Plans and Situated (Algorithmic) Actions: Networked Medical Devices as Sites of Feminist Technoscience or Encountering the More Than Human in the Middle of the Night

• In Event: Regenerating Algorithms

Abstract

This paper takes on the tensions between the imaginaries of automation and in networked medical devices and the realities of lived experience by analyzing “the world’s first hybrid closed loop system,” a recently released insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor (CGM) system. This paper inquires into the moral imperative to automate bodily systems by seeking to understand the algorithms, software and hardware limitations that regulate these devices including the sensors. In particular, the insulin pump has three modes of use: 1) manual mode; 2) hybrid mode with a feature called “suspend on low”; and, 3) auto-mode. Auto-mode requires that a user train the system with data for approximately one month. With auto-mode, which is intended to function more dynamically similar to a “natural” human pancreas, the boundaries between human and non-human are constantly reconfigured. This begs a question that allows for the rethinking of Suchman’s original notion of “situated action” (Suchman, 1987), in the case of networked medical devices, who is the actor in these situated (algorithmic) actions? This investigation builds on earlier publications on this topic that have engaged Haraway’s cyborg (1991) and Jackson’s broken world thinking (Jackson, 2014) to create a figure of the disabled cyborg, operationalized through a multi-scalar theory of broken body thinking that collapses the world onto the body and expands the body into the world (Forlano, 2016, 2017a, 2017b), suggesting a different set of concerns, relations, contingencies and processes.

References:

Forlano, Laura. (2016). Decentering the Human in the Design of Collaborative Cities. Design Issues, 32(3), 42-54.
Forlano, Laura. (2017a). Maintaining, Repairing and Caring for the Multiple Subject. Continent(6.1), 30-35.
Forlano, Laura. (2017b). Posthumanism and Design. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 3(1), 16-29.
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. (1991). A cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature (pp. 149-181). New York: Routledge.
Jackson, Steven J. (2014). Rethinking Repair. In T. Gillespie, P. Boczkowski & K. Foot (Eds.), Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (pp. 221-239). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Suchman, Lucy. (1987). Plans and Situated Actions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Author

• Laura Forlano, Illinois Institute of Technology