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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Daniela Rosner, Critical Fabulations. Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design, MIT Press, 2018
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Book Reviews
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Mariacristina Sciannamblo
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Daniela Rosner, Critical Fabulations. Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design, MIT Press, 2018
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11
Book Review                                                               95
    Daniela Rosner
Critical Fabulations. Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design,
Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2018, pp. 216

Mariacristina Sciannamblo Sapienza Università di Roma

     The first time I have approached the book Critical Fabulations. Re-
working the Methods and Margins of Design by Daniela Rosner was dur-
ing the EASST Conference held in Lancaster in 2018. At the time, Rosner
was in Lancaster acting as one of the discussants in the open panel “Situ-
ating designs”, and presenting her freshly published book. I remember
that Rosner’s insights into the rich and complex relationship between de-
sign and STS have been quite encouraging for me, a postdoctoral re-
searcher in Participatory Design back then, with a PhD in STS and a
background in Media Studies. I was grappling with the particular condi-
tion of navigating neighboring, yet different, research fields, striving to
find my place somewhere between them. In that circumstance, I found
Rosner’s thoughtful considerations about how STS and design are con-
nected rather promising insofar as she identified the contribution that
each of them could offer to the other (Boeva 2018). More than anything,
after listening to Rosner’s intervention, I have started the process of dis-
missing that idiosyncratic picture of design made up of sticky notes, port-
folios, posters, websites etc. (that is, what I was the least familiar with),
and pinpointing the actual, although challenging, entanglements between
STS and design. This commitment was definitely confirmed and reiterat-
ed by reading the book, which advances the theoretical argument of ‘crit-
ical fabulations’ understood as ways of storytelling that rework how
things we design come into being, therefore opening new paths for design
by awakening alternative stories.
     The book is divided into five chapters, crossed by a narrative thread
that starts with theoretical and impersonal chapters (1 and 2) and runs
towards practical and personal examples of critical fabulations (chapters
3, 4, 5). The distinction between ‘personal’ and ‘impersonal’ narrative is
not a trivial one, as it reflects both the theoretical pivots underpinning
Rosner’s book and work as well as the narrative tone deployed in the
book. The book’s structure, indeed, moves from a historical critique trac-
ing central influences on design today and search for “correctives” (iden-
tified in feminist programs of technoscience) to interventionist possibili-
ties. Such content structure is also experimented in form and voice, with
Chapter 1 presenting a historical account, Chapter 2 a biographical narra-
tive, Chapter 3 an autobiographical note, while Chapters 4 and 5 portray
Rosner herself as deeply embedded into critical fabulations. Accordingly,
she adopts a more embodied and experiential writing voice along the
way, a narrative choice that reflects her professional and personal transi-
96                                                          Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)

