The intervention of non-technical influences on design takes the form of external pressures but it is also internal to the technical sphere itself. What appears technically rational to the designer is a function of many things, including her training and the codified outcomes of technological choices made in the past under various social influences. In other words, even when engaging in “purely technical” activities, designers are guided by rules that are culturally specific and value-laden.60 Design thus invariably exhibits social bias. This bias is part and parcel of designing since optimizing for a given situation requires taking social concerns such as cost, compatibility, and so on into account. These social concerns, in turn, presuppose certain “facts” about the social world; they naturalize prior value judgments that are anything but natural, and how these past judgments were made is forgotten. It is this taken-for-grantedness to which critical theory draws attention.
3 Critical Theory of Technology
We have explained how the traditional design studies literature tends to focus on the work of proximate designers, conceptualizing design as an instrumental activity. Recent work in the field of STS brings in elements of the social by focusing on the actions and strategies of social groups close to the design process. What is missing in both these accounts is an acknowledgement of how past technologies and practices
- our technical heritage, if you will - shapes current design. As a result, the impact of historical and cultural developments on the design of technology has been undertheorized. Critical theory attempts to address this oversight.
A number of STS scholars have looked at the issue of design. From the many approaches employed, two have emerged to prominence: social construction of technology (SCOT) and actor-network theory (ANT). Briefly, SCOT theorists argue that technologies are contested and contingent, the outcome of battles between various social groups, each with its own vested interests. To understand a design one should trace the history of a specific technology’s development and look for the influence of relevant social groups. Similarly, ANT theorists argue that technologies are contingent, the result of strategies and tactics employed by key actors in bringing together a stable network of people and devices in which a new technology will succeed.
Critical theory shifts attention away from the micro-level analysis of constructivist technology studies to the macro-level. We take the fact that technologies are socially constructed to be self-evident. However, whereas SCOT is focused on uncovering which social groups were most influential in shaping the design of a particular technology, and ANT is focused on the strategies employed by various actors in the design of a particular technology, we are interested in the broader cultural values and practices that surround a particular technology. Put another way, our focus is less on specific social groups or the strategies they employ and more on what cultural resources were brought into play in the design process (see table 1).
| Table 1 Three theoretical perspectives on design |
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Feenberg (1999; 2002) has developed this approach as “instrumentalization theory.” This is a critical version of constructivism that understands technology as designed to conform not just to the interests or plans of actors, but also to the cultural background of the society. That background provides some of the decision rules under which technically underdetermined design choices are made. This background takes two forms: beliefs and practices of the everyday lifeworld, and culturally biased knowledge sedimented in technical disciplines shaped by a history of technical choices. The cultural study of technology must therefore operate at two levels, the level of the basic technical operations and the level of the current power relations or socio-cultural conditions that specify definite designs.
To give an example, consider a simple technology: the bicycle. Anyone who has spent time in Holland knows that the bicycle is an important mode of transportation in Dutch cities - far more so than in most North American cities. Bike lanes are prominent features in Dutch cities and bicyclists co-exist peacefully with motorists. This contrasts with North American cities, where cyclists must fight with motorists for use of the road. Furthermore, the everyday use of bicycles is a technological practice that is supported by another technology, the “Dutch road,” which extensively incorporates bike lanes and, just as importantly, social expectations about the proper use of bicycles.61
What is of interest to us here is the dominant meaning attached to a particular device, in this case a roadway: in Holland, it is accepted that bicycles and bicyclists are “legitimate” users of the road (indeed, cyclists commonly have the right-of-way); in North America, these same devices and people are oddities, either grudgingly accepted or met with hostility by the road’s primary users, motorists. No one doubts that cars dominate the roadways of North American cities. In North America, the word “road” brings to mind cars; in Holland, the same word brings to mind both cars and bicycles.
Our claim is that the “naturalness” of the interpretation of a particular device within a given social context is singularly important. The fact that a person living in Amsterdam is inclined to think of cyclists as natural users of roadways - while a person living in Atlanta does not - matters. It matters because this taken-for-granted understanding - what in essence is “culture” - becomes a background condition to the design of technology. Neither SCOT nor ANT pay much attention to these background conditions, choosing to focus instead on the actions of specific actors or groups of actors.62 Yet, to understand the ways in which technological design may be biased one needs to look at this broader context.
We now turn to a more detailed exposition of the instrumentalization theory. The starting point is the notion of technical element. By this we mean the most elementary technical ideas and corresponding simple implementations that go into building devices and performing technical operations. Anthropologists conjecture that the ability to think of objects as means, the upright stance and opposable thumb together form a constellation that predisposes human beings to engage technically with the environment. In this humans achieve an exorbitant development of potentials exhibited in small ways by other higher mammals. The starting point of this basic technical orientation is imaginative and perceptuaclass="underline" humans can see and formulate technical possibilities where other animals cannot. These most basic technical insights consist in the identification of “technical elements,” affordances or useful properties of things.
What is involved in perceiving a technical element? Two things are necessary: first, the world must be understood in terms of the possibilities it offers to goal oriented action; second, the subject of that action must conceive itself as such, that is, as a detached manipulator of things. The technical disposition of such a subject and the manner in which it conceives its objects constitutes the “primary instrumen-talization.” Primary instrumentalization proceeds by decontextualizing objects and simplifying them to highlight those qualities by which they are assigned a function.63 There appears to be very little of a social character about such technical insight and elements can be employed in a very wide variety of social contexts. In this sense they are relatively neutral with respect to different social values. Nevertheless, a detailed study would reveal in each case some sort of minimal social contingency controlling selection and implementation even in the simplest form. Where technical elements emerge in the context of complex technical traditions, they presuppose the results of past social and cultural shaping of technical practice and so may carry with them quite a bit of social content.
60
An example of this is when designers make use of scientific and technical standards in their work. To the designer, these standards appear neutral and unproblematic: they represent established guidelines and best practices within their design community. However, as numerous STS studies have shown, the making of such standards are as much political as they are technical in nature: technical standards are never “purely technical” (Bowker and Star, 2000).
61
Dutch bicycles are typically designed for everyday transportation without many of the bells and whistles of North American bicycles, which often seem more designed for hobbyist use. This illustrates once again the way in which devices are expected and constructed to fit into dominant understandings of what a technology is and how it is supposed to work. In addition, as Pinch and Bijker (1987) show in their study of bicycle development, the variety of styles one sees today reflects differences in opinion among designers and users as to what values are most important in a bicycle (e.g., fashion vs. comfort or speed vs. safety).
62
In their original formulation of SCOT, Pinch and Bijker (1987) posited an examination of the “wider context” as the third and final step in their analysis. However, few SCOT theorists have followed through with this promise. We would also suggest that it makes a difference whether one begins one’s analysis with the “wider context” or ends with it as an afterthought.
63
For a more detailed account of instrumentalization theory see Feenberg (1999), especially pp. 202-208.