billpapa.org Reading (b)log

A recent post in pasta and vinegar, touches the subject of delegation, namely the fact that pretty much most solutions to a problem include delegating it to a human or machine. He cites a very interesting article by Latour which points out that in the act of delegation, we equip artefacts not only with the solution to the problem but implicitly or explicitly with our own values:

The interesting thing with such impolite doors is this: if they slam shut so violently, it means that you, the visitor have to be very quick in passing through and that you should not be at someone else’s heels, otherwise your nose will get shorter and bloody. An unskilled non-human groom thus presupposes a skilled human user. It is always a trade-off. I will call the behaviour imposed back onto the human by non-human delegates prescription. Prescription is the moral and ethical dimension of mechanisms. (…) We have been able to delegate to non-humans not only force but also values, duties and ethics. It is because of this morality that we, humans, behave so ethically, no matter how weak and wicked we feel we are.

Latour (1992) cited in pasta and vinegar

This fact has been known for a long time in Ergonomics Analysis (e.g. francophone Ergonomics, Activity Theory), but is very often ignored especially in technocentric approaches. What is interesting -I think- is to examine the opposite process: the treatment of people as artefacts. It may seem trivial, after all the groom was there first before the automated system, but in many situations we still rely on unreliable (but flexible) humans. The question is when we treat humans as artefacts by delegating a simple task (e.g. bring me the results from the lab) what are our expectations vis a vis our experience with non-human actors? Is there a mechanization of human actors (the inverse of anthropomorphism)?

References

Latour, B. (1992). Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a few mundane artifacts. In W. E. Bijker & J. Law (Eds.), Shaping Technology / Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge: MA: MIT Press.

technorati tags:ergonomics, analysis, design

This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 10:53 am and is filed under cognitive ergonomics, design, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.