Whose Time Counts? Temporal Arrangements in Sociotechnical Infrastructures

Catherine Wieczorek, Anh-ton Tran, Cindy Kaiying Lin, Laura Forlano, Carl DiSalvo, Shaowen Bardzell

Abstract

This paper examines how infrastructures organize time in ways that unevenly distribute burden, access, and opportunity across communities. We draw on two ethnographic cases: eviction case filings in Atlanta, part of the state’s legal and housing governance infrastructure, and a sexual healthcare intervention in Chicago, situated within the city’s public health services. We advance HCI’s engagement with temporality by demonstrating how infrastructures sediment layers of political, social, and technical decisions over time. We conceptualize infrastructures as stratified formations where earlier allocations of power become materially and procedurally embedded, configuring present-day experiences of public systems. We define temporal arrangements as the patterned ways infrastructures shape and allocate time, producing unequal demands on who waits, who moves, and who must continually adjust. We describe two temporal arrangements—compression and gaps—to show how systems structure and constrain access to care, support, and basic services. By linking inherited infrastructural logics to everyday temporal burdens, we offer HCI a framework for examining how inequities persist through time.

Here is the full paper.

A sketch illustrating our contribution: infrastructures accumulate layers of sedimentation over time that shape contemporary experiences in our two field sites, Atlanta, GA, and Chicago, IL.