10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17149
This conversation stems from and relies on the lectures presented by the three authors at the second STS Italia Summer School (2013 June 12-14, Ostuni, Italy). The text by Attila Bruni portrays in an impressionistic (and partly ironical) way the "genesis and development of a scientific fact", namely technologically dense environments (TDEs), sketching some of its basic characteristics and antescedents. Trevor Pinch, again in a personal&nbsp;anecdotal style, offers various examples of mundane interactions with technologies&nbsp;in dense and less dense environments, underlining how sociomateriality&nbsp;must always be unpacked, beside any innate or transformative properties&nbsp;of the materials themselves. Cornelius Schubert, finally, rather than closing&nbsp;the conversation, offers a case in point, focusing on improvisations in&nbsp;TDEs and, in particular, in medical practice.
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Cornelius Schubert
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
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Technologically Dense Environments: What For? What Next?
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2014-01-04
2023-06-12
2014-01-04
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Cornelius Schubert
2013
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17149
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affordance
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Technologically Dense Environments: What For? What Next?
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17149/16056
4
                                                                         Conversations

Technologically Dense Environments:
What For? What Next?
	
  
       Attila Bruni                     Trevor Pinch           Cornelius Schubert
       University of Trento               Cornell University      University of Siegen
	
  
        Abstract: This conversation stems from and relies on the lectures present-
        ed by the three authors at the second STS Italia Summer School (2013 June
        12-14, Ostuni, Italy). The text by Attila Bruni portrays in an impressionistic
        (and partly ironical) way the "genesis and development of a scientific fact",
        namely technologically dense environments (TDEs), sketching some of its
        basic characteristics and antescedents. Trevor Pinch, again in a personal
        anecdotal style, offers various examples of mundane interactions with tech-
        nologies in dense and less dense environments, underlining how sociomateri-
        ality must always be unpacked, beside any innate or transformative proper-
        ties of the materials themselves. Cornelius Schubert, finally, rather than clos-
        ing the conversation, offers a case in point, focusing on improvisations in
        TDEs and, in particular, in medical practice.

        Keywords: Technology; density; sociomateriality; improvisation; affordance.

        Corresponding author: Attila Bruni, Dipartimento di Sociologia e Ricerca
        Sociale, Università di Trento, via Verdi 26, 38122 Trento, Italy. Email –
        attila.bruni@unitn.it




Technologically Dense Environments: The Genesis of a
Scientific Fact?

Attila Bruni

    The expression “technologically dense environments” (TDEs) has
been gradually defined on several occasions, while (at the same time) of-
fering the excuse to activate such occasions.
    The last one was the summer school organized this year by STS Italia.
But the first one was the fieldwork carried out for my doctorate thesis.
This was centred on telemedicine and, in particular, on shadowing the
introduction of electronic patient records (EPRs) in the oncology de-
partment of an Italian hospital. I thought that I would observe the prob-

TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
4(2) pp. 51-72 - ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                                   2013
	
  
52                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Tecnoscienza - 4 (2)

lems and difficulties that usually arise when a group of actors begin to re-
late to a new technological object, but I noticed something that I found
more interesting. Not only were the humans required to learn how to
handle the new technological tool, but they also had to ensure that the
latter ‘got on with’ the plethora of already-existing technologies in every-
day use, both in the department and in the departments with which on-
cology is usually connected (radiotherapy, for example, or the blood
chemistry laboratory). Having just undergone a cure based on ANT-CoP
(which could be the name of a drug but instead is the acronym of Actor-
Network Theory and Communities of Practice), I began to think of the
EPR as a new s-object1 encountering (and being socialized to) a more
composite ‘community of objects’. The EPR appeared to me a ‘newcom-
er’ in the already-existing ‘community of objects’ (made up of drugs,
blood-test results, radiographies, and so on) which marked out the mate-
rial boundaries of everyday work in the Oncology Department. I began to
see the EPR as ‘contending’ with this community for its practical rele-
vance and ‘negotiating’ with the objects already present in the organiza-
tion for spaces of action. In a non-reflexive manner, as if it were a simple
matter of fact, I then began to use the expression ‘technologically dense’
to denote the type of practices and environment that I was observing
(Bruni 2004, 2005a, 2005b). After all, given the entire tradition of STS
studies, it seemed to me that authors much better qualified than myself
had already declared that the contemporary world is characterized by
‘technological forms of life’ (Lash 2001) and by an ‘object-centered soci-
ality’ (Knorr-Cetina 1997).
    Years later (and this was the second occasion), I was involved by Silvia
Gherardi in writing a book on the study of work practices (Bruni and
Gherardi 20072). I was therefore pleasantly surprised by the proposal to
put the expression ‘technologically dense’ (referenced to me!) in inverted
commas, to indicate it as one of the distinctive features of contemporary
work environments (and therefore of the practices that take shape within
them). Also in this case, the expression was used as if it referred to a mat-
ter of fact, but the inverted commas emphasised its somewhat less irre-
flexive use.
    The third occasion came in 2008 during the second national STS Italia
conference. Together with Manuela Perrotta I organized a thematic track
entitled “Working and Organizing in Technologically Dense Environ-
ments.” We received around ten submissions, some more attuned, others


