The 18th annual International Research Conference ‘Dilemmas for Human Services’ and the preliminary Doctoral Consortium took place at Linnaeus University and Teleborg castle in Växjo, Sweden, during September 9th–11th 2015. The conference was organized as a joint effort between Linnaeus University, Växjö, and University of Linköping.

The Dilemmas conference dates back to 1995. It was formed, and is maintained, by scholars at Staffordshire University, University of East London, and Luleå University of Technology. Generally, Dilemmas stimulates critical analysis and reflections, and encourages more careful considerations about dominant ideas and notions relevant for human services. With this, Dilemmas nurtures meetings between established and new coming scholars where policy, organizational, management and sociological issues relating to human services can be considered. The research topics relevant to such span areas of e.g. health, social services, housing and education. 

In the last decade we have seen a rise of social media. Within this landscape of online services Facebook plays an immense role in facilitating and creating bonds bewteen people. In this paper we enter a qualitative study conducted with a small group of adult Facebookers over 58. We do so in an effort to understand waht kind of relationships one can have through this digital media. The theortical lens used is Phenomenology, which we find fruitful for more carefully looking into relationship between humans and technology. 

Awareness is a concept familiar to specialists within the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). It is superior for analysing and describing some of the ad hoc work activities that unfold in cooperation. Such informal activities are outside the scope of engineers' formal models, which are created to tackle challenges concerning human activities and their social interactions with regards to safety concerns in operation. This paper draws on fieldwork conducted in a marine setting of offshore operations. It presents an attempt to visualise the importance of cooperative work activities that shape computer systems. The aim, thus, is to portray cooperative work in a way that can be valuable for engineers implementing marine technology. We do so by way of presenting a transferring technique (2T) using insights from the CSCW field and Actor Network Theory (ANT).

Modern operating systems are increasingly complex and require a large number of individual subsystems and procedures; operators also must cooperate to make them function. In this paper the authors consider usability from a broad perspective based on this understanding, recognizing the challenges a team of operators, complex subsystems, and other technical aspects pose as they work together. It seeks to expand usability by adding insights from Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)-based fieldwork in offshore operations. To contribute to the current usability literature, we investigated and analyzed through a network-based approach how operators, ship bridge hardware and software, and other physical environments work together. We propose a process for evaluating the usability of complex systems: field observation and interviews to determine how work is organized and executed by human and nonhuman actors and to identify whether additional artifacts are being used to supplement the nonhuman components. The use of those artifacts often identifies usability issues in complex systems.

We discuss the process of meeting digital technology when entering a senior age, by taking a closer look at how different modes of independence and elderliness are (co-)constituted in relation to digital domestic care technologies.  Specifically, we suggest reading independence and elderliness as shaped by both the discursive and the material.  Our starting point is the notion of intra-action as introduced in Feminist Technoscience.  Thinking through use and design of digital technology from a standpoint of Feminism prompts us to widen the perspective on living with such technologies and, thusly, to raise questions about the process of coming of age as an independent person with such care technologies.

“In my agential realist account, meaning making is not a human-based practice, but rather a result of specific material reconfigurations of the world.” (Barad 2007:465n116)

 In the introductory quote Karen Barad states her non-anthropocentric positioning on meaning making.  Her position is rooted in ‘agential realism’ with which she gestures to a symbiotic relationship between meaning and matter.  From a standpoint of agential realism subjects and objects are not constituted as pre-fixed entities with specific properties; rather, they are performed and becoming in intra-actions through which boundaries and properties emerge and make meaningful (such) phenomena and concepts (Barad 2007).

 In this paper we bring forth Barad’s account on agential realism to unpack the mutual workings of subjects and objects within three different organizational setting. Accordingly, with Barad’s take on meaning making and the inseparableness of meaning and matter, we aim at unfolding how humans, activities, practices, things, technologies, and working life come into being, matters, and effects the very organization of (the) work (they do together).

 We draw on Barad and fellow STS scholars when asking the following questions:  What do the reconfiguring and redeployment of subjects and objects mean and how do they matter?  For whom?  In what way?  And with what effects?

 Thus, in re-entering a reading of meaning making through an optic of ‘agential realism’ we present three vignettes from different domains of working life that all feed into the questions raised above.  One vignette is situated in a meeting taking place in a project on IT systems design in a government agency, another vignette tells a story about a municipal planning project and the third zooms in on a project on care technologies in ICT based nursing homes (aka smart houses).  Different as they are, these vignettes all shed light on and seek to further our understands on how meaning is a becoming that happens in the very reconfiguration and redeployment of subjects and objects.

In this paper our focus is on smart homes as an emerging phenomenon in care and services offered to senior citizens. The background of this phenomenon is the so-called tide-wave of elderly. Along with socio-economic challenges, politicians express a desire to keep alive the welfare state that offers senior citizen services to maintain their well-being and autonomy. New technologies are therefore considered as a means to meet these challenges. Senior citizens are, like other citizens, a heterogeneous group with different wishes, activities, demands, and expectations rather than a uniform group with similar needs. The boundaries between those included in the smart homes and those not, and the very way these are drawn have ontological implications for the subject and object that emerges out of ongoing activities. We ask what kinds of homes that comes into existence due to the integration of elderly, care staff, alarm providers, alarms, sensor and so on. In addition to these entities other more intangible entities such as policies, technological push, and governance regimes are included. We locate our discussion of smart homes as infrastructures to a relational ontology in which humans and nonhumans are understood not as pre-given but come into existence in intra-actions in ongoing material-discursive practices e.g. smart homes offered to senior citizens. Hence what come into existence is dependent on the entities included, entities that are not innocent but “they are necessary for making meaning” and “have real material-consequences“ (Barad 1996:187). Three vignettes are used in the exploration of the thinking house.

We discuss some figurations (figures) that have emerged out of the resentreconfigurations of health care, which are rooted in the so-called tide-wave of elderly.We take a closer look at the phenomenon smart house for elderly to understand thehome when it, at the same time, becomes an in-baked infrastructure of public careservices. Such in-baked infrastructure supports senior citizens and disabled people intheir daily life, but, simultaneously, we argue, in such infrastructure technology and carebecomes intertwined and difficult to separate. We subject the topic through readingsconcerned with care and care technologies.