Working Relations
For scholars in STS and design, this offers a conceptual framework to rethink human-technology relations, but it is an incremental theoretical contribution without empirical validation.
The paper introduces the concept of 'working relations' to complement theories of maintenance, care, and repair, using three case studies to propose seven guiding propositions and arguing for its centrality in fostering generative and pluralistic relations with objects and environments.
This paper offers a concept of working relations as a complement and extension to existing theories of maintenance, care and repair. Building on the cases of an umbrella, a tractor and a pond, it advances seven propositions that might guide and inform further work and thinking in this space. It concludes with the challenging figures of Chernobyl, nickel extraction, and AI, and argues for the centrality of working relations to more generative and pluralistic relations with the things and worlds around us.