Machine Imperfect

Machine Imperfect weaves together conversations across media studies, science and technology studies, and critical design that challenge dominant imaginaries of technological progress. Rather than treating technological changes as a teleology toward seamlessness—frictionless interfaces, stable infrastructures, and perfect(ed) intelligence—this body of work attends to breakdowns, glitches, and errors as ordinary experiences of sociotechnical life.

The project draws inspirations from several lines of thinking:

1. Donna Haraway’s book Staying with the Trouble, which rejects the desire for clean resolutions and perfected futures. Writing against solutionist imaginaries, Haraway urges an orientation toward messy, compromised, and ongoing conditions. Trouble, in her account, is not a failure of progress but the terrain of living in the present. This insistence on remaining with difficulty—rather than overcoming it—provides a way to understand technological breakdown not as an exception or error, but as constitutive of everyday life.

2. Steve Jackson’s writing on "Rethinking Repair" and Shannon Mattern's piece on "Maintenance and Care": Against narratives that privilege innovation, rupture, or spectacular moments of failure, Jackson and Mattern foregrounds maintenance, endurance, and the small acts of care through which infrastructures are tended to despite their imperfections.

3. Sarah Ahmed’s work on comfort and on "The Uses of Use": Ahmed theorizes comfort not as a private feeling but as an alignment between bodies, environments, and expectations—an alignment that often goes unnoticed until it breaks down. By examining how objects and systems are shaped by assumed uses, she shows how everyday design renders some actions effortless while making others difficult or out of place. Moments of discomfort, misuse, or irritation thus become diagnostic, revealing the norms and promises embedded in sociotechnical arrangements.

4. Lauren Berlant’s idea of inconvenience: Berlant understands inconvenience not as a minor personal irritation, but as a structural condition that accumulates, wears down, and binds people through uneven experiences of disruption. The commons, in this sense, is not a space of harmony or consensus, but a condition of being thrown together by shared interruptions.