Digital material value: Designing emerging technologies

Introduction

The category of emerging technologies stands for a set of digital material things that are coming into being or are predicted to exist in an imagined future society or possible world. They are manifested in narratives of technologically driven societal change, which usually have utopian tendencies or at least offer (supposed) benefits to people, markets and governance, within a solutionism paradigm (Morozov, 2013). Often, alongside these visions of the positive impacts of emerging technologies, dystopian narratives are also generated that highlight the possible harm that they could cause. It is ironic that, after so many years of critical social science and humanities work that has dispelled the myth of technological determinism, such narratives persist in science and engineering, popular technology and mainstream media discourses. It signifies that there remains, for many researchers, technology experts and businesses, a certain enchantment with such narratives and indeed an anticipatory tendency to invest forms of hope and trust in the technological futures they predict. This simultaneously reminds us that there is still a significant role for social scientists of technology, media and communication in unpacking, discussing and intervening in how our possible futures with technology play out.

In this article, we advance this discussion in one specific direction, through an exploration of how the digital materiality of emerging technologies and data are assigned value. Rather than limiting our discussion of value to a fixed or universalist definition, we engage a working concept of value, which becomes contingent on emergent ethnographic meanings, rather than being imposed as if from above. This is distinct to existing approaches to defining value, where with reference to technological processes it has tended to conceptualised as determined through economic analysis or as emphasising the social features of valuing. Indeed, as the earlier analysis of Dumont (1970, 1986), of value in terms of moral schemes instead of a rigid set of values, demonstrates, it is not productive to make a false dichotomy between the social and the economic.

In doing so, we draw on Dumont’s (1970, 1986) work to see value as encountered ethnographically in the form of what Graeber (2001) refers to as ‘meaningful difference’ (p. 2). Thus, we engage the concept of value on two levels. On one level, value is an operative category by which people give meaning to an order of things, people, attitude or actions that exist, or which they create in their own social entities. On another level, value is an action oriented to a particular web of imagined social relations between humans, non-humans and future scenarios. Such actions gain value as they are incorporated into larger social entities (Gaztañaga, 2018; Graeber, 2001). We ultimately combine these two understandings to both make sense of situated digital materialities and understand how larger social entities operate in processes of value creation. Thus, rather than being associated with a process of economic production that embeds value in an object or an attitude towards a market exchange, value is emergent within particular sets of circumstances. We contribute to the discussion of the digital material proposed by this Special Issue by engaging the example of emerging technologies to demonstrate an analysis of digital materials beyond the study of the consumption of digital material things and instead towards questions of value.

To do this we ask how emerging technologies are developed and designed and how modes of value participate in and are co-emergent with these processes. We argue that such an understanding is a necessary corrective to the science and engineering narratives we have noted above, since it enables us to see how the value of emerging technologies does not necessarily lie in their adoption by a predefined market, which will as a result bring to fruition the societal and individual benefits that they are predicted or promised to lead to. This implies a corresponding shift in attention away from the study of the consumption of digital material technologies. Thus, we engage a processual approach to emerging technology, data and value rooted in design anthropological principles to examine how and with what digital materiality in progress configures to create value.

To undertake this, we draw on our ethnographic research with a group of drone technology designers based in Melbourne, Australia. Drones have been critically analysed anthropologically in terms of their military applications (Gusterson, 2016), and geographers Garrett and Anderson (2018) have called both for academic engagement with drones beyond the military context and for academics to participate in how these technologies are shaped. Our work takes steps in both directions in our focus on drone development in a makerspace, and through our collaborative and interventional approach to the ethnography of emerging technologies. Drone development is also an ideal example through which to explore the digital materiality of emerging technologies since drones: are in the process of reaching markets but not yet ‘there’ for a number of technological and regulatory reasons; they bring together hardware, software and data in both their development processes and they future possibilities associated with or imagined for them; and they have a number of current, emerging and possible future uses and therefore forms of value in, for instance, military (Gusterson, 2016), health (e.g. Mueller, 2016), logistics (such as recent Amazon deliveries) and agricultural (as in the case of the drone developers we researched with) applications.