	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
1
  By this trick of words, I intend to stress that objects, like subjects, always stand
in relation to a social world, so that ‘observing’ a s-object means looking at the
relations of which it is part, the contexts in which it is located, the practices that
construct it socially, and the other s-objects that cross its trajectory (Bruni 2005a).
2
  Updated and authored by Silvia Gherardi, the book is now available in English
with the title: How to Conduct a Practice-Based Study.
	
  
Bruni, Pinch, and Schubert                                            53
less so, but in any case signalling that the expression had a minimum of
meaning for others as well.
    One year later I was invited by Francois Cooren, at the University of
Montreal, to discuss the doctoral thesis of Consuelo Vasquez, and I had
the occasion to hold a seminar within the research group to which Con-
suelo and Francois belong. In an attempt to present something sufficient-
ly original, I decided to make TDEs the subject of my paper. This obliged
me to come up with a definition of TDEs. I started with the individual
words. As regards ‘technology’, I resorted to etymology (tekhne + logos,
crafts + knowledge), as for that matter do McKenzie and Wajcman in the
introduction to The Social Shaping of Technology; ‘density’, according to
the Oxford Dictionary, refers to “the degree of compactness of a sub-
stance”; by ‘environment’ I meant the surroundings (or the ecology of el-
ements) in which action takes place. I sought to concentrate on ‘density’,
as a term able to express both the quantity and quality of relations that
arise among a set of elements. I framed the idea of TDEs as a ‘sensitizing
concept’ (whilst defining concepts furnish instructions on what to see,
sensitizing concepts suggest directions in which to look - see Blumer,
1969). I then identified three characteristics that, in my opinion, define
TDEs:
     • working implies complex sociomaterial practices and a specific
          technological know-how;
     • human actors and technological objects work ‘together’;
     • interaction is made possible by technologies and time and space
          are reconfigured on the basis of such interactions (and technolo-
          gies).

   I then provided some concrete examples of TDE. The first that came
to my mind was a coordination centre (Engerstrom and Middleton 1998;
Luff et al. 2000). Going somewhat back in time, however, also Laboratory
Studies (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Lynch 1985) furnish good examples.
Moving to the present day (and to recent developments in the STS de-
bate), the most effective example seemed to me that of financial markets
(Knorr-Cetina and Preda 2005). Finally, I cited medical settings, which I
undoubtedly know best and which first suggested the idea to me. In re-
gard to these settings I provided a series of detailed ethnographic exam-
ples. I concluded that the notion of TDE refers to:
     - the stratification of texts, architectures, knowledges, objects, and
          technologies that characterizes an organizational environment;
     - the essential (and practical) proximity between the ‘functioning’
          of technologies and the ‘functioning’ of work;
     - the heterogeneous and scattered dimension of working and or-
          ganizing;
     - the constitutive (in ethnomethodological terms) role of technolo-
          gies for working and organizing.

	
  
54                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Tecnoscienza - 4 (2)

     Elaboration of the concept (if it can be described as such) was still in
an embryonic state. But during the seminar I received comments, criti-
cisms and stimulating suggestions. Above all, nobody disputed the idea of
TDEs; rather, all those present seemed to grasp the idea intuitively and
had something to say on the subject.
     The fifth occasion was the EASST conference organized in Trento in
2010. In this case, Manuela Perrotta and Maurizio Teli organized a the-
matic track on TDEs and thus gave international visibility to this new ‘la-
bel’. As part of the track I gave a paper, at the end of which a colleague
asked the so-what question: "Ok, we live in a technologically dense
world. Didn’t we already know that?!". Probably yes, I replied, but it is
precisely for this reason that it is interesting to study how this technologi-
cal density is constructed, performed, and practised. Fortunately, at that
point the bell rang for the coffee-break.
     While waiting to find the time to write a rigorous article on TDEs,
and in an attempt to involve other interested researchers in discussion of
the idea, I actively constructed the next occasions. Together with Ma-
nuela Perrotta and Anne Mayére, I organized a thematic track on TDEs
at the 27th Egos Colloquium (in Gothenburg, 2011), and whose call for
paper received a good response. In particular, Carsten Østerlund (Øster-
lund et al. 2011), Jon Rennstam (2011) and Cornelius Schubert (2011)
sought to ‘operationalize’ the idea of TDEs and show its heuristic poten-
tial3. Then, together with Cornelius, I organized a track at the 4S/EASST
conference held in Copenhagen in 2012, which received a limited number
of submissions but all of great interest and targeted on the topic. Above
all, they all sought to give concreteness to the idea of TDEs and to define
it more clearly. Personally, this was the occasion on which, above all
thanks to my discussions with Cornelius Schubert during organization of
the track, that I was able to focus more closely on the need to conceive
‘density’ as something that emerges from the context and from its rela-
tions, not as a property of the environment or of those relations them-
selves. With a play on words, the technological density of TDEs is entirely
to be demonstrated. Put otherwise, it is not enough that an environment
comprise a large number of technologies, or that patterns of action re-
quire the use of various technological artifacts, for that same environment
to be defined as technologically dense. It is necessary instead for techno-
logical density to emerge in relational terms as a problem, routine, or a
spur to improvisation. In this regard, I shall now provide a brief example.
     Around a year ago, I began research in an university laboratory of en-
vironmentary chemistry. The laboratory engages in analysis of atmospher-
ic particulates. It conducts innovative research for which a standardized
methodology and/or instrumentation does not always exist. Obviously, all
activities in the laboratory are accompanied by some kind of technologi-
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
3
 A revised version of the paper by Jon Rennstam has been published last year in
Organization Studies (2012, vol. 33, n. 1071).
	
