First, I want to show something of how technologies are differently embedded in different cultural contexts. My first example is the windmill - a device which like a pinwheel turns with the wind. The most ancient example, according to Lynn White, Jr., is to be found in India, a wind-driven prayer wheel or ‘automated praying device.’ (White, Jr., 1971) There were, and continue to be, hand-driven prayer wheels, rotating drums on a hand-held handle, which can have written prayers on the surfaces which are then spun with the prayers presumably being sent outwards. The ‘automated’ prayer wheel of the wind driven device lets ‘nature’ do the work. Later, in Mesopotamia, larger versions of the windmill occurred in the 9th century. These devices were used to provide power for such applications as milling. Moving to Europe, ‘windmill fields’ were developed to help pump out the lowlands of Holland in the 9th century in an early ‘technological revolution’ of larger-scale power use. Finally, today, we are moving into the argument phase of wind-generated energy, well accepted and in place in Denmark, which produces nearly 20% of its energy from windmill farms. In England and the USA, such windmill farms, proposed for offshore or mountain ridge sites, are undergoing technology assessment battles along NIMBY [not-in-my-back-yard] lines.
Abstractly, one can argue that these are all the ‘same’ technology, wind driven devices to supply different powers, but each example is differently culturally embedded. The need to have relatively constant praying is quite different from the need to have renewable energy, and to call each a different ‘use’ is to abstract from the complexity of the cultural background. The ‘same’ technology is embedded differently in the different historical-cultural settings. But this is also to say that the ‘same’ technology can fit into different contexts and is field located.
A closer look, however, also shows that what I have called the ‘same’ technology, is also materially different in each context. The Indian wind-driven prayer wheel is a relatively small device, whereas the Danish and contemporary high-tech windmill is up to a 100 meters tall; and the former responds to the speed of the wind with faster or slower revolutions, whereas the latter turns at the same speed through self-governing blade adjustment. Both entail what Andrew Pickering calls a process of “tuning” and a “dance of agency” in the development process. (Pickering, 1995)
In design, the “tuning” and “dance of agency” can often turn around ‘designer intent.’ Bruno Latour has made the familiar post-it example famous in Science in
Action The designer, experimenting with the material properties of various glues, accidentally as it were, produced a glue which would stick only temporarily - thus seemingly a failure in terms of ‘designed glues.’ But, instead of simply casting aside the new propertied invention, the designer began to think of possible new uses and chanced upon the idea of page marks for hymn books. (Latour, 1987, 140) Thus, a new use, both unintended and unplanned, led to what today is a massive market for Post-It products. One could say, were one to adopt Latourean language, that the non-human here transformed the human (designer) with its actant, material behavior! I have frequently employed a similar example. Take the million year old ‘hand-axe,’ the chipped tool from pre-modern hominids which is usually thought to be a scraper and butchering tool, although no one knows the possible uses which could be many, and the small, sharp earlier-thought-to-be-detrius chips from the hand-axe, which are now recognized to have been used for cutting and even, possibly, surgery, and we get an archaic version of the Post-It story.
Allow a quick pause with respect to the designer-intent model of technological development: it should appear by now that the ‘designer fallacy’ may well be the rule rather than the exception. While it may be the case that some technologies have come into being and performed as ‘intended’ by their designers (I admit, I can think of none which have served solely in this way), there would seem to be none which can not be subverted to other, to unintended, or unsuspected uses and results. This is frequently the case for an initial design and even more so for later modified designs. Moreover, whether simple or complex, the same indeterminacy seems to apply. As artifactual, technologies seem potentially to contain multiple uses or trajectories of development. If even the simplest artifact, an Acheulean hand axe, can be used for multiple purposes, it differs little in outcome from the purposely designed multi-task tool, the Swiss Army Knife. Indeed, multi-tasking may be an emergent pattern for contemporary technologies. Some have begun to hold that the trajectory of multi-tasking for information technologies, is toward a single big and a single small multi-tasking instrument. The mobile technology which, like the Swiss Army Knife, is a cell phone, digital camera, bar-code reader, email device, etc., etc. is the single small multi-tasking technology, while the large home entertainment unit (TV, DVD, computer screen, etc., etc.) connected to the economic, entertainment, communications dimensions of life, is the big multi-tasking instrument; and while much of this remains technofantasy, it is plausible technofantasy.
Fantasy, however, is one type of imagination which also plays a role in, behind, and throughout design activity. I think a case can be made that in the high Middle Ages, a form of technofantasy began to emerge which, at first slowly, but with acceleration, began to shape the form of culture in Europe, which in turn pointed towards the saturated technological culture of today. Lynn White, Jr. has argued that there was something of a technological revolution which occurred in this period. The construction of high-standing Gothic cathedrals called for machines and architectural techniques not employed previously. Admittedly borrowing interculturally from, first the Moorish styles which entered Europe no later than the 10th century, but taking these to greater extremes, Chartres, Notre Dame, Cologne, all borrowed flying buttresses and glass-stone frillery. What might not be noted, however, was a similar shift in imagery in the world of fantasy. The fantasy paintings of the Bruegels remained largely ‘organic’ or ‘animal-like’ fantasies. Devils, dragons, demons, large monsters, clearly were ‘biomorphic’ however fantastical. But by the 13th century, machines began to play fantasy roles. Roger Bacon described fantasy machines, such as self-propelled ships, underwater craft, flying machines and other impossible-to-build machines for the times, machines which were later ‘visualized’ in the 15th century by da Vinci in his notebooks (discovered and publicized by the Futurists in the 1920s). I am hinting that a specific mode of technology imagination or fantasy began to take hold. This probably was a life-world reflection, since many of the radical new machines which began to appear and be developed in Europe had earlier, in other forms, come from the multicultural trade, journeys, and experiences of the cross-cultural exchanges between Islamic culture, the Mongolian invasions, and the post-Marco Polo adventures to the Far East. Lynn White, Jr., Joseph Needham, and others began to recognize this cross-cultural trade of technologies by the middle of the 20th century. Spices, gunpowder, the compass, silk, windmills, as previously mentioned, all migrated to Medieval Europe, and were adapted and developed. Optics, better known by Al Hazen (1038) than the West, ended up on a trajectory of lens making which led to the optical inventions of the telescope and microscope which drove the early scientific revolution, instrumental technologies provided the infrastructure of science itself.
All of this today is relatively common tender. But it needs to be seen in the light of the ‘designer fallacy’ I am addressing here. Each new invention which came into Europe, often first a matter of fascination, became adapted into new uses and developments. While China invented gunpowder, it did not successfully produce a cannon! But by the Thirty Years War, cannons were being used to demolish French castles at the rate of dozens per week. (DeLanda, 1991) It is with this observation that I will now begin my move away from the ‘designer fallacy.’