The broken world of refugee apps? Towards sustainability of mobile applications

The following text was written by Olga Usachova, Postdoc Researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and reflects her presentation at our Closing Conference, “Repairing Technology – Fixing Society?” from 13-14 October 2022 in Luxemburg.

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In the past few years, discussions on maintenance and repair practices have become central to sustainability transformation narratives. While attention is still mostly focused on material objects, in this talk I focus on digital materiality – namely refugee apps. Repair is seen as a practice of engaging people in sustainable consumption by making the lifespan of artefacts longer (Meißner, 2021). When it comes to material practices of repair, we can observe two diverging trends. First, the lifespan of artefacts is inevitably decreasing in the absence of the necessary support – for example, a failure to upgrade software in some devices that pushes consumers to switch to a more recently produced model. But at the same time, a marked increase in repair cultures is strengthening the argument for maintenance and repair practices.

In this talk, I explore the centrality of maintenance and repair work in developing mobile applications for refugees by seeing it not as a “subsidiary process of design, but an active way of designing” (Caselli & Lathrop, 2022). Although it was back in 2015-2016 that refugee apps received massive public attention, during the “long summer of migration” (Römhild et al., 2018), issues of maintenance and repair remain highly topical today.

The relatively fast response from the civic tech community to the call for improved access to information and services for newly arrived asylum seekers in Europe has been supported by several policy reports, academic articles, funding streams and hackathons. But as Benton (2019) put it, “in some cases, creativity has come at the expense of sustainability, with damaging consequences when information is outdated or outright incorrect”. The increased attention on refugees and technology has created a highly competitive environment in private and non-profit sectors which “does not always lead to successful and sustainable solutions” (Pakzad, 2017). As Jackson et al. (2012, p. 107) mentioned, “we keep track of figures like ICT penetration, adoption, and diffusion, but rarely breakdown or abandonment. We capture statistics on cell phones purchased, but rarely cell phones discarded.” The same applies to software artefacts – mobile applications and particularly refugee apps. Our attention is captured by the practices of development and use of the abovementioned objects, but less often by the fact that software development and technological design universes function in a consumerist society.

I explore maintenance and repair as distinct categories and inevitable parts of the process of technological development of ICT driven by the logic of progressive computer science. Noticeably, technological infrastructures depend on “serviceability and usability” (Krebs & Weber, 2021, p. 12). This way of thinking resonates strongly with social concerns: from Dewey’s way of seeing enquiry and disruption to what is known as the invisible work of infrastructure in science and technology studies (STS) (Star, 1999; Strebel et al., 2018). Previous approaches to repair and maintenance from an STS standpoint have focused on innovation dynamics in practices and processes of repair (Denis et al., 2016) and social aspects of the intersection between design and technology (Lausberg & Pelizza, 2021). By taking this view further, we can see the repair and maintenance of devices as “matters of care”, meaning “everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair “our world”” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 3). This also comprises a structural framework of users, practices and spaces of repair and maintenance which resonates strongly with the narrative of sustainable information systems development.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted during 2019-2020 in Germany as part of a PhD research project investigating the role of refugee apps within a broader network of migration technologies, I offer a thick description of the maintenance and repair work that sustains the ecology of such apps. I draw a parallel between practices of use of refugee apps and their maintenance strategy by asking: what politics and affordances are embedded in refugee apps, and how are these negotiated and transformed after implementation in maintenance and repair work? How is sustainability discourse embedded in refugee app development techniques?

I identify from interviews with developers, implementers and users of refugee apps that maintenance and repair practices are often underestimated and even neglected, and that this has a direct effect on the sustainability of such infrastructures and the usability of the artefacts. Building on the argument of Graham and Thrift (2007, p. 17) that “maintenance and repair is an ongoing process, but it can be designed in many different ways in order to produce many different outcomes and these outcomes can be more or less efficacious: there is […] a politics of repair and maintenance”, I explain how this became especially visible in our case study of refugee apps, with interest-driven competition between developers of such artefacts influencing the approach to sustaining the app infrastructure.

 

References:

Benton, M. (2019, June 18). Digital Litter: The Downside of Using Technology to Help Refugees. Migration Policy Institute. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/digital-litter-downside-using-technology-help-refugees

Caselli, P., & Lathrop, A. (2022). Repair as a social design practice: Three case studies in vulnerable households in Chile. DRS2022, Bilbao. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.218

Denis, J., Mongili, A., & Pontille, D. (2016). Maintenance & Repair in Science and Technology Studies. TECNOSCIENZA: Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies, 6(2).

Graham, S., & Thrift, N. (2007). Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance. Theory, Culture & Society, 24(3), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276407075954

Jackson, S. J., Pompe, A., & Krieshok, G. (2012). Repair Worlds: Maintenance, Repair, and ICT for Development in Rural Namibia. CSCW’12: Across the Globe – Cross-cultural studies.

Krebs, S., & Weber, H. (eds) (2021). The Persistence of Technology: Histories of Repair, Reuse and Disposal. Transcript Publishing.

Lausberg, Y., & Pelizza, A. (2021). Thinking with Maintenance and Repair to Account for Obduracy of Macro Orders. The Case of Informational Migration Management in Europe. TECNOSCIENZA: Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies, 12(2).

Meißner, M. (2021). Repair is care? – Dimensions of care within collaborative practices in repair cafes. Journal of Cleaner Production, 299. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.126913

Pakzad, R. (2017). Bits of Life: Leveraging Emerging Technologies to Improve the Livelihoods of Refugees [Columbia University]. https://doi.org/10.7916/D8X6406P

Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. University of Minnesota Press.

Römhild, R., Schwanhäußer, A., zur Nieden, B., & Yurdakul, G. (eds.) (2018). Witnessing the Transition: Moments in the Long Summer of Migration. Berlin Institute for Empirical Integration and Migration Research (BIM). https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/handle/18452/19415

Star, S. L. (1999). The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), 377–391. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326

Strebel, I., Bovet, A., & Sormani, P. (2018). Repair Work Ethnographies: Revisiting Breakdown, Relocating Materiality. Springer.