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Technologies of public space are technological artifacts that foster, encourage, or invite social action between individuals while also providing a forum for expressing individual need and desire to the larger public. It is possible to identify certain sociotechnical arrangements that work better than others when trying to produce vibrant communities through alternative organization. The difficulty for the activist academic, however, does not come from choosing the right technologies but rather, from the relationship they maintain between the group they choose to work with, their hosting institution, and the audience they plan to share their results with. That is why this dissertation focuses mainly on the organization of labor and the allocation of resources when testing and building technologies of public space. In many respects, the people involved in all three projects are understood through the material and digital relationships that form when technologies of public space are brought into being.

The international work in case study 1 is an effort to seed and stimulate a local, small-scale condom vending industry in Kumasi, Ghana. By investing in the capital-intensive process of R&D and then open sourcing the resulting product, we hope to create a broad-based cottage industry of vending machine makers. The machines are necessary for increasing condom distribution because existing venues for condom purchase are intimidating, especially for women. The machines provide a small bit of privacy in places that are generally public (restaurant bathrooms and gas stations for example).

Case study 2 will track the problem of expertise, decision-making, and concepts of public and private space. The design and construction of Freedom Square in North Central Troy is a collaborative project between several social justice-minded organizations and the local residents.

Case study 3 involves the establishment and maintenance of a mesh wifi network within the same study area as case study 2. This is an opportunity to consider the possibility of using online social action to help remediate perceived problems. By providing an online social meeting space in addition to a physical one, we can chart how the different technological affordances provide opportunities for varying social engagement within “the public.”

**Version 2** With the rise of Do-It-Yourself culture and the plummeting costs of both information transfer and prototype construction, social scientists must reconsider some of their fundamental assumptions about organized human labor and the production of material goods. In the past decade STS scholars have introduced a plurality of new collaborative, interdisciplinary, and hands-on methods that seek to democratize innovation and bring under-represented groups to the drawing board. These new (and many pre-existing) action-based methods vary widely in theoretical underpinning and degree of public participation but they can all be put under the broad category of praxis: testing, evaluating, and creating social theory through action (Arendt 1969).

This project will analyze three separate cases of community-based efforts at producing what I call “technologies of public space.” Technologies of public space are technological artifacts that foster, encourage, or invite social action between individuals while also providing tools for expressing individual need and desire to the larger public. Each case is also an exercise in praxis, wherein old boundaries of expertise and hierarchies of power are dramatically shifting. The international work in case study one is an effort to seed and stimulate a local, small-scale condom vending industry in Kumasi, Ghana. Case study two tracks the problems of expertise, decision-making, and concepts of public and private space during the design and construction of an outdoor community performance space in North Central Troy, New York. Case study three involves the establishment and maintenance of a free Wi-Fi network within the same city block as case study 2. This is an opportunity to consider the possibility of using online social action to help remediate perceived problems. All three projects seek to organize individuals in such a way that awareness of social problems is increased and the capacity to solve these perceived problems is evaluated and tested. I aim to “triangulate” across all three cases to provide generalizable conclusions about praxis in the service of technologies of public space. This work is immediately applicable to academics interested in alternatives to traditional research institutions and social entrepreneurs that wish to bring radically new ideas to lingering problems of poverty and social injustice.

I will also be making a contribution to the literature on what constitutes the public and what technologies build public space. This project gives equal attention to physical and digital technologies because one can no longer treat the two as separate and distinct worlds. Our everyday lives are augmented by online social action, and therefore any theory about what kinds of technologies constitute public space should consider data as well as street networks. I anticipate that this project and its three constituent case studies will be the launch point for a new kind of research institution: a small, project-based organization dedicated to social justice.