Emerging technologies and the digital material

In online technology news, and less frequently in mainstream news, emerging technologies are depicted through a narrative of technological innovation. Examples include, in 2017, the Scientific American ‘10 Emerging Technologies to watch: Innovations that are on the verge of making a difference to society’ ¹ and MIT Technology Review’s ‘10 Breakthrough Technologies 2017’ of which it is claimed that

These technologies all have staying power. They will affect the economy and our politics, improve medicine, or influence our culture. Some are unfolding now; others will take a decade or more to develop. But you should know about all of them right now. ²

Such lists vary but include technologies such as self-driving trucks, drones, face-detecting payment systems, quantum computing and forms of machine learning.

These technologies and related services are presented online in widely disseminated popular and business science news publications as already completed or imagined as completed things. They usually have been, or are being, prototyped or simulated and their value to society, markets and governments is usually predicted within the way they are defined. That is, they are viewed as being technologically possible, and it is assumed that they will have particular impacts that will change society. However, an anthropology that accounts for ‘the radical contingencies of the future’ (Irving, 2017, see Pink and Salazar, 2017) reveals that the predictive narratives of dominant visions of how society will be impacted by emerging technologies or scientific discoveries do not account for how such technologies become interwoven with life as lived. For instance, self-driving vehicles (vehicles with various degrees of autonomous driving features that take over some driver activities) have been a very hyped emerging technology in recent years and self-driving trucks were featured as a breakthrough technology into 2017, due to the future impact they are predicted to have on society. ³ However, design anthropological research has shown that such solutionist narratives, which depend on the finished product being launched into a pre-existing market upon which it can impact, do not (in the case of self-driving vehicles) account for how people will engage with these technologies (Pink et al., 2018a). In this article, we shift the focus to examine emerging technologies for which maker–user configurations are imagined differently. In doing so, we call for a non-determinist approach to researching emerging technologies that evades both technological determinism and solutionism and deterministic notions of future. This understanding also has implications for how we can understand the digital materiality of such emerging technologies and the ways in which this is sustained by value.

The question of digital materiality (which is distinct from that of the online/offline which we do not discuss here) has been addressed by scholars from an increasing number of disciplines in recent years, including in architecture, media and communications, and social sciences (reviewed by Pink et al., 2016). When treated from a material culture studies perspective as Miller and Horst (2012) outline, the relationality between the two can be analysed in three ways: ‘First, there is the materiality of digital infrastructure and technology. Second, there is the materiality of digital content, and, third, there is the materiality of digital context’ (p. 25). This approach works well for understanding how people consume technologies. However, our empirical and theoretical context not only requires a different focus, which examines what happens when the concept of digital material does not stand only for objects of study in the form of digital materials such as digital data, files, photographs, software programmes or smartphones, but also requires us to account for changing configurations of things and processes and the imagined futures that people attach to them. To develop this, we engage a concept of digital materiality (Pink et al., 2016) as what Henrietta Moore (1999, 2004) has called a concept-metaphor, which serves as a conceptual container for things that are similar in that they share certain characteristics, but that are only partially co-framed. Here, the digital material is characterised in three ways: (1) It does not separate the digitality and materiality of any ‘thing’ – thus, the digital and material are considered part of the same process, whereby things are continually in progress; (2) Digital materiality is not a quality of an object but rather a process – it is part of the ‘thingness’ of configurations that emerge in processes. That is not to say we cannot isolate a digital material ‘thing’ at one point in its process and view it as if it were an object – for instance, to speak of a drone, as we do below, we might need to consider the drone as existing in a snapshot through which it can be held still and described. However, our focus is primarily on how digital materiality is itself processual and is part of ongoing processes and configurations; (3) Digital materiality is, in this sense, not something that has meaning on its own but always generates meaning because it is configured with other processes. As a concept-metaphor, this notion of digital materiality, is not a fixed theoretical category, but rather it is a container through which we can examine how digital materials are manifested and mobilised across a range of different circumstances and situations. Here, we are concerned specifically with how digital materiality configures with processes through which value is imagined and generated. In pursuing this interest, we are also concerned with the empirical question of how digital materialities are engaged in the pursuit of technological futures, and the role these processes play in the consolidation of the value that becomes associated with emerging technologies.

