10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17190
Design is a notoriously ambiguous word in English. Similarly, it is also an ambiguous research field for Science and Technology Studies (STS). Introducing the special section A Matter of Design, the paper discusses the place of design in the overall context of Science and Technology Studies, with an emphasis on relevancies and difficulties in making two different epistemic cultures meet.
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Paolo Volonté
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
technoscience
Design Worlds and Science and Technology Studies
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
5
Editorial
2015-01-29
2023-06-13
2015-01-29
2023-07-27
5-14
TS
Paolo Volonté
2014
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17190
5
Politecnico of Milan
2038-3460
2
technoscience
en
14
Design Worlds and Science and Technology Studies
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17190/16087
5
                                                                         Introduction

Design Worlds and Science and
Technology Studies
	
  

Paolo Volonté
Politecnico of Milan
	
  
       Abstract: Design is a notoriously ambiguous word in English. Similarly, it is
       also an ambiguous research field for Science and Technology Studies (STS).
       Introducing the special section A Matter of Design, the paper discusses the
       place of design in the overall context of Science and Technology Studies,
       with an emphasis on relevancies and difficulties in making two different epis-
       temic cultures meet.

       Keywords: Design; epistemic cultures; cross-fertilization; objects; artefacts;
       technoscience.

       Corresponding author: Paolo Volonté, Politecnico di Milano,
       Dipartimento di Design, Via Durando, 38/A, 20158, Milano (Italy) – Email:
       paolo.volonte@polimi.it




1. Designed Objects and Designing Subjects

    Design is a notoriously ambiguous word in English. Similarly, it is also
an ambiguous research field for Science and Technology Studies (STS).
Despite its high relevance, it has only been partially investigated.
    In a sense, design has always been a pivotal issue for STS. In fact, STS
arose when science scholars realised that no satisfying comprehension of
technoscientific processes can be achieved without considering nonhu-
man actors, artefacts included. A rich STS contribution to the growing
field of studies about objects (Shove et al. 2007) originated from that turn
and has continued ever since. It has included the consideration of the role
nonhumans play, for instance, in maintaining a stable collective existence
(Latour 1992), in moving power and knowledge (Law 1986), in defining
the epistemological framework of a scientific effort (Knorr Cetina 1999),
and even in configuring the human–machine interface (Suchman 2007).
Objects entail artefacts, namely things that have been designed. They
have not necessarily been designed by an acknowledged professional de-
	
  
TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
5 (2) pp. 5-14 - ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                              2014
6                                                             Tecnoscienza - 5 (2)