  
Bruni, Pinch, and Schubert                                               55
cal instrumentation and (equally obviously) numerous situations arise in
which the researchers must ‘support’ the correct operation of the tech-
nologies and/or make sense of the numerical values yielded by those
technologies. It should also be borne in mind that, given the cost of cer-
tain technologies and the shortage of funds, in very early experimental
stages the researchers must themselves construct makeshift instruments,
whose definitive set-up (if the hypothesis to be tested proves sensible) is
commissioned from specialized firms. Yet I would not cite this as an ex-
ample of a technologically of dense environment. For this it is not an en-
vironment in which, by observing the technologies, one can understand
the nature of interactions and work organization practices (which I in-
stead began to think resided in the dynamics of taking the laboratory in
the environment and the environment in the laboratory). From the point
of view of the actors involved, the technologies available to them were
simply tools and, as such, subject to malfunctions and breakdowns, as
well as having an entirely accessory role with respect to a much more
complex activity, that of producing scientific knowledge.
    It can certainly be objected that this is one of those situations in which
technology is such a routine infrastructure for action that it becomes in-
visible to the researcher, because its ‘density’ may also obscure the prac-
tices and relations bound up in it. But the debate has just begun, and this
conversation is only a further occasion to continue it.


                                      ***


Sociomateriality and Technological Dense Environments

Trevor Pinch

Introduction

    This essay has its origins in a lecture given to the 2013 STS Italia
summer school held in a gorgeous and rustic atelier outside Ostuni in Pu-
glia, Italy. My abiding memory of the workshop is one of the grad stu-
dents, Joan Donovan, “desperately seeking signal” for her laptop. Under
some definitions of technology we were definitely in a technologically
sparse environment. But the environment was rich in the mundane tech-
nologies needed for nurturing a wonderful social ambience. The mistral
cooperated and kept the temperatures comfortable. The seating arrange-
ments were cushions; the food was locally produced pastas; and the drink
was wine from the owner’s own vineyard. Yes it was as close to heaven as
you can get for academic encounters these days! I have deliberately kept

	
  
56                                                             Tecnoscienza - 4 (2)

the style of this essay informal, merely polishing the text of the conversa-
tions we had at the workshop. The personal anecdotal style I find works
best in teaching, so it runs throughout this essay. We as academics are
first of all story tellers. Some of the crucial terms I will be referring to are
technology, materiality, infrastructure, sociomateriality, affordances and
scripts. Bruno Latour first discussed some of these terms in a provocative
way, in an article he wrote about the missing masses and the sociology of
a few mundane artifacts (Latour 1992). Bruno too likes storytelling and
one version of that piece was originally framed as an account provided by
a fictitious engineer called Jim Johnson, from the Colorado School of
Mines. As with so much in our field, there is more to say than Bruno said.
But I think the genius of that early piece was how Bruno/Jim took objects
he encountered in his everyday life - doors, grooms, seat belts, speed
bumps and so on – and weaved them into little stories which made them
analytically interesting. In this essay I shall try do something similar. I
shall describe my encounters with various mundane objects and try and
see what lessons we can learn.