In digital anthropology, the value of technologies as commodities has often been understood through approaches that emphasise how people consume technologies and thus make them meaningful within their existing everyday worlds. For instance, Miller and Horst (2012) have defined the digital as a social phenomenon through Miller’s theory of consumption and material culture, to suggest that our use of digital technologies is a form of consumption in which ‘everyday domestic consumption utilizes commodities to facilitate meaningful relationships between persons (Miller 2007)’. The evidence they reviewed at the time suggested that ‘the new political economy of the digital world is really not that different from the older political economy. The digital extends the possibilities previously unleashed by money, equally the positive and negative’ (p. 19). While in the areas of everyday consumption and the materiality of technologies as goods and artefacts this argument can hold, contemporary emerging technology design implies the need for a different understanding which is pinned on the question of how digital materiality and value (sometimes monetary, but not always) are mutually constituted. This requires a shift in focus away from anthropologies of consumption, which tend to be concerned with questions of how people appropriate products and the social relationships they are implicated in and towards the imaginaries that are part of the design of technologies and how these imaginaries are relational to markets.

Therefore, rather than seeing designed technologies as products that are consumed by the people who make up or become their market, we understand the design of technology and the constitution of its market as co-constituted. In part, this is because the particular technologies and the forms of digital materiality they demonstrate are associated with new business models that indeed (as was not the case for the studies reviewed by Miller and Horst, 2012) do represent a different political economy where value is differently constituted and, rather than extending existing possibilities, open up new ones. In this economy, ‘things’ cannot be consumed, and are not launched into existing markets, but are rather vehicles for the mobilisation of processes that have potential economic value when they configure with users who might take the form of stakeholders, institutions and markets. At the centre of this question, and its differentiation from those studies that focus on the consumption of technologies, is the question of digital data and its relationship to digital material value.

What are data in the context of digital materiality?

There is an extensive literature in the social sciences and humanities surrounding digital data, commenting on big data and its societal implications, including the datafication of the environments and lives, which involves ‘the ability to render into data many aspects of the world that have not been quantified before’ (Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger, 2013). Questions relating to most (if not all) emerging technologies are inseparable from questions about data.

Social scientists have responded to this context by treating (digital) data critically and interrogating its status to show it is not an objective or self-evident artefact (Baym, 2013; Boellstorff, 2013; boyd and Crawford, 2012; Markham, 2013; Nafus, 2014). For the examples that were concerned within this article, which refer to technology design, data are an integral element of the digital materiality of technology. They are moreover inseparable from value, but they do not necessarily have an intrinsic, predetermined value of their own – that is, they do not have value that is separate from their status as a constitutive element of a digital material configuration. Corresponding with Boellstorff and Maurer’s (2015) emphasis on data as ‘formed through relations that extend beyond “data” itself; how what counts as data (and data’s referent) is a social process with political overtones; and that data is always in real-time transformation in ways that cut across notions of nature and culture’, our concern here is with how to situate data and understand its dynamism and relatedness (pp. 3–4). In this sense, we see data as leaky (like digital materiality as outlined above) and lively rather than discrete (Lupton, 2016; Pink et al., 2018c), and not objective units that can be isolated. The example of technology design developed in this article demonstrates how data, like value, which is discussed next, are emergent from and constitutive of digital material configurations.