signer or through a conscious and institutionalised process of design.
Most of them are the result of anonymous design (Bassi 2007), folk tink-
ering (Archipov 2006), or ‘design by society’ (Woodhouse and Patton
2004). Nevertheless, they are the outcome of a design process; they bear a
script (Akrich 1992) that is a consequence of their origin from a social
world; they are ‘designed design’. In this framework, designed objects
commonly appear in the descriptions provided by studies in design and
technology.
    On the other hand, design as a social setting, what we could call the
‘designing design’ (product design, architectural design, etc.) has rarely
been researched through an STS approach. With some eminent excep-
tions, mainly originating in the sociology of culture (see for instance
Molotch 2003; Vinck 2003; Storni 2012), the social worlds of design have
not been subjected to a thorough inquiry. Although they are complex so-
cial settings involving a broad collection of people far removed from the
drawing board (Woodhouse and Patton 2004) and they appear to be
places where the interaction between humans and nonhumans strongly
comes to light (Parolin and Mattozzi 2013), they do not seem to have at-
tracted the same widespread STS interest as highly technological settings
like, for instance, health care or energy production and distribution.
    In a very general way, this could depend on a double mental bias. On
one side, the concept of technoscience, which has been introduced in the
STS debate to underline that ‘science and technology’ does not coincide
with science and technology alone, is often used just as a visual expres-
sion of how strongly technology is bound with science (alone). Bruno
Latour originally adopted this term (coined by Gaston Bachelard) to
summarize “all the elements tied to the scientific contents no matter how
dirty, unexpected or foreign they seem” (Latour 1987: 174), i.e. to under-
line that there is no scientific enterprise without the participation of tech-
nological devices, inscription devices, ordinary objects, professionals,
laymen, political institutions, organizations, animals, and other contribu-
tors. That is to say that science and technology are always associated with
non-scientific and non-technological actors, if they are to occur. Never-
theless, (see for instance Hackett et al. 2008) the same term has often
been used afterwards just to implicitly point out that new scientific
knowledge is produced through technological enterprise, underlining a
growing trend of innovation processes (Etzkowitz 1990). This use of the
term involves the idea that there is no science without technology, and
that technology, conversely, is tightly bound to science. I suspect that this
apparently tight relationship with science, which is closely reminiscent of
the economic concept of R&D (research and development), alienates the
designers’ interest for a genuine STS analysis of technology.
    On the design side, a similar but reverse bias is the effect of the half-
hidden opposition between design and technology. It becomes visible in
academic settings through the antagonism between design and engineer-
ing, which are conceived as two different cultures, and in economic set-
Volonté                                                                                                                                                                                                                            7
tings through the contrast between the designers’ creativity and the engi-
neers’ and managers’ technological innovation (Gold 2007). Such every-
day life frameworks induce an attitude in the field of design to legitimize
the profession by means of juxtaposition to sheer technology (like, for in-
stance, in Brown 2009 and in Verganti 2009). In this respect, long-time
opposition between the fields of design studies and technology history
has been part of the culture (Katz 1997). Such opposition is related, I
suppose, to the conventional association of several design fields (like
product design, architecture, urban design), in some cultures, with the fi-
ne arts rather than with science and technology (Moore and Karvonen
2008).
    As a consequence of these biases and for many other reasons as well,
technology studies and design studies have often looked in opposite di-
rections. Although objects are pivotal ingredients in technoscientific pro-
cesses according to STS, a deep and wide consideration of the design
processes that underlie the emergence, the form-and-function, the biog-
raphy of artefacts is often missing in the studies of science and technolo-
gy. The very concept of design finds inadequate consideration in the re-
construction of the networks, alliances, and controversies in which those
artefacts are involved. Equally, although technology is a key ingredient of
design (product design, service design, communication design, etc.), so-
cial studies of technology are not housed within design research, not even
in the frame where they should appear, what Frayling (1993) calls ‘re-
search for design’.
    To integrate what I have said above, the cautious emergence of a new
interest for STS theory in the field of design studies must be emphasized.
It came to light principally in the decisions of some key institutions of the
field in the last decades. In Summer 2004, Design Issues published a spe-
cial issue titled ‘Science + technology studies’, edited by the Department
of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In
September 2008, the Design History Society invited Bruno Latour to give
the keynote lecture at the conference Networks of Design (Latour 2009).
In 2014, the journal CoDesign released a call for papers about ‘Intersec-
tions of Co-Design and Actor-Network Theory’.
    In this general framework, STS Italia, the Italian Society of Science
and Technology Studies, decided to dedicate to design its fifth confer-
ence, titled A Matter of Design: Making Society through Science and Tech-
nology (Politecnico of Milan, 12-14 June 2014). Tecnoscienza has the priv-
ilege now to publish the keynote speeches of that conference1. The talks
have been revised or redrafted for the written medium by the authors.
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
1
  A wider selection of papers presented during the conference is contained in the
book A Matter of Design. Proceedings from the V STS Italia Conference, edited by
C. Coletta, S. Colombo, P. Magaudda, A. Mattozzi, L.L. Parolin and L. Rampino,
Milano, STS Italia Publishing, 2014. The book is an open access publication and
it can be downloaded from www.stsitalia.org.
8                                                               Tecnoscienza - 5 (2)

