Infrastructure as Creative Action: Online Buying, Selling, and Delivery in Phnom Penh

Author : Margaret Jack, Jay Chen, Steven Jackson
Category : Conference Papers and Dissertations
Format : Website
Geographic Focus : Phnom Penh
Published : May.2017 Access

This paper describes a complex global sales and logistics network based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, which utilizes Internet tools (particularly Facebook) as well as a suite of offline tools such as feature phones, paper receipts, and motorcycles to facilitate the buying and selling of clothes and other commodities. Against the gap or import models that sometimes limit HCI understandings of computational change in non-Western environments, we argue that the consumers, business owners, delivery drivers, and call center staff play active and formative roles in producing this infrastructure, integrating new tools into older cultural practices and determining how they work within the limits and conventions of the environment. We argue that resourceful and imaginative activities such as these constitute a form of creative infrastructural action and are central to the ways that new tools circulate in the world, though they often go unrecognized by HCI as innovation.