Despite this scholarly problematisation of the status of data, when viewed as units that can be objectified and commoditised, data can nonetheless be bought and sold, and are packaged and monetised as a commodity in some circumstances (see Maurer, 2015). Treating data as a market in which discrete entities might be sold, or where access to specific (ongoingly produced but delimited in scope) data resources might be bought, generates concern among social scientists. It is a driver for fears about third-party access, privacy, predictive analytics and the possibility of unethical and inequitable governance and regulatory regimes they imply (Dencik et al., 2017; Smith and O’Malley, 2017). Those issues are likewise a concern for us and are discussed elsewhere (Pink et al., 2018b). Here, by dispensing with the model that commoditises data, we see data or data sets as not a commodity in themselves. Therefore, shifting focus from the consumption of data to ask instead where data participate in the generation of digital material value. This, we argue, enables us to also envision a different perspective on how ethical and responsible data futures could be conceptualised or conceived in a potentially different future. As David Graeber (2013) has emphasised, this is the essence of politics, which is

not just to accumulate value, but to define what value is, and how different values (forms of ‘honor’, ‘capital’, etc.) dominate, encompass, or otherwise relate to one another; and thus at the same time, between those imaginary arenas in which they are realized. (p. 228)

Data are often at the core of such issues in a contemporary context. Therefore, to address existing problematic uses of data that are unethical and inequitable, we need to investigate the sites where data become differently associated with value through an interrogation of how data are being implicated in the definition of value and of what alternative models are already emerging that indicate that the positioning of data in relation to value can be differently defined.

Graeber (2013) has recently stressed his own earlier argument that ‘value will necessarily be a key issue if we see social worlds not just as a collection of persons and things but rather as a project of mutual creation, as something collectively made and remade’ (p. 222). Following this, we understand value is a complex and processual concept. It refers not to something that can be fixed but that is ongoingly produced and that is discursive, experienced and imagined. In the context of our discussion here, the study of value enables us to enter the research context to understand digital materiality through something that is very obviously processual, contingent, unstable and unpredictable (because technology markets are) and evidently and inevitably unfinished. Thus, we engage the study of value specifically as a prism through which to comprehend what is needed to configure and ensure the continuation of digital materialities, like the example of drones discussed below, and the data associated with them. Without value and imagined futures, or potential value, emerging technologies will not be able to come about.

Making drones: digital materiality and value

In 2017 and 2018, we undertook ethnographic research in Australia with a group of drone designers, apprentices and entrepreneurs and their imagined stakeholders and business partners. Our fieldwork involves tech enthusiasts, designers and hobbyists who gathered at Melbourne’s first makerspace, ‘Brunswick’, or were connected through incubators, meetups or business centres. Most participants were professionals and men; however, women’s participation and the age range (between 18 and 70) were growing. Most members were highly qualified or skilled in technology fields.

