This chapter interrogates Langdon Winner’s now infamous piece “Do Artifacts Have Politics” through the lens of Design. As both designers and users of technologies and infrastructures, there is much to be gained from disciplinary translations and deeper considerations of Winner’s ideas: refocusing on contextual and situated aspects surrounding a designed object or system, foregrounding issues related to time and obduracy, encouraging ethical Design considerations, and increasing the scope of designers’ and users’ agency, among others. Yet, Winner’s work, largely discussed from a Sociological and more collective standpoint, requires translation into Design Praxis. To accomplish this, the chapter explicates some of the utility, and inherent tensions, in the scales and temporal positions of Sociological epistemologies and ontologies of collectives, for designers and their users, at work. In so doing, it further unpacks how designers may utilize Winner’s relational frameworks of artifacts and politics to more consciously understand, pluralize, leverage, and predict potential implications of their impacts in the world. Divided into two parts, the chapter first contextualizes Winner’s argument in relation to Design, while the second proposes three design tools/approaches that bridge Science and Technology Studies and Design praxis, which may assist designers to better forecast the politics of their products.

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Artifacts’ Agency | Designers’ Agency

  • Meredith Sattler

摘要

This chapter interrogates Langdon Winner’s now infamous piece “Do Artifacts Have Politics” through the lens of Design. As both designers and users of technologies and infrastructures, there is much to be gained from disciplinary translations and deeper considerations of Winner’s ideas: refocusing on contextual and situated aspects surrounding a designed object or system, foregrounding issues related to time and obduracy, encouraging ethical Design considerations, and increasing the scope of designers’ and users’ agency, among others. Yet, Winner’s work, largely discussed from a Sociological and more collective standpoint, requires translation into Design Praxis. To accomplish this, the chapter explicates some of the utility, and inherent tensions, in the scales and temporal positions of Sociological epistemologies and ontologies of collectives, for designers and their users, at work. In so doing, it further unpacks how designers may utilize Winner’s relational frameworks of artifacts and politics to more consciously understand, pluralize, leverage, and predict potential implications of their impacts in the world. Divided into two parts, the chapter first contextualizes Winner’s argument in relation to Design, while the second proposes three design tools/approaches that bridge Science and Technology Studies and Design praxis, which may assist designers to better forecast the politics of their products.