1. Dense and Sparse Technological Environments?

     What makes an environment technologically dense or for that matter
“sparse”, clearly depends on your definition of technology. For instance
on some definitions of technology languages are technologies and since
that is the one thing all humans share then clearly all human environ-
ments are technologically dense. Defining technology is notoriously tric-
ky. As Leo Marx has pointed out, the definition has changed throughout
history. Back in the times of the ancient Greeks the word tekhne was used
to describe the mechanical arts, but for some influential thinkers about
technology (e.g. Heidegger) the poesis involved in the craft of pottery is
very different from a technology which enframes humans. Karl Marx in
Capital (Vol. II) avoids the word technology altogether preferring to talk
about machines. The word technology starts to gain salience in the late
nineteenth century when technology came to refer to what Thomas Hu-
ghes called “large scale technological systems” such as the telegraph, the
railroad, and electric power. This meaning of technology captures not
only the material systems but the new sorts of managerial skills needed to
run such systems and turns engineers into what John law calls heteroge-
neous engineers who must deal with the managerial, social, economic, po-
litical as well as the technical aspects of systems. Leo Marx notes that
even with the founding of MIT in 1861 technology had not yet stabilized
as a word. Today technology is often associated in the media with particu-
lar devices such as cell phones, computers and the like.
     A working definition of technology comes from MacKenzie’s and Wa-
jcman’s classic book (1999) The Social Shaping of Technology where tech-
nology is defined as involving three aspects: knowledge, artefacts, and
	
  
Bruni, Pinch, and Schubert                                               57
practices. Most definitions of technology need to capture the human ena-
bling quality of technology and it is this which separates technology from
simply material stuff. A piece of wood worked into the case of the mini-
moog electronic music synthesizer is a material artefact, part of a techno-
logy, whilst the walnut tree growing in Robert Moog’s garden in Truman-
sburg, New York, from which the wood was cut is simply part of the ma-
terial world. Animals, of course also make use of the material world and
some theories of material agency would also want to grant similar powers
to animals. Indeed within science studies, “multispecies ethnography” is
in vogue. The important notion of “affordances”, as first suggested by
psychologist James Gibson (1986), was developed as part of an ecological
approach which included animals. Thus Gibson talked about a tree gi-
ving animals affordance to climb to safety. If animals use of the material
environment is considered part of technology then we will find TDEs
everywhere we encounter bee hives and termite mounds!
    We will return to affordances later in this essay, but for now I want to
suggest that it is the knowledge aspect of technology which makes it hard
to classify termite mounds and the like as technological systems and ter-
mites as heterogeneous insects! Whilst animals, such as apes, may use ob-
jects they encounter in the environment, such as sticks as tools, it is as far
as we know, only humans who have the capacity to make and manufactu-
re tools. Knowledge involves language and although animals have sophi-
sticated communication systems it is arguable whether they have develo-
ped language.


2. The Material Turn

    In recent years there has been a turn towards the study of materiality
more generally in the academy. Scholars in fields such as anthropology,
archeology, feminist theory, and of course subfields such as the sociology
of finance all lay stress upon materiality. Crude ways of measuring which
academic terms are trending, such as Google N-grams, also indicate the
rise of the word material. And of course our own field of science studies
has always laid claim to materiality. Madonna’s song title “Living in a ma-
terial world” has been stolen by at least two of us (Andy Pickering and
myself). This interest in materiality when it is taken up by social scientists
is sometimes expressed within the lexicon of “sociomateriality”.
    So what is sociomateriality? One definition is provided by organiza-
tional studies scholar, Wanda Orlikowski, who refers to it as ‘the consti-
tutive entanglement of the social and the material in everyday organiza-
tional life’ (Orlikowski 2007, 1438). Taken seriously, sociomateriality is
more than simply a fascination with the ‘things’ that shape or are de-
ployed within human action, as found, for example, in the growing re-
search agenda which examines artifacts and boundary objects, Rather, it
is a serious attempt to understand how human bodies, spatial arrange-
	
  
58                                                            Tecnoscienza - 4 (2)

ments, physical objects, and technologies are entangled with language,
interaction, and practices in the doing of activities. It is a useful way of
capturing what I see as the essence of TDEs – how humans interact with
the material artefacts that make up technologies.


3. Making Invisible Infrastructures Visible

    I live in a tiny little hamlet called Forest Home just outside Ithaca in
what is called upstate New York. “Upstate” says it all – it is not New
York City, it is somewhere up the state. It is rural and as we like to say
about Ithaca where Cornell University is located - it is “centrally isola-
ted”. But we manage.
    Now Forest Home is a beautiful little place and our little hamlet has
its own housing association quaintly called “The Forest Home Improve-
ment Association”. Life is good but not as good as in Southern Italy. The-
re is always room for improvement. So citizens volunteer for the Impro-
vement Association. One of the mundane examples I want to talk about
comes from involvement with this organization.
    I was attending a meeting of the Ithaca Town Planning Committee,
when a rabbi from Cornell University proposed that our town be sur-
rounded by an invisible wall - a very special form of wall known in Jewish
Law as an eruv (the Hebrew word for mixing or blending). An eruv sur-
rounds a space with a series of symbolic gates (as to a temple) and enables
a blending of the public and private space within. Once in existence, this
invisible wall gives the space within it special religious significance, a form
of virtual temple, and allows Orthodox Jewish religious observances to be
carried out in an easier way. It would permit an Orthodox Jew, say, to
take property from his home that would not normally be allowed on the
Sabbath.
    So the Town of Ithaca got down to considering the rabbi’s request.
The first problem is that building an invisible wall turns out to be a non-
trivial matter. The eruv, the rabbi explained, must consist of a continuous
wire around the space with columns hanging from it at certain fixed in-
tervals to symbolize the gates. An immense stroke of good fortune is,
however, on the side of the modern eruv builders. Most cities and towns
are already surrounded by wires with columns attached to them - tele-
phone poles and power lines! The rabbi pointed out that the necessary
wires and poles could be cleverly adapted for eruv purposes. There was
one problem. Jewish Law stipulates that the poles should be placed preci-
sely under the wires - a position to be determined exactly using laser
measurements.
    Part of the job of town planning committees is to make the normally
invisible infrastructure of towns visible. In other words to make mundane
artefacts a little bit less mundane. The first issue to be addressed at any

