Agencies in Technology Design: Feminist Reconfigurations*

Abstract

In this chapter I consider some new resources for thinking about how capacities for action are configured at the human-machine interface, informed by developments in feminist science and technology studies. While not all of the authors and works cited would identify as feminist, they share with feminist research – in my reading at least – a commitment to critical, but also reconstructive engagement with received conceptions of the human, the technological and the relations between them. Based on my own experience of the worlds of technology research and development, I argue that these reconceptualisations have implications for everyday practices of technology design. Both reconceptualisations of the human-machine interface, moreover, and the practices of their realization are inflected by, and consequential for, gendered relations within technoscience and beyond. The ideas and examples that I discuss below are draw from science and technology studies (STS), feminist theory, new media studies and experiments in cooperative systems design, each of which is multiple and extensive in themselves and no one of which can be adequately represented here. My hope nonetheless is to trace out enough of the lines of resonant thought that run across these fields of research to indicate the fertility of the ground, specifically with respect to creative reconfigurations at the interface of human and machine. One of the issues at stake here is the question of what counts as ‘innovation’ in science and engineering. This in itself, I will propose, is a gendered question insofar as it aligns with the longstanding feminist concern with the problem of who is recognized and who not in prevailing discourses of science and technology (see for example Suchman and Jordan 1989). Recent research on the actual work involved in putting technologies into use highlights the mundane forms of inventive yet taken for granted labor, hidden in the background, that are necessary to the success of complex sociotechnical arrangements. A central strategy in recognizing those labors is to decenter sites of innovation from singular persons, places and things to multiple acts of everyday activity, including the actions through which only certain actors and associated achievements