Noble (1977) provides an example of a neo-Marxist analysis of labor relations and corporate growth. Arguing that the rise of corporate capitalism in America went hand-in-hand with the wedding of science and engineering to industry, Noble shows that workers increasingly lost their autonomy as management became increasingly of a “science.”58 New fields of study such as industrial relations were meant to be “the means by which farsighted industrial leaders strove to adjust - or to give the appearance of adjusting - industrial reality to the needs of workers, to defuse hostile criticism and isolate irreconcilable radicals by making the workers’ side of capitalism more livable” (1977, 290). While not specifically about design, Noble’s book suggests that workers of all sorts, including designers, have little ability to follow their own intentions where these conflict with corporate interests. Of course, there is still room for some choice in design (e.g., what color to paint the car), but truly radical design alternatives are excluded by corporate control.
Others are less totalizing in their analysis. In his analysis of a high tech firm, for example, Kunda (1993) argues there is room for maneuvering and resistance, even as corporate control over workers becomes more subtle and insidious. He shows that constraints imposed on workers need not be explicit. Indeed, while “self-management” may be the catch phrase in today’s knowledge economy, the demands of management hang heavy in the air of modern companies, even if they are never directly articulated by managers. Quoting from a company career development booklet, Kunda points out how responsibility for managing performance is shifted from management to workers:
In our complex and ever changing HT [hi-tech] environment there is often the temptation to abdicate responsibility and place the blame for your lack of job clarity or results on ‘the organization’ or on ‘management.’ But if you really value your energies and talents, you will make it your responsibility ‘to self’ that you utilize them well. (1993, 57)
In such an environment, designers who start out thinking they have complete autonomy may find themselves constrained by the intricate web of norms and expectations of the corporate culture.59
Finally, Bucciarelli (1994) provides an optimistic view of constrained design. In his account constraints mainly stem from negotiating with co-workers. His analysis, while not exactly ignoring questions of political-economy or organizational control, generally skirts these concerns, focusing instead on how design teams come to agree on a “good design.” Bucciarelli continually talks about negotiation between designers, suggesting that interests and intentions are central to his conception of design; if there are constraints on the designers in his story, these arise from having to work with other members of a design team to get a job done - a lesser constraint than, for example, external market pressures. In general, Bucciarelli assumes that despite numerous and often conflicting constraints, designers do have a significant degree of autonomy.
The weak intentionality approach views design as a complicated set of negotiations between proximate designers and those in the immediate design environment, i.e., clients, corporate executives, and other stakeholders. Institutional rules and organizational culture often play a role in this line of analysis. This approach is congruent with certain approaches in STS such as social constructivism and actor-network theory, where designers are viewed as influential actors engaged in conflict and negotiation with other interested actors.
Finally, some authors relate design to broader socio-cultural trends, thus questioning the whole notion of intentionality. A good example of this approach is Edwards’ (1996) history of computer development during the Cold War. In his book The Closed World, Edwards argues that “American weapons and American culture cannot be understood in isolation from each other” (1996, 7). He shows how academic, military, industrial, and popular cultures intermeshed in the “closed world” of Cold War ideology.
Edwards defines a closed world as “a radically bounded scene of conflict, an inescapably self-referential space where every thought, word, and action is ultimately directed back toward a central struggle” (1996, 12). In such a world, it is questionable whether anyone truly has agency. How, for instance, could a designer escape from the values and assumptions of Cold War ideology and propose an alternative design? The closed-world discourse of the Cold War framed everything in terms of containment: the aim was to contain communism by protecting and enlarging the boundaries of the so-called free world. Within this discursive space, notions about what kinds of technologies would be necessary or desirable took on specific characteristics: increasing military precision required “a theory of human psychology commensurable with the theory of machines” (1996, 20); automation, “getting the man out of the loop”, and integration, “making those who remained more efficient”, were the answers provided by psychologists and other academics. Edwards concludes that the material and symbolic significance of computers is intimately connected to Cold War politics; indeed, Cold War politics is embedded in the machines computer scientists built during the past half-century.
A similar blurring of lines between designers and society-at-large can be seen in Abbate’s (1999) study of the anarchic beginnings of the Internet. She argues that the “invention” of this technology was not an isolated, one-time event: “the meaning of the Internet had to be invented - and constantly reinvented - at the same time as the technology itself’ (1999, 6). Her view of Internet history suggests there was no “master plan”: the sources of its design are not to be found in any one place but are distributed among individuals and groups that, though loosely linked by a common culture, may not even be aware of each other.
This third approach is under-represented in contemporary studies of design. It conforms neither to the instrumentalist assumptions of the strong intentionality thesis nor to the weak intentionality thesis that is compatible with the methods of STS. Instead, a sociology of culture is presupposed which must then be combined with a philosophy of technology open to cultural considerations. Design is not only a strategic contest between interested actors and social groups, it is also a function of the way in which things appear to be “natural” to the designer. This insight shifts our attention away from proximate designers to the background assumptions that are at work in broader culture. We will explain this approach in the second half of this chapter.
With these perspectives in mind, let us reconsider the role of designers in shaping technology. If designers are strong, then we would expect their views to be the key factor in determining the form of technologies. On the other hand, if designers are weak, then their role would be merely to implement out the views of others; devices would simply reflect the values of influential actors rather than those of the design team. Clearly, there are circumstances that can be accurately described by each of these positions. Designers do have a substantial influence on the design process and sometimes control the outcome. Nevertheless, to focus too much on those closest to the design process is to miss the larger political-economic and cultural structure within which their activities take place.
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Compare this with Chandler’s (1977) explanation of why managerial capitalism arose in America during the 19th century. While Noble explains the rise of management as an intentional move by corporations to gain greater control over labor, Chandler presents it as a necessary and inevitable step in the evolution of American businesses, a step precipitated by the arrival of new “revolutionary” technologies. Thus, while Noble seeks to point out the
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Downey’s (1998) ethnography of engineering students nicely illustrates this tension. He notes how students in a CAD/CAM class were presented with conflicting stories: on the one hand, they were told “[m]achines are slaves - they’re dumb, they’re stupid” (135). Yet, just a few days later -after considerable frustration with a lab project - students were told “[y]ou are also a slave to the computer” (137). Caught between these contradictory statements, these students began to question how much control they really had over the machine.