In 2017, Roger and Ali, the managers, were cooking a start-up based on drone design and services. When we contacted them to start our fieldwork with them, the first thing Roger told us on the phone was that ‘Ali and I quit our jobs and now we are working fully in the company’. When we visited them in the makerspace, we realised this meant that everything they did was somehow connected with the company. Ali, a computational engineer, had had the idea of creating a start-up to build on the drone initiative and Internet of Things (IoT) group and Roger, an architect and the makerspace manager, enthusiastically joined him. He explained that he was producing merchandise for local brands and making enough money to live but not to grow his business because his central interest now was managing the makerspace. For Roger, a start-up from the makerspace would be a ‘dream job’. To raise the funds and support to create the company, Roger and Ali attended every workshop and talk they could and applied to programmes for tech entrepreneurs in Melbourne and Sydney. Alongside this idea, the drone initiative grew through the makerspace workshops, communal work hours and design courses with expert members. They started to make their own collection of drones, with corresponding documentation and materials. The drones they made were based on market technology but with more modest materials and less investment of expert hours. However, it was difficult both for the makerspace community initiative and the future start-up to conceptualise the possible uses for drones beyond them following a series of orders, such as picking up an object, transporting it, taking photos and mobilising sensors. Within this imagination, the drones constituted a particular form of digital materiality that brought together available hardware, software, firmware and other components and their combined functionality, as well as the data the drones would produce through and regarding their flight paths, photographs and video, and sensor data. While the promise of the emerging technology was vast, finding the business models or functions appropriate for it in the current market was a major issue from any ground-up emerging technology. This was particularly so for the drones since, in principle, drone technology is fully developed and is a successful technology in the context of, for example, the arms industry but has limited production, retail and distribution chains beyond this. We followed Roger and Ali as they searched for resources and attended all the makerspace’s drones and IoT for drones meetings. The design of the drones was impacted not only by the technology making but by all those contexts where Roger and Ali sought advice, help, partners, ideas and money. At each step, almost in unison, all the members of the makerspace were trying to make the tech and the company come together. Every time Roger came back from an incubator with a possible programme to apply to, the guys at the makerspace worked days and weeks to fulfil the technological requirements and each time they generated a new capacity for the drones Ali wrote a new mission for the company. The drone environment, the company’s goals and the quality of the technology changed constantly during the fieldwork, as did the group of makerspace members committed to the company, and the meaning of the company itself from being a business idea to referring to everything concerning drone production. All through this, Roger and Ali’s commitment, expectations and search for a life change remained intact. While in the makerspace the technological design opened new directions for drones to make an impact, the search to generate profit from them was harder.

During our fieldwork, the members of the makerspace also collaborated in our research, coming to workshops talking with us about how we could sharpen our elusive object of investigation and letting us participate in the technological making and the social life it entailed. We collaborated in the company project, working on videos for crowdsourcing campaigns and programme applications, organising work hours and offering them the conceptual reflection, insights and know-how that emerged from our participation in their processes and from our research project. In this fieldwork, our research partners included us as part of the imagined community of geeks, makers and designers, and as part of the design processes, thus making us part of what was emerging.

When we visited Make Create a year later in 2018, the group was still enthusiastic about the technology they were forging, even though, like most start-ups, both their business model and the drones were still in progress. The previous year had had its ups and downs, but the business was still doing well. The drone project was still limited by two things, which for the designers were ‘not yet’ resolved. Like many organisations in the field of emerging technologies, their project suffered from the lack of GPS accuracy, which meant imagined uses could not be realised, and short battery time, which was being addressed through a new hybrid design. The digital materiality of the drones was unfinished, ongoing and represented a form of potential and value which it was imagined could be configured when the GPS data and power and material design issues would permit the production of the visual and sensor data needed for the business. These futures that could not yet be realised were articulated in relation to what the drones would be able to do. Thus, enabling us to see how the digital material value of the drone project was constituted not only by the digital material and data possibilities and ‘not yets’ of the design process but also through an imagined market for the uses of the drones that drew on the developers’ own knowledge and experience. Yet, this does not mean the drone project was halted; Ali, an outstanding software engineer, was trying to figure out problems associated with agriculture and farming in order to create technological solutions, and, as Roger told us, the agriculture sector represented a nearer future for drones given the regulatory issues and complexities of using drones in busy urban environments. For example, this was discussed in relation to how a drone could help moving injured animals in a protected area, monitor industrial plants or how an affordable drone could process images and map areas affected by catastrophes.

Yet while they were ‘waiting’, what had started almost 3 years earlier as a nascent drone business had become a bundle of projects – consultancy for start-ups, supply of drone parts for other initiatives, taking part in tech-related contests and so on. This enlivened the ‘drone enterprise’ which was now no longer about setting up a business but about ‘keeping going’ with the technology and with the projects, moving towards new models and pushing collectively to generate an actual market for the ‘drone thing’.

