Investigating Opaque Infrastructures with Discursive Design

Abstract

The information we access on the Internet appears immediately but usually lives far away. A search for “holiday decorations” might take you from a server in Montana to India to Northeastern Canada. The Desktop Odometer is a device that shows users the distance they travel when browsing the web by tracking the total miles between their current location and the server from which they are requesting information. Upon connecting the Desktop Odometer to their computer via a web browser extension, users are able to see how far information travels while surfing the web in real time. The Desktop Odometer is a Discursive Design artifact that allows users to observe certain aspects of the Internet’s elaborate and largely opaque infrastructure in relation to how they use it. Recognizing the vast distances information travels while one navigates the web brings this facet of the Internet into the foreground of a user’s experience. I describe the three approaches I used to investigate opaque infrastructures: the first was making the Desktop Odometer itself, the second was selling the Desktop Odometer on Amazon.com as a way to elicit user-generated feedback about the inner workings of the Internet, and the third was gaining firsthand experience of the seller’s side of Amazon.com.