UC San Diego

This dissertation examines the nuances of multidisciplinary teamwork on a biometric device to fingerprint newborns. Since 2015 a group of engineers, medical professionals, social scientists, and designers have worked on a non-contact scanner that would capture infant fingerprints and create a digital record of one’s identity for vaccination purposes. My research opens critical space for imagining alternatives for the two competing perspectives of either infant biometrics as the pure evil or the ultimate solution for all problems.I analyze an online collaboration software called Slack, which the team used, as an additional lens in my ethnographic account of the team. I examine to what extent Slack mirrors offline team interactions and project progress. My research shows how to visualize the team’s multidisciplinary collaboration throughout the project, the phases of biometric design by discipline, and what the limitations of such representations are. I observe how the team wanted to go beyond just making a tool and redesign the whole healthcare delivery system to make it more equitable and accessible. Unable to solve all global health problems, after conducting multiple tests in the field, the project ends up centered on the technical side of making a device work. I also find how ethics is practiced from distinct disciplinary vantage points in the daily entanglements of limited resources and interpersonal relationships. At the team level, I demonstrate which concerns are voiced and draw attention to the role of the team leader in many key decisions. At the project level, the story of a particular biometric device is an invitation for a dialogue between those who make technologies of the future, and those who are rightfully skeptical and emphasize the unintended consequences of any biometrics. Ultimately, I suggest an approach to the biometric device not as one static deliverable but as a boundary object that brings together all the different stakeholders. I demonstrate how human the making of future technologies is; and how from numerous daily interactions the final device is created, influenced by people who, at some point, participate in the project as employees, volunteers, and study participants.