	
  
Bruni, Pinch, and Schubert                                             59
such gathering is money. How much will this cost? The Town Supervisor
clarified with the rabbi that it would not cost the town of Ithaca anything
as all costs were to be born by the Cornell Jewish community. But mem-
bers of the committee were worried about other aspects. Wasn’t there
meant to be a strict separation of church and state? The town clerk had
diligently gone on-line and circulated a case of a eruv in Palo Alto which
had been opposed on exactly these grounds. “What if a less benign reli-
gious group wanted to nail crosses to every telephone pole in Ithaca?”
asked one member of the committee, who prefaced his remarks by stating
that he had been brought up Jewish and “to be frank I find the whole
idea of a eruv silly”. The rabbi had his reply ready. He understood where
the criticism was coming from but the eruv demanded no precedent be-
cause it was simply allowing religious people to do what secular people
did all the time. In short it permitted something secular to happen rather
than prescribing something as religious.
    The Town lawyer then spoke. She had researched other cases and felt
that the Town could maintain its discretion in the future to ban any less
benign walls. But members of the planning committee still felt uncomfor-
table because the request came from a specific religious group with a spe-
cific religious purpose in mind. The discussion wandered over the exact
wording of the request and whether other religious groups would tolerate
the wall. The lawyer questioned whether the wall would break local si-
gnage ordinances – Ithaca has strict rules about signs being posted on te-
lephone poles and this looked like a sign. No, argued the rabbi, it wasn’t
a sign because it was invisible to most people. The lawyer came back; the
definition of a sign is something that conveys information and since the
wall will convey information to some people it could potentially be a sign.
The committee decided further investigation was required. Someone
whispered in my ear after the rabbi had left. “If God was really omnipo-
tent he wouldn’t be fooled by this fake wall anyway!” The last word as
always was with God.
    In the ten-minute discussion the Planning Committee had ranged over
some of the most salient issues in sociomateriality. The example reminds
us again that technologies carry no intrinsic meanings. Their meanings are
always to be found amongst social groups who interact with the techno-
logy and share a meaning of the technology. Most people share the mea-
ning of poles and wires as carriers of part of our technological infrastruc-
ture – power lines and telephone lines. Such objects are mundane and we
barely notice them. Now a new meaning of the poles and wires was being
asserted; that they also carried religious significance. This meaning was
shared amongst a specific social group - namely Orthodox Jews.
    In the case of the eruv it is important to note that, although the mea-
ning of the technology is mainly symbolic, materiality is involved. The wi-
res and pipes need to be precisely aligned. In short “religious functionali-
ty” requires its own non-trivial material alignment. Measuring each pole
with laser equipment and retrofitting if necessary is a huge investment in
	
  
60                                                            Tecnoscienza - 4 (2)

time, technique, and money. Furthermore technologies and their mea-
nings do not exist detached from the rest of society, its institutions, cultu-
re, and the vast assemblages of technologies and humans we have already
built. This point is nicely illustrated by the Planning Committee’s discus-
sion which ranges over economy, law, religion and the nature of signifiers.


4. Affordances Revisited

     The example can also be used to exemplify a very common way of
dealing with how mundane technologies interact with humans, namely
affordances. As I mentioned earlier, this term comes from Gibson and
has been extended by Don Norman (1990) as a way of ascribing some
sort of agency to mundane objects and technologies. The chair is used for
sitting and therefore affords seating. Now there are many problems with
affordances. The word itself with its economic overtones is a weasel word
– it is very vague to talk about what can or cannot be “afforded”. Can I
afford to buy a new car, for example, is a complex question. It is clear al-
so that an affordance is a relational property depending upon the rela-
tionship between an object and someone using that object. Affordances
also don’t only “afford” – they prevent, prohibit and protect. The electri-
cal power lines around my town give affordance to people who want to
use power in their homes to run electrical appliances and so on. But by
being raised up high on poles the power lines protect people from being
electrocuted. We could express this property as giving them the “affor-
dance” to travel in safety. This form of protection again is relational, de-
pending upon the user. This was brought home to me by a family acci-
dent. One of my cousins likes to sail and forgot to lower the mast of the
boat he was launching when he passed under some power lines. He was
electrocuted and as a result today only has three fingers. The protection
afforded by power lines does not apply to very tall people or people laun-
ching sailing boats! In other words built into every affordance is a parti-
cular sort of user.
     Work on affordances needs to be tied in with user studies in S&TS
(Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003). It is clear not only that technological arte-
facts have more than one affordance as the eruv example reminds us, but
also that new affordances can arise in the context of use. For example, the
affordance of the early motor car as a stationary source of power was so-
mething that only developed in the context of use (Kline and Pinch
1996). ”Affordance” is an overly passive term as the issue of new uses of
technologies reveals. It is not that affordances are waiting to be discove-
red in objects – the creation of a new affordance is often a struggle invol-
ving active work by users. The disappearance of an affordance, or the non
appearance of an affordance that should be there, is also worth reflecting
upon. It was a power play by Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company

