Akrich, Madeleine. 1992. “The De-Scription of technical Objects”. In Shaping Technology / Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, edited by Wiebe J. Bijker and Trever Pinch.
Machines and devices are obviously composite, heterogeneous, and physically localized. (p. 205)
- a set of diverse forces
- various persons can judge the extent to which it has been used in ways that conform to the norms it represents
- Technical objects thus simultaneously embody and measure a set of relations between heterogeneous elements.
It would,in other words, look like a set of places where elements of the technical, the social, the economic, and so on were found together, and it would leave observers free to switch between one element or register and another as this suited them. (p. 206)
building heterogeneous networks
the ways in which they build, maintain, and stabilize a structure of links between diverse actants
relationships
- obduracy or plasticity
- technical objects distribute causes
Designers thus define actors with specific tastes, competences, motives, aspirations, political prejudices, and the rest, and they assume that morality, technology, science, and economy will evolve in particular ways. A large part of the work of innovators is that of "inscribing' this vision of (or prediction about) the world in the technical content of the new object. I will call this end product of this work a "script" or a "scenario." (p. 208)
The technical realization of the innovator's beliefs about the relationships between an object and its surrounding actors is thus an attempt to predetermine the settings that users are asked to imagine for a particular piece of technology and the pre-scriptions (notices, contracts, advice, etc.) that accompany it. (p. 208)
De-Scription in Technological Transfer: Reinventing and Reshaping Technical Objects in Use
- negotiations between the innovator and potential users
- relationships between forms and meanings -> adjustment
- mediators to create the links between technical content and user
- study users or disputes
Prescriptions as a Way of Enrolling Actors: Or How to Make Citizens
- Sometimes the designers of technology only have access to certain actors, whom they push into certain roles. (p. 214)
- Winner (1980): certain technologies are inherently political, or undemocratic, but users have to be persuaded to play the roles assigned for them.
From Causes to Accusations and Forms of Knowledge
Abobo-the-War and Marcory-No-Wire: Where Technology Meets Morality
"The Order of Things and Human Nature": The Stabilization and Naturalization of Scripts
- establish systems of causality