In this example, where the designers and users were the same people – all in the company – we see how as they continued to work they prepared for an imagined future market that did not yet exist, through an anticipated sense of value. The value of the drones continued to emerge as part of the process of their digital materiality – as the technological development came about in tandem with the possible forms of support and possible uses for them.

We also have shown here that drones can be seen as digital material technologies in the sense that they are devices in progress and in that they create ‘data’. Data are inextricable from the configurations that such emerging technologies entail because without it they would not be able to be used to perform imagined future tasks. Yet as we have also shown, it is not the data itself that has any immediate or obvious value as separate from the drone or that is monetised. Indeed, during our 2017 fieldwork, one of the drone makers told us that it would not even matter if the data itself was lost once it had been used. Here, ‘data’ needs to be understood beyond its frequent association with the gathering, managing and creating of information. It was the developers’ ability to imagine what might happen or cannot happen ‘yet’ that bound together the project of the drone company. The data that drones produce were an integral and inevitably part of this, since they were fundamental to what could be done with drones. However, this did not involve ‘capitalization’ of data in the sense highlighted by Boellstorff (2013), whereby ‘there is a background to capitalization practices with regard to technology – and value in treating big data as a common noun, vulnerable to reconfiguration’ (p. 1). Rather, for the drone company, data was one element of the constitution of digital material value.

Moving digital materialities, moving value

Existing treatments of data have tended to attribute its value to the profit procured through, for instance, data mining and profiling (Couldry and Mejias, 2019) or the perceived benefits accrued through its use in surveillance (Andrejevic and Gates, 2014; Zuboff, 2015) and social engineering (Tufekci, 2014). Such approaches tend to reify value in the logics of existing markets, seeing data as a novel commodity with a static exchange value. Critical approaches in Studies of Science and Technology see value of data differently – as lying in its participation in processes of stabilisation and constitution of technology (Storni, 2012), thus suggesting that data has an active role beyond its exchange value in the generation of profit. Our approach, to value, outlined above, builds on this to argue that value is not located in a specific context or thing but in the actor’s capacity to imagine a social web (Gaztañaga, 2018), and consequently act and interact. Thus, value of digital materialities emerges when, simultaneously, a possible society is imagined and things are created for it (Graeber, 2001), as shown in our example where an imagined market becomes the configuration where data and drone would exist. Ethnographic analysis illuminates aspects of the emergence of data that are crucial to understanding how it participates in these processes: in defining societies (e.g. markets, countries or communities) that are desirable, and in constituting the capacities, moral schemes and attitudes through which data and its actions are valued.

Our ethnographic analysis leads us to three key insights into how and where digital material value is constituted. Each insight refers to a wider finding that both the value and the temporalities of the digital materialities of drone design are continually moving. In this section, we outline these insights. Then, to conclude, we reflect on what this example tells us regarding the interrogation of the question of the digital material which this special issue confronts.

First, value is imagined in possible future configurations, in which technology and data participate, yet, in the example discussed here, not as commodities. For instance, neither the technology itself nor the data are the repositories of value or the ‘thing’ that accrues exchange or monetary value. Rather value is an ongoing potentiality that is an affordance of something that is incomplete, inevitably unfinished and contingent. It inhabits the realm of the ‘not yet’. Here, certainty lies not in what can be predicted for the future but rather in what the designers know that they cannot do (yet). For example, the drone designers were aware of the technological and energy limitations of the drones. This stopped them both from advancing the digital materiality of the technology and from producing or using data. However, it did not make the digital material technology or data less valuable since its value was invested in what the company would be able to do with the drone, once the necessary things configured for the monetary value of that activity to be realised. In this sense, returning to our discussion of the value of data and its use as non-commodified in this context, we can see how data become the bait but not the objective. Boltanski and Thévenot (1991) suggest contemporary notions of market value are linked to the scarcity of goods (p. 45). However, data are not scarce in any market. Instead their value lies in how their potential is framed. Data are part of a service but need to configure with other things so that this service has value.