	
  
Bruni, Pinch, and Schubert                                             61
that helped kill the affordance of using the car as a stationary source of
power.. Affordances can thus involve politics.
    “Affordance” as a term, in short encourages sloppy thinking. It is of-
ten used as a convenient short hand, particularly in information science,
to describe the functional attributes of a piece of technology. You will
read that the internet provides the “affordance” of remote access, cutting
and pasting, and copying. But as soon as one examines the particular use
of a technology in context, say using the internet in Iran or copying an
iTunes music file several times, you are reminded that it is only a shor-
thand.
    We clearly need terms for describing how humans interact with tech-
nologies and the material world. The key issue for me is that even if we
want to use a term like affordances, the affordances of a technology (in-
cluding what it will permit and prohibit) can only be made visible and
stabilized within the complex social setting of the mundane technology.
Whether the retrofitted poles afford religious functionality or the mecha-
nical functionality of carrying power and telephone lines or both or yet
other affordances can only de determined by looking at the precise cultu-
ral and social setting within which these technologies are embedded and
used.


5. Scripts

    “Scripts” as introduced by Madeleine Akrich (1992) is another way of
thinking about the same issue. Scripts can be read from an object and she
allows for the possibility for objects to be “descripted” and “rescripted”
in the context of use. This is a more satisfactory way of talking about the
interaction between humans and non-humans than the language of affor-
dances. In the strong form of scripts argued for by Bruno Latour with his
famous examples of sleeping policemen and seat belts the danger is that
the script is read from the object rather than the context of use of the ob-
ject. This becomes particularly problematic when an intention is said to
be embedded within a script or delegated to an object. The example of
the sign “Slow down” which is replaced by a speed bump seems intuitive-
ly compelling because the sign (the intention) has been replaced by the
material artifact which now “scripts” us to slow down.
    An example I like to play with here which shows how complex this
process can be is one where a sign replaces a material artefact. The case I
have in mind is a peculiarly US one where American dog owners restrain
their pets with a technology known as an “invisible fence”. This techno-
logy is a wire which is buried in the ground around the owner’s home.
The dog is trained by wearing a special collar which administers a small
electric shock when approaching the wire. Soon the dog learns to stay wi-
thin the assigned area and the shocks can be replaced by sonic signals and

	
  
62                                                            Tecnoscienza - 4 (2)

eventually the whole device works passively. Owners who employ this
technology always put up a sign saying “Dog restrained by invisible fen-
ce”. So in this case a technology - a fence - is replaced by a sign. But rea-
ding intention into the sign is problematic. My own enquiries into the
meaning of the sign have produced many different sorts of readings and
the intentionality implied. I have been told it is: (a) an advertisement for
the invisible fence company, (b) a means of showing people that the dog
is actually restrained in case they are scared, (c) a warning to people not
to try and steal the dog, (d) a residue of a training exercise, (e) a legal ne-
cessity for liability purposes. No one told me it was a warning to be read
by the dog! Obviously if we added in animal intentionality and behavior
to the analysis, the case would become even more complicated because
the fence is not “invisible” to the dog. The particular breed of dog may
also be important – a rotweiller requiring perhaps more symbolic re-
straint than a playful poodle. This example reminds us again that the lan-
guage of scripts only works with close attention paid to specific users and
the context of use.


6. What to do with a Limp Clipcard!

    I will introduce one last example to amplify these points. Prepaid
“stripcards” or “clipcards” are commonly used to pay for rides on trams
and subways in the Netherlands and Denmark. You typically pay for a
number of rides in advance and each time you take a ride you “clip” your
card at a machine. In a way this technology fits nicely the Latourian story
of delegation. On buses in the UK ticket collectors (known as “clippies”)
used to “clip” bus tickets by punching a hole in them. In Denmark a ma-
chine, into which the card is inserted automatically, reads and “clips” the
card (by removing a fixed part of the edge corresponding to one journey
or a segment of a journey).
    When visiting Copenhagen I regularly use such a card to pay for my
trips on the very fast and efficient subway. On a recent visit I had one last
journey to make to the Copenhagen airport from my hotel in the middle
of town. I planned to use my clipcard as I had just enough segments left
on it. Because I had a heavy bag I used the elevator to enter the station.
On my way into the elevator I lent a hand to a woman having difficulties
getting her pram inside. Once on the platform I tried to use my clipcard,
but the machine would not clip it – the card had become limp from being
bent over in my wallet. I struggled with the machine before the woman I
had earlier helped noticed my problem and came to my rescue. She
showed me with a knowing smile what to do: spit on the clipcard! I did
just that and lo and behold the machine “accepted” my card and I was
able to complete my journey legally and happily!


