Suchman explores how different perspectives (e.g. feminist) can be incorporated in technology production:
The discussions on which I propose to draw involve, among other things, a shift from a view of objective knowledge as a single, asituated, master perspective that bases its claims to objectivity in the closure of controversy, to multiple, located, partial perspectives that find their objective character through ongoing processes of debate. The premise is that the latter is not only a better route to objectivity, but that it is in actuality the only way in which claims to objectivity are or ever could be grounded, however much the lived work of knowledge production is deleted from traditional scientific discourse. The feminist move in particular reframes the locus of objectivity from an established body of knowledge not produced or owned by anyone, to knowledges in dynamic production, reproduction and transformation, for which we are all responsible.
The paper then describes the dominant, normative technology production with its strict dichotomies between user/designer. But the reality is different as users appropriate the designed products in ways unanticipated by designers:
surrogates, proxies, stand-in’s for ‘the user,’ designed to allow the creation of usable technologies in the absence of these other relations. But as Hales points out, the technological usefulness of artifacts created in this way remains unknown, or known only indirectly, and relies upon extensive forms of articulation work that remain invisible to professional design: Users ‘construct’ technology; they do this both symbolically, in their ‘reading’ of artefacts, and literally, in the articulation work that is essential before a concrete configuration of artefacts (as distinct from the generic system-products that emerge from usability labs in Silicon Valley) can serve as an adequate day-by-day supporting structure for a live practice (ibid, p. 162, original emphasis).
Another interesting point is how professional communities, gradually abstract from reality absorbed in their own professional discourse
the specific sites of technologies-in-use, they are invited into progressively more intimate relations with their own professions and with the companies for which they work. Wagner (1994) identifies three processes that underwrite the combined detachment (from other sites) and intimacy (within their own) of scientific and technical communities. Organizational egocentrism refers to a kind of ‘autopoiesis‘ of such communities, through which they “select those aspects of reality that can be grasped by existing cognitive structures and create their own artificial worlds in which their potential can unfold” (ibid. p. 260). The structures are not only cognitive, of course, but political, economic and practical as well. Fake collectivity is the common assumption of a kind of shared reality that provides the self-evidence, for anyone within the community, of the logic of individual actions. Finally, de-realization is the establishment and maintenance of “an environment (a lab, a mathematical theory, a computer screen)” that provides distance from practicalities that must eventually be faced as the products of scientific and technical labor are exported beyond their local sites (ibid., p. 260). A consequence of these processes is a kind of detached intimacy that characterizes much of scientific and technical production work, through the joint creation of an elaborate social world within which one can be deeply engaged, but which remains largely self-referential, cut-off from others who might seriously challenge aspects of the community’s practice. At the same time, the creation of this world is not fully under designers’ control.
References
Hales, M. (1994). Where are the designers? Styles of design practice, objects of design and view of users in CSCW. In D. Rosenberg & C. Hutchinson (Eds.), Design Issues in CSCW (pp. 151-177): Springer Verlag.
Suchman, L. (2003). Located Accountabilities in Technology Production [Electronic Version] from http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Suchman-Located-Accountabilities.pdf.
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