The videos of the live speeches are available on the association’s website
(www.stsitalia.org).
     To tackle the issue of design in a conference does not just mean to
discuss design among STS scholars; this is even more germane if the con-
ference is held at a School of Design, as happened in Milan. It means ra-
ther experimenting with creating a convergence between two very dispar-
ate and distant disciplinary groups. Not an easy job. From this point of
view, the STS Italia conference and the present special issue of Tecnosci-
enza represent a new setting with respect to customary situations where
one community deals with the other or gently hosts it at some event.
     Actually, meeting other communities and taking advantage of their
perspectives is a fundamental characteristic of the STS approach, espe-
cially of actor–network theory. Accordingly, the self-awareness of design-
ers about their own work, their practices, and their attitudes is pivotal to
reconstruct a reliable view of their worlds and networks. Paraphrasing
Latour (2005: 97), we have to study the design worlds up instead of study-
ing them down.
     But such encounter of communities is not that easy, especially when
real people have to meet in real places carrying out real practices, as hap-
pens at a conference. As a matter of fact, in organizing the conference in
Milan, we soon had to tackle the problem of mediating between two dif-
ferent epistemic cultures (Knorr Cetina 1999). An epistemic culture is not
a collection of thoughts or theories on how to produce knowledge, rather
it is a set of practices, a series of action chains, a network of players, and a
sequence of situations. These situations convey the actions, thoughts, and
knowledge claims made by those social players toward a certain idea of
how things are to be done, of what makes for good research, what makes
for good design, what makes for a good paper, and what makes for a
good conference. Karin Knorr Cetina (1999: 3) described these epistemic
cultures as machineries, specifically as knowledge machineries composed
of practices. She stressed that epistemic subjects, i.e. knowledge produc-
ers, are essentially mere derivatives of these machineries. So, there is an
epistemic culture of STS and there is an epistemic culture of design, and
the task of enabling them to meet and communicate appears to be much
harder and more important than those of studying design worlds outside
down or absorbing STS theories into design theory. It is about a task and
an opportunity for cross-fertilization between worlds that are not well
mutually acquainted, except for some rather marginal fringes. As Michèle
Lamont (2009) quite ably showed in her discussion of the American aca-
demic evaluation system, it is when academics find themselves having to
draw equivalences between their standards for how things are to be done
– in highly interdisciplinary contexts, for instance – that situations arise
that provide the greatest cognitive yield and intellectual satisfaction.
Volonté                                                                    9
    2. On This Special Section

    The articles collected in this special issue do not presume to outline an
overview of the STS interest for design, nor to document the designers’
interest for studies of science and technology. They rather tackle in dif-
ferent ways some issues that are topical discussions in this field. In this
way they advance into the above cross-fertilization. I will try now to high-
light the dynamic background of each contribution.
    A recent and very lively debate concerns the issue of design ethics.
This is an increasingly discussed issue in design studies in the 21st centu-
ry, although an ethical problem is implicit in the very origin of design it-
self. As a matter of fact, design grew out of the industrial revolution and
the rise of a capitalistic system of production. However, only in recent
times have the designers started systematically questioning their relation-
ship with industry’s needs and developing new attitudes under the con-
cepts of user-centred design (Norman 2013 [1988]) and lately, human-
centred design (Cooley 2000; Norman 2005; IDEO 2011). Designing,
they mean, is not engaging with objects but with human lives. It is as a
consequence of this focus on the human being that the issue of design
ethics has come to the fore. In this context, STS has offered a useful con-
ceptual framework for design scholars. In a way, in fact, STS has histori-
cally provided some basic elements for a moral examination of technology
itself. Focussing on controversies, and therefore criticizing technological
determinism, STS could bring to light the multiplicity of subjects that are
engaged in innovation processes; consequently, it could highlight that
technoscientific processes have wide social and political implications, and
basically generate new awareness for issues like risk, user–technology re-
lationship, and public participation in technology policy decisions. For
this reason, design studies often draw on STS reasoning to discuss the
fundaments of design ethics (see Verbeek 2006; Shilton 2012; Steen
2014).
    From the point of view of design history, this growing interest for eth-
ical issues is echoed with new excitement for sustainable design history.
This is the matter tackled by Kjetil Fallan in his article Our Common Fu-
ture. He focuses on the interdisciplinary common ground between design
history, design studies, history of technology, and science and technology
studies. Pivotal for the inception of a history of sustainable design are the
changes that have taken place in recent years in the environmentalist cul-
ture. As long as environmental awareness had privileged issues related to
the protection of wild nature, no room for an appropriate consideration
of design was available. Indeed, to design is equivalent to modifying the
environment, altering nature. However, the sustainability turn produced
a change of perspective and paved the way to historical studies of sustain-
ability in design discourse that in turn require engaging with studies of
science and technology. It does not matter, according to Fallan, that his-
torians are interested in settled traces from the past, whereas STS scholars
10                                                          Tecnoscienza - 5 (2)