	
  
Bruni, Pinch, and Schubert                                               63
    What do we make of this vignette – this little ethnographic encounter
with machines? The normal use of the clipcard could be described as a
case of affordances or Latourian scripts. indeed we might rename the
card a “script card” in honor of Madeline Akrich! The card and card
clipper give affordance to the journey. The card is scripted to be inserted
into the machine and receive the requisite clipping. But a crumpled or
limp card breaches the material script for which both card and machine
have been designed and which are necessary parts of the sequence of ac-
tions to legally board the train.
    At its most fundamental we see that the actions of the woman is in re-
pairing the script, which had been breached by the breakdown of the in-
terface between the card and the machine. That is, the designed affordan-
ces or scripts that enabled connection between the clip card and the ma-
chine reader have broken down, thus preventing the material script of
actions encoded within them. The woman simply uses other material pos-
sibilities, such as moisture, to make the repair. It is in no way exceptional;
the woman knew exactly what to do as a practical everyday behavior to
enable action to continue.
    Repairing is itself an important aspect to consider in understanding
the situated interaction between the social and the material. But we need
to look beyond the specific instance of repair to fully understand socio-
materiality in context. We cannot understand this social activity of ac-
complishing the boarding of a train, if we do not consider the multiplicity
of context and action implicit within it. First, the very act of repairing is
uniquely situated within its cultural context; Danes know that clipcards
sometimes fail and also what ‘usually works to fix the problem (they have
other ways of repairing the situation). Second, the action was facilitated
by the social interaction that preceded it – the materiality of the pram and
elevator through which the association was brought into being and which
facilitated the woman sharing her tacit cultural knowledge of how to re-
pair a perceived breakdown of human and material interactions (not to
mention conventional gendered notions of politeness, would I have as
willingly helped a man struggling with, say, a huge keg of Tuborg?).
Third, which material affordances and scripts should we privilege to ex-
plain this incident: the pram, the elevator; the clipcard; the wallet in
which it became crumpled; the ticket machine; the boarding of the train;
or the broader Danish context within which the design of the clipcards,
their possible breakdowns, and their knowledgeable repair are entangled?
Of course, none can be privileged. They are all part of accomplishing ac-
tivity with materials (Jarzabkowksi and Pinch forthcoming). In order to
focus on and explain the specific instance of repair we must of necessity
explain the broader activity and surrounding materials within which that
instance is situated, and without which it occurred. Even the intentions of
the actors are not always clear. We impute that both actors in this en-
counter intended to help each other on their journey – but maybe their
intentions were less clear. Maybe they intended to fall in love as in classic
	
  
64                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Tecnoscienza - 4 (2)

movie stories of chance railway encounters. In such a scenario the spitting
on the clipcard might mean something else altogether!
    All these examples of mundane interactions with technologies in den-
se and less dense environments serve to remind us that sociomateriality
must always be unpacked. As we focus upon contexts of use we observe
reappropriation, repair and also improvisation. The agenda of technology
studies will be best served by situating materials, mundane artefacts, and
technologies within the accomplishing of activities in multiple contexts. It
is these contexts and activities that best explain the interaction of the so-
cial and the material, rather than any innate or transformative properties
of the materials themselves.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   ***


Improvisations in technological density

Cornelius Schubert

Introduction

    My input to the conversation seeks to connect the idea of technologi-
cally dense environments (TDEs) with the concept of improvisation as a
form of technical practice.4 The term improvisation carries a dual mean-
ing. On the one hand, in its original sense, it positively refers to the artis-
tic quality of situated performances which do not follow a pre-given
script and often include the mastery of (musical) instruments. On the
other hand, it has taken on a negative meaning of makeshift tinkering
which implies the inability of doing something properly. The latter mean-
ing typically prevails in technical settings, where improvisation is consid-
ered to be a partial fix and inferior to pre-planned control. The former
meaning entails that improvisation itself is a form of mastery and this un-
derstanding is typically found fields like the performing arts. On the fol-
lowing pages, I will outline an understanding of improvisation in TDEs
which draws on the positive notions of mastery and competence from the
performing arts and which conceptualises improvisation as an essential
aspect of working in TDEs. My reflections are set against a background
of ethnographic observations during surgical operations (Schubert 2007)
and conceive modern medical care as a prototypical technologically dense
environment.

