23 November. Two pieces will be on display: The video In The Air 24h (2019), commissioned by the Royal Academy and produced with the support of CIM and the Spanish Embassy, has been developed in collaboration with code designer and artist Martin Nadal (Berlin), sound designer and musician Javier Lara (Mexico City), and photographers Imagen Subliminal (New York-Madrid). The second piece is Histories of Pollution (2010), three models developed in collaboration with Martin Nadal.

Curated by Gonzalo Herrero Delicado, Pedro Gadanho and Mariana Pestana, Eco-Visionaries was originally organised by the MAAT (Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnología) in Lisbon (Portugal), Bildmuseet de Umeå (Sweden), House of Electronic Arts (HeK) in Basel (Switzerland) and LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón.

A CIM visit will take place on 17 February, to accompany a public seminar on air pollution visualisations. More information soon, stay tuned!

The Royal Academy of Arts webpage for this exhibition is here.

A new paper from Dr Nathaniel Tkacz:

Link to paper

“What’s on your mind?”

These words, subtly greyed out in an input box on the user interface. Inviting users to write over them, replace them, respond. Pitched somewhere between an inquiring friend and a therapist, such is the gentle nudge fuelling content generation on the Facebook platform. What’s on your mind? Consider it a general declaration of the cognitive orientation of contemporary media. An underwhelming apotheosis when contrasted with the World Brains, augmented intellects or man–machine symbioses of days past...

CIM Academics Noortje Marres and Michael Castelle are at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science  (4S) in New Orleans this week.

On September 5, Professor Marres will speak at the Conference's Opening Plenary on Innovations. The other speakers are Maria Belen Albornoz (FLASCO-Ecuador), Lesley Green (University of Cape Town), Shobita Parthasarathy (University of Michigan). In the words of 4S President Kim Fortun (UC Irvine), the Innovations Plenary addresses the following:

To innovate is to move beyond, out of line, skirting predictable directions and outcomes. This is far from straightforward -- imaginatively, analytically and logistically. To innovate means being outside usual frames, working counter-culturally, against intuition and usual method. In many settings, innovation is a matter of great urgency: lives and prosperity depend on it. All too easily, however, innovation serves and even exacerbates entrenched hierarchies of privilege, creating something new but sustaining old structures (of wealth, authority, and so on). Innovation is subject -- even prone -- to capture -- becoming a carrier rather than critique of capital and empire. Innovation can also become an empty ideal, cover for business as usual. Innovation is pursued and promised in industry, government, education and NGOS -- and in scholarly fields like STS. Scholars need and promise to innovate; indeed, their charge is to create “new knowledge.” Their scholarly organizations -- like 4S -- promise to scaffold and help sustain this, though what this looks like in theory and practice often receives little attention.

This article discusses methodological approaches to app studies, focusing on their embeddedness and situatedness within multiple infrastructural settings. Our approach involves close attention to the multivalent affordances of apps as software packages, particularly their capacity to enter into diverse groupings and relations depending on different infrastructural situations. The changing situations they evoke and participate in, accordingly, make apps visible and accountable in a variety of unique ways. Therefore, engaging with and even staging these situations allows for political-economic, social, and cultural dynamics associated with apps and their infrastructures to be investigated through a style of research we describe as multi-situated app studies. This article offers an overview of four different entry points of enquiry that are exemplary of this multi-situated approach, focusing on app stores, app interfaces, app packages, and app connections. We conclude with nine propositions that develop out of these studies as prompts for further research.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2056305119846486