D. Ihde, Stony Brook University
P. E. Vermaas et al. (eds.), Philosophy and Design. 51
© Springer 2008 any technologies may be put. Ultimately I am after a deconstruction of the individualistic notion of design which permeates both the literary and technological versions of the fallacy. First, some examples of simple designer fallacies: Thomas Edison, the great late 19th-early 20th century American inventor, was among the first to design and invent a machine to reproduce sounds - the phonograph. The machine, at first, was a mechanical device which consisted of a speaking tube into which someone would speak; this was attached to a sensitive diaphragm which would reverberate with the sound waves coming into the tube and the diaphragm, in turn, was connected to a crystal needle which would trace the wave patterns onto a rotating roll covered with tinfoil. As the crank was turned, the speaker sounding into the tube, a ‘record’ was made on the foil. The same machine, played back, would reverse the process and one could hear, well enough to understand and recognize the sounds, originally inscribed on the roller - “Mary had a little lamb....” (Nyre, 2003, 89-90)
Here, the designer intent was to reproduce sounds. But the intent, at this stage, remained ambiguous and the primary possible use of this machine was drawn from the resultant capacities which emerged, more than from any pre-planned single use. It could be a rather primitive dictation machine. Clearly, it would have restricted use since the number of play-backs was very limited due to the softness of the foil
- the play-back would remain intelligible for only one or two times. In spite of this, the machine was advertised in the typically glowing rhetoric of technological promise of the late 19th century. It was advertised as “The miracle of the 19th Century,” a machine that speaks:
It will Talk, Sing, Laugh, Crow, Whistle, Repeat cornet solos, imitating the Human Voice,
enunciating and pronouncing every word perfectly, IN EVERY KNOWN LANGUAGE.”
(Nyre, 2003, 89)
If one, with the anachronistic insight of knowing anything about the subsequent history of recordings, read back to Edison’s early machines, one might have predicted that one early dominant use of recording devices would quickly evolve into music recording, which in turn, also transformed a number of musical practices. For example, early recording devices could record for only three and a half to four minutes of time - thus the music played must be three and a half to four minutes long, a traditional length for the ‘popular song’ which persisted well past the time of early recording devices. The new machine calls for new practices, but in this case not ‘intended’ ones.
The phonograph came later than the telephone, invented at least once by Alexander Graham Bell. Here the designer intent was for an amplifying device capable of transmitting a voice over distance, and intended as a prosthetic technology for the hard-of-hearing (Bell’s mother). The early antecedent of “chat” on the internet, the party line on which all the neighbors ‘chatted’ was not foreseen, let alone the subsequent telephone wiring of early 20th century America.
Even the typewriter was first designed as a prosthetic technology aiding blind or myopic people by allowing them to produce clear script. Instead, as Friedrich Kittler has pointed out, the typewriter become, dominantly, a business machine and one which transformed the secretary of the late 19th century from male to female (male secretaries often refused to adopt to this ‘machine’ which they thought deskilled their handwork, but young women, seeking both a public role and preskilled with keyboard or piano skills, easily found a new role)! (Kittler, 1990) The designer fallacy also plays a role in Langdon Winner’s best-known story, “Do artifacts have politics?” (1986). This article traces the history of Robert Moses’ designs for the bridges over the parkways of Long Island. Winner claims that Moses’ ulterior intention was to keep the lower classes and races out of Long Island’s pristine growing suburbs. Thus he deliberately designed low bridges which would prevent large trucks and double decker buses from using the parkways. In one sense, there was some success with this material strategy if one looks at the demographics of the early 20th century - but a counter-strategy defeated whatever politics were first employed. The Eisenhower Interstate development of the 1950s called for all interstate highways to have high bridges so that trucks - including those carrying ballistic missiles for the Cold War - could clear them, thus opening the way for what we Long Islanders call our “longest parking lots” of multi-laned highways. The Cold War trumps suburban protection.38
The language and notion of ‘intent,’ while still dominant, is inverted by Edward Tenner’s well-known book, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (1996). Tenner catalogues and classifies an enormous number of technologies, presumably designed for certain uses, which end up having disastrous or contrary unintended consequences. He spoofs Toffler’s notion of the paperless society, where, “making paper copies of anything is a primitive use of [electronic word processing] machines and violates their very spirit (quoted Toffler, 1970, ix), in light of the higher-papered society of today.” (Tenner, 1996, ix) Or, something as simple as a home security system, designed to increase security, he contends subverts security by producing false alarms and overwhelming police ability to respond, “In Philadelphia, on 3,000 of 157,000 calls from automatic security systems over three years were real; by diverting the full-time equivalent of fifty-eight police officers for useless calls, the systems may have promoted crime elsewhere.” (Tenner, 1996, 7) Tenner’s examples are of unintended, but also of unpredictable effects. The patterns being traced here apply equally to simple and complex technologies. I have lived through the long term claim of virtually infinitely free energy to be produced from nuclear sources, through the Three Mile Island near melt-down situation, to the closing of Long Island’s Shoreham nuclear plant, designed as part of this trajectory of designer intent, but which to date has ended in a colossal, 4,000,000,000 U.S. dollar ‘technology museum’ which as yet has no use.
From the comparatively simple examples above, one can note that designer intent may be subverted, become a minor use, or not result in uses in line with intended ends at all. In addition, with unintended consequences the theme becomes the unpredictability of the uses of technologies. But, there remains a persistence of the designer fallacy, that in some way ‘intent’ determines, however successfully or unsuccessfully, outcomes. My argument is directed against this framing and description of the design project. What I hope to establish is a description which recognizes much more complex relations between designers, technologies and the ultimate uses of technologies in variable social and cultural situations. My approach is descriptivist in a sense parallel to those in science studies and the history of science which eschew end results over the examination of development in process (Kuhn, Latour, Pickering). I will open the way to my counter-thesis by looking at several variations upon technologies and the embedded ways in which these function. Again, I am arguing against an individualistic notion of design, and for a more complex set of relations between multiple inputs into developing technologies and for multiple, multistable possibilities for any single technology.
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In discussion, it was pointed out that there is a difference between initial design intent, and subsequent design modification, but the argument I am making is that in neither case is there simple designer control over outcomes.