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
4
  I am especially indebted with the participants of the 2013 STS Italia Summer
School for the fruitful discussion around improvisation, TDEs, and medicine.
	
  
Bruni, Pinch, and Schubert                                              65


1. Improvising as skilled and situated performance

    Let us first come to terms with the manifold meanings of improvisa-
tion. The word was originally used in the arts, starting in the 18th century
and referring to a situated performance that would not be rehearsed like
classical script based theatrical plays or musical pieces (literally meaning
“un-foreseen”). Improvisation was performed in front of small audiences
and typically consisted of creative acts like thinking up a poem. This per-
formance did not, however, come out of thin air. The improvising artists
were credited for their skill and competence in situated creativity. From
there on, different facets of improvisation have become a central virtue in
many artistic fields, most notably jazz music (Berliner 1994). In jazz mu-
sic, improvisation typically denotes the skilled and situated variation of
existing musical themes by experienced players (Becker 2000). Yet, in dif-
ferent performing arts, different notions of improvisation can be found.
Theatrical improvisations, for instance, often aren’t variations of an exist-
ing theme, but stress the ad hoc creation of the play as it is performed.
This brief glance at improvisation in the performing arts should suffice to
highlight two core aspects of improvisation. First, improvisation is a
skilled art which has to be learned, often over many years of training and
experience. In contrast to the negative meaning of improvisation as a lack
of mastery, it connotes a highly professional competence. Second, im-
provisation is a form of situated conduct which highlights the contingency
and adaptations in concrete actions and interactions. Thus, it connotes
the intentional deviation from pre-planned scripts or protocols.
    Such an understanding of improvisation and especially the notion of
jazz improvisation have been fruitfully extended within organisation stud-
ies (Weick 1998; Kamoche et al. 2002). The idea of organisational im-
provisation mainly serves as an antidote to prevailing assumptions about
order and control in organisational theory. Weick, for instance, argues
that assumptions about order make it difficult for organisational scholars
to address issues of creativity and innovation, since they impose an overly
rational model of organisational structure and process. In addition, im-
provisation implies a situation which deals with the unexpected and un-
planned. This is not to say that improvisation lacks order. Rather, improv-
isation is a process in which a specific situated order is created.
    We can extend this thought towards a more general understanding:
Improvisation is a situated combination of already existing and newly
created elements. It is a creative process by which a number of situated
“givens”, e.g. musical themes, instruments and knowledge are recobined
and adapted according to an ongoing situation. It is a process through
which the situation itself is instantaneously created. But it would be
wrong to equate improvisation with simple spontaneity or creation ex-
nihilo. What makes improvisation an interesting concept is the creative
relation of the old and the new. In such broad terms, improvisation is in
	
  
66                                                           Tecnoscienza - 4 (2)

effect an essential aspect of all human action, since we are always faced
with open ended courses of action and the need to adapt to changing en-
vironments, be they natural, social or technical.


2. Improvising in technical settings

    Even though jazz improvisation provides a fruitful point of departure
for discussing improvisation in technological dense environments, it may
also be misleading in some ways. I will point out two critical issues. First
the idea of the human mastery of a technical instrument and second the
idea of improvisation as an end in itself.
    Jazz improvisation is a capability of highly skilled experts and requires
years of training and experience. This is an important point to note, since
it provides the argument against notions of improvisation as inferior
makeshift tinkering. At the same time, expert jazz improvisation implies
the mastery of the musical instrument (Becker 2000). The instrument has
to “withdraw” in a phenomenological sense (Heidegger 1996 [1927]: 65),
so that the musician may exert full control over it. Only if the instrument
has become “at hand” (“zuhanden” in German, ibid.: 66), i.e. if the musi-
cian can essentially forget about how he or she has to play the instrument
and is therefore able to focus on making music, will improvisation be-
come an artful and creative mastery. In this understanding, the creative
aspects of variation solely reside on the side of the human musicians and
improvisations in effect become a one-sided perspective, privileging the
creativity of humans while depicting instruments as functional appliances.
But as Heidegger has also noted, tools must not necessarily withdraw to
be only ready at hand – rather they may become conspicuous, obtrusive
or even obstinate in use. Indeed, some forms of musical improvisation,
like experimental electronic or ambient music, use “malfunctioning” in-
struments or random sounds in order to create unexpected elements in
their music. Even if this essentially returns a malfunction into some form
of functionality, i.e. the creation of the unexpected, it counters the notion
of mastery and withdrawal. In other genres, like drone metal, electric am-
plification and feedback are used to create lasting soundscapes (drones).
The minimalist improvisations of drone metal point to the material ar-
rangements required to create such sounds and highlight the artists re-
flexive engagements with the instruments during improvisation. In both
cases, the locus of creativity is shifted from the solely human side towards
a distributed creativity between instruments and musicians. