Autonomous Stores:

Sociotechnical Infrastructures, Imaginaries
and Data Governance

AutonomouStores is a research project financed by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (ref. 2022.02730.PTDC) with DOI 10.54499/2022.02730.PTDC.

Autonomous stores

‘Autonomous Stores: Sociotechnical Infrastructures, Imaginaries and Data Governance’ is a research project funded by FCT (ref. 2022.02730.PTDC) and led by Prof. Ana Viseu (PI). Hosted at ICNOVA, it is composed of a multidisciplinary team, it aims to examine the imaginaries and practices behind the emergence of so-called ‘autonomous stores’.

 

‘Autonomous stores’ are often characterized in the media as the future of shopping: intelligent spaces without cashiers or employees and filled with tech that can identify consumers and their actions, saving time and increasing convenience. References to autonomy and automation invoke a set of imaginaries related to ideas of technological innovation and progress. Despite the name ‘autonomous’, these spaces rely on vast infrastructures that involve people, knowledges, and numerous technologies (such as, Internet of Things, AI, sensors, algorithms, computer vision, machine learning). This project explores the digital and material infrastructures and practices of these stores to understand the worlds they are creating.

 

Portugal is one of the leaders of this future-making endeavor. In 2019 – just one year after Amazon displayed its ‘Just Walk Out’ (or Amazon Go) shop – SENSEI, a Portuguese unicorn specialized in the development of autonomous stores technologies, partnered with SONAE, one of the largest Portuguese retail chains, to open ‘Continente Labs’.  One year later, Pingo Doce – another supermarket chain – opened its own ‘Lab Store’. Since then, these companies have been making strides in the field, both nationally and abroad.

The core goal of this project is to examine how autonomous stores are discursively and materially constituted, maintained and used. In other words, we seek to examine the worlding practices (Haraway 2016) of these infrastructures to ask what worlds they produce, transform, and reify, and with what implications. To do we draw upon two complementary research questions:

  • (1) Identify and examine the sociotechnical imaginaries that drive and justify the development and regulation of these places;
  • (2) Examine the practices and infrastructures through which autonomous stores are implemented, maintained and used, and the underlying concepts of autonomy and agency.

This project is also a springboard for a future application for EU research funding, with an international consortium, for a broader study of the constitution and functioning of digital infrastructures, an issue that is all the more important because large parts of our lives are increasingly shaped and spent /of/in/with data.

 

All academic publications will be made available in open access and some outputs will be specifically targeted at non-academic audiences.