in practices and networks-in-action. The artefact is an object of research
to which both historians and ethnographers can meet and relate.
    In the article On “The Design of Everyday Life”, Elizabeth Shove also
deals with the interdisciplinary common ground among STS, design stud-
ies, and other fields of interest. Particularly, she draws insight from the
sociology of consumption, theories of material culture, and her own con-
cept of social practice (Shove, Pantzar and Watson 2012). Putting for-
ward some practical examples, like varnishing or digital photography, she
draws attention to the competences that they require and discusses where
such competences are located. This opens a critical view upon some tradi-
tional ideas in design theory and STS as well. Her main target is the con-
cept of ‘the user’, that is still predominant in design studies, notwith-
standing the impetuous development of design forms in the last decades.
Actually, this is an opinion that can be shared since even in the concept of
participatory design is still implied the idea that two subjects, a profes-
sional designer and a user, collaborate in producing a designed result.
Participatory design implies the idea that competence lies in the person,
even if the person does not necessarily coincide with the designer. STS
has shown instead that competence is a quality that emerges from hybrid
situations, not being part of the object or the user. It descends from con-
tingent connections of ‘objects’ and ‘users’ (and ‘designers’), all of them
contributing to the production of a meaning.
    However, Shove suggests focusing not on the hybrids but on the prac-
tices embedded in the artefact and embodied in people. Practices are not
something that can be decided at any one moment. Many times we are
carriers of practices rather than real actors. Practices set constraints to
our behaviour. The relationship between designers and clients is mediat-
ed not by the artefact but by the practice. Practices, though, are not
steady. People are not just carriers of practices, they are also performing
them and through such performances changing them at any moment.
This draws attention to the role of design as an intervention in practice
rather than upon an artefact. I think that this approach could help design
in conceptualising the idea of a design-driven innovation (Utterback et al.
2006; Verganti 2009). What representatives from the influential design
consulting firm IDEO usually repeat in their discourse — namely that af-
ter the transition from designing products to designing services, a further
transition to designing entire customer experiences with products and
services must follow — could find a sound theoretical basis here.
    The last contribution, Charis Thompson’s article titled Designing for
the Life Sciences, deals with the buildings where science is carried out.
Consideration for the physical places where science-in-action happens is
at the very origin of STS (Latour and Woolgar 1986 [1979]; Knorr-Cetina
1981); and architecture has been a special issue in STS for a long time
(Brain 1993; Aibar and Bijker 1997; Galison and Thompson 1999; Hom-
mels 2005; Yaneva 2005 and 2012). Nevertheless, science buildings as
‘physicalized architecture of knowledge’ (Galison 1997: 785) remain to be
Volonté                                                                       11
studied in detail. The fundamental laboratory studies do not thoroughly
consider the lab’s architecture while describing the contextual location of
scientific action. They instead focus on social contingencies and on mate-
rial culture. However, a relationship between the building design and a
certain idea of science will not be surprising. It could be expected, for in-
stance, that some typical features of physics laboratory buildings, where
theorists are usually accommodated on the upper floor (Palmer and Rice
1961), are connected to a recurring social stratification structure in the re-
lated community where theorists are considered a sort of physicists’ ‘up-
per class’ (Volonté 2003). Evidence should be collected about how design
processes, as well as science practices, reflect interests, values, and expec-
tations of implicated social groups and stakeholders.
    In this context, Thompson discusses how very recent buildings for the
elite life sciences reflect shared ideas about science at the beginning of the
21st century. The analysed buildings materialize the transition from an
old idea of science as a detached sphere ruled by its own ethic and own
imperatives to a new vision where science is deeply involved in social life
and widely open to social issues. This occurs for the increasing im-
portance that entrepreneurial science (Etzkowitz and Webster 1998)
plays with respect to ‘big science’ (Price 1963) as well as for the growing
commitment of nonexperts in decisions that regard fostering research and
assessing its outcomes (Bucchi and Neresini 2008). Reading elite life sci-
ence real estate, concludes Thompson, is a conceptual tool to follow the
evolving epistemology of science, the changes in science policy, and the
development of the public understanding of science.
    As a whole, this special issue does not aim to only reinforce a particu-
lar research area in science and technology studies. Nor does it simply
want to bridge the gap between two epistemic cultures and provoke
cross-fertilization. It strives to strengthen an ‘open’ approach to STS. De-
spite its name, science and technology studies is not characterized by its
subjects, science and technology. Quite the opposite. What distinguishes
STS is its specific approach to the sociotechnical world; that is to say, the
idea that human actors and technological structures, nonhuman objects,
and political institutions contribute in an intimately connected fashion to
building the world we live in. Such an approach is promising when ap-
plied to several different subjects. Making it available to multiple com-
munities and spreading it wider is the main task for an STS community.
Accordingly, it can be said that this special issue is ultimately aimed at
fighting the corruption of STS by the deleterious hyperspecialization typ-
ical of mainstream science.

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