Second, digital material value is contingent on the emergence of not only the technology but also the problem space in which it participates. This problem space can have multiple facets and temporalities simultaneously, and indeed these temporalities and/or the expectations associated with them can shift as the circumstances and stages of technology development and external demand reconfigure. For example, from the very beginning of the ‘Drone thing’ as the designers call the overall project, their ultimate objective was to reach the technology market by making a tailored technology based on drones for industrial or governmental sectors. Some aspects, including having the basic initial technology setup, transferring the know-how from previous experiences and initiatives (e.g. IoT, smart technology start-ups) and other administrative and legal issues, seemed just around the corner to them. Yet to achieve their goal, they needed to imagine the problems of those sectors. Initially, this, and developing a malleable business model, proved difficult. However, over time, as more technological challenges emerged, the ‘just around the corner’ feeling became more distant. Instead, a series of process outcomes became part of the project and fed back into its trajectory. These included selling drone parts, offering consulting services and working towards a competitive drone challenge, thus enabling the designers and the project to subsist economically and technologically. Simultaneously they continued to work on trialling and testing the technology and learning themselves, while working on closing the distance between themselves and their imagined future technology market by generating technological reliability, positioning themselves with stakeholders and securing a cash flow to maintain their work.

Third, value was always an unfinished and open element of the digital materiality of the drones, in the work of the technology developers we researched with. If value can only be realised through the confirmation of other people eyes ‘whose assessment one takes seriously’ (Graeber, 2013: 2), then we can conceptualise the drones as not having a single value that needed to ultimately be recognised by a specific market that would use them in a predicted way. Rather, emerging technologies of the kind we discuss here do not have a value that is oriented to one imagined use of the technology but instead to the possibility of different uses. Therefore, this differs from the way value is situated in relation to the contemporary economy where it is attributed to technological innovation. Moreover, forms of unfinished value play a particular role in the generation of further forms of economic value, since, as seen in the example of drone design, those activities and uses of technology that generate economic value while the technology design is not finished (e.g. consultancy, entering competitions and supplying drone parts to others) play a role in generating the imagined future value of the drone company, in that they underpin and support the technology design processes and the designers.

Conclusion

In the case of drone development, neither the technology development nor the ethnographic fieldwork could be encapsulated easily because both were part of larger processes. Drone technology was seeking to emerge in markets that did not yet exist, but through which large amounts of finance already flowed. Our research is also hard to circumscribe, since it is only by following this process that we are able to understand emerging technologies. Our research was also part of our wider project, whereby as part of our meta-analysis across this and the other sites where we did fieldwork, we sought to identify the common threads in the ways technologies emerge through design processes and how designer/users and others became involved with them. Other sites discussed elsewhere (Pink et al., 2018) include the Barcelona Smart Citizen project where designers and users were necessarily co-complicit in processes of use and adjustment and thus in generating the value of the device and platform, and the Melbourne Blockchain centre where a participant and his colleague had created a Bitcoin pension fund, which did not have a market value, at least at that time. These examples, along with the drone developers, present different modes of design and use to those often associated with mainstream technology design, whereby finished products are designed for users and tested and launched into markets. The example of the drone developers represents a movement across technology design (particularly in start-ups) which implies that we need new ways of conceptualising the trajectories of digital and material things beyond earlier models of the consumption of technology as digital material artefact. Collectively, these examples offer us a different vision of how digital material technologies and data emerge in design use and an alternative mode of production and consumption to that which has been analysed conventionally in anthropological studies of the consumption of technologies (e.g. Miller and Horst, 2012; Silverstone and Hirsch, 1992). Significantly, the example discussed in this article reveals a mode through which the value of digital material technologies and data is constituted, whereby the designer–user plays a particular role in ensuring this value. What is emerging here is not more technologies that will be finished and marketed, but rather technologies that are inevitably unfinished along with corresponding economies of knowledge and know-how, designer–user communities and collective or shared modes of imagining futures.