Sarah Fox

Sarah Fox is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, San Diego in the Department of Communication and The Design Lab. Her research focuses on how technological artifacts challenge or propagate social exclusions, by examining existing systems and building alternatives.

Project name: Care & IoT

Project description:

Sarah extended her research program on infrastructures of care by examining how Internet of Things (IoT) technologies — or, ubiquitous networked objects imbued with computational capacity — are newly shaping intimate bodily experiences. Computing technologies for tracking the body are on the verge of being introduced broadly across public and private spheres and are poised to have unique and lasting effects on the privacy and autonomy of those being sensed, as well as the responsibility of workers entrusted with handling such data. For example, hygiene product manufacturers boast the ability for new models of soap dispensers to track the number of times one washes one’s hands during the day, correlating this information with employee break records. By investigating such technologies as they are being newly deployed, Sarah seeks to engage what computing researchers Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell (2011) call the “mess” of ubiquitous computing as it unfolds — focusing on how these systems shape experiences on the ground.