Always somewhere, never there: using critical design to understand database interactions

Structured databases achieve effective searching and sorting by enacting sharply delineated category boundaries around their contents. While this enables precise retrieval, it also distorts identities that exist between category lines. A choice between Single and Married, for example, blurs distinctions within the Single group: single, perhaps, merely because same-sex marriage is not legal in one's locality. Sociologists Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker describe such residual states as inevitable byproducts of information systems. To minimize residuality, traditional practice for descriptive metadata seeks to demarcate clear and objective classes. In this study, we use critical design to question this position by creating information collections that foreground the residual, instead of diminishing it. We then interrogate our design experiments with solicited critical responses from invited experts and student designers. Inspired by the anthropologist Tim Ingold, we argue that our experiments illuminate a form of interacting with databases characterized by notions of wayfaring, or inhabiting a space, as opposed to notions of transport, or reaching a known destination. We suggest that the form of coherence that shapes a wayfaring database is enacted through its flow, or fluid integration between structure and content.