tion from a dominant design paradigm towards a more implicated, open-
ended, collaborative practices of technoscience. As a matter of fact,
Chapter 1 reconstructs the intellectual pillars that, according to Rosner,
have dominated design thinking: individualism, universalism, objectivism,
and solutionism. Each of them is situated, so as the doctrine of individu-
alism is associated with John Dewey’s American Pragmatism, while uni-
versalism is linked with Cold War cybernetics, objectivism is related to
the cognitive model developed by economist Herbert Simon, and solu-
tionism is coupled with the increasing tendency toward problem solving
the design discipline took up at the outset of the 1960s. According to
Rosner, these intellectual foundations of the dominant design paradigm
advance an understanding of design as a disembodied activity comprising
universal subjects, thus neglecting or underrecognizing certain bodies
and voices.
    An alternative way of understanding design is drawn from feminist
programs of technoscience, which are examined in Chapter 2 through the
biographical notes of two major figures in the field: Lucy Suchman and
Donna Haraway. Rosner engages with Suchman’s and Haraway’s work
and lives though biographical notes collected from various public inter-
views and from conversations she personally had with them. The out-
come is an interesting double portray that emphasizes connections by
highlighting the different paths walked by the two scholars, namely eth-
nomethodology and symbolic interactionism in the case of Suchman, and
Heidegger’s phenomenology, Whitehead’s writings and cybernetic theory
in the case of Haraway. Such heterogeneous formations developed later
into two more coherent research frames: whereas Suchman attended to
the position of the user by developing the concept of ‘situated action’,
Haraway focused on the position of the analyst by elaborating the con-
cept of ‘situated knowledges’.
    These intellectual sensitivities are put at play in the subsequent chap-
ters, in which Rosner narrates her personal encounters with critical fabu-
lations. Chapter 3 provides an account of her fieldwork with knitters and
crafters in the Bay Area, an experience that made her grapple with issues
of invisible labor and the view of users as a united category of practices.
In this respect, Spyn – the new knitting technology Rosner developed –
served more as a tool whereby to open the intimate relationships at stake
than the right solution to achieve a supposed universal state. This experi-
ence allows Rosner to develop a deep reflection on the role of design
practice and designers, leading to the elaboration of four orienting tactics
characterizing critical fabulations: alliances, recuperations, interferences,
extensions. Rooted in the theoretical commitments of feminist technosci-
ence, these techniques work as guiding orientations for critical fabula-
tions, in order for investigators to reimagine established design tech-
niques and to recuperate invisible stories behind contemporary tech-
noculture’s extractive systems of power. More specifically, alliances refer
Book Review                                                                97
to the set of relations designers can foster through their practice, enabling
ways whereby to cultivate collective action and to inquire in concert with
those standing in the design setting. An example of this tactic is men-
tioned in relation to contemporary design projects aimed at enabling alli-
ances between gig workers as in the case of Turkopticon, a digital plat-
form developed to allow Amazon Mechanical Turk workers to search and
add reviews of employers, thus prompting both workers and employers
to be known and accountable to one another. Recuperations point to at-
tempts to revive stories entangled with the design settings, but neglected
by prevailing design narratives. This tactic pushes investigators to ask
questions such as: Whose invisible work underpins your own? How
might inform your inquiry? What histories of practice have been sup-
pressed or elided? Whose legacies are being left out or dismissed? Simi-
larly, the tactic of interferences works to disturb a narrative that is privi-
leged within a prevailing design culture, showing that it might work oth-
erwise, and how. In the case of extensions, designers work to uncover
and value an abandoned or ignored design situation within a prevailing
design culture.
    The last chapter of the book brings us into the critical fabulations
through an account of design projects in which Rosner was involved.
These projects have been devoted to challenging the established ideas of
craftwork as a plan to be given form by design (Arc project), embracing
legacies of repair (Broken Probes project), recuperating the textile work
of Little Old Ladies – the female workers who wove the software into the
core memory for the Apollo Missions – to trouble the current mainstream
understandings of design and engineering innovation (Making Core
Memory project).
    Critical Fabulations is a brilliant piece of intellectual and empirical
work, which falls into an interesting lineage of scholarship focused on de-
veloping a conception of design as an activity inherently cultural, social
and political (Balsamo 2011; Manzini 2015; Escobar 2018), aiming at cre-
ative and ethical transformation. What I think makes Rosner’s book par-
ticularly interesting for the STS audience is the effort to portray a critical
and engaged practice of design building on works that are central in the
STS scholarship, such as Suchman and Haraway’s intellectual legacies.
Such an effort is palpable in the recurrent emphasis on the alternative
processes of knowledge production that critical fabulations can spark. In
this respect, I feel that the most interesting contribution of the book to
STS researchers is an invitation to experimenting with material objects
and practices as methodological tools to be added to the STS traditional
toolbox (e.g. interviews, observations, archive research, etc.) in order to
detect issues and intervene in the field. Such a commitment resonates
with the emergence of a “collaborative mode of practicing STS” (Farías
2017) based on dialogue, mutual learning, and caring relationships with
other research fields and disciplines as well as with non-academic collec-
98                                                                Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)

tives. After all, one of the orientations informing critical fabulations is
precisely making alliances in order to cultivate transformative collective
actions by standing with the groups with which we inquire.
    Critical fabulations is a compelling reading for STS scholars interested
to find their distinctive way into design as much as for designers to re-
think and retool their practice from a critical point of view. It is a tool
that can help building fruitful bridges between design and STS, fostering
promising alliances and possibilities.

References
Balsamo, A. (2011) Designing culture: The technological imagination at work,
      Durham, NC, Duke University Press.
Boeva, Y. (2018) The Confluence of Design and STS: Reflecting Disciplinary Po-
       sitions and/or Situatedness, Place, Publisher, in “EASST Review”, 37 (4).
Escobar, A. (2018) Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autono-
      my, and the making of worlds, Durham, NC, Duke University Press.
Farias, I. (2016) A collaborative turn in STS?, in “EASST Review”, 35 (3), pp. 4-5.
Manzini, E. (2015) Design, when everybody designs: An introduction to design
      for social innovation, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.



                                        ***
   Tiago Saraiva and Marta Macedo (eds.)
Capital Científica. Práticas da Ciência em Lisboa e a História
Contemporânea de Portugal [Science Capital. Science Practices in Lisbon
and Contemporary History of Portugal], Lisbon, Imprensa de Ciências
Sociais, 2019, pp. 410

Ana Delicado Instituto de Ciencias Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa

    Capital Científica [Science Capital] examines how Lisbon became not
just the official (political) capital of Portugal but also the capital of its sci-
entific system and how scientific knowledge helped build the contempo-
rary city outlook.
    This book is an edited volume that brings together ten chapters au-
thored by some of the leading scholars in History of Science in Portugal,
from the main universities and research centers dedicated to this disci-
pline, such as Tiago Saraiva (University of Drexel), Ana Carneiro and
Maria Paulo Diogo (New University of Lisbon), Ana Cardoso de Matos
(University of Évora), Ana Simões (University of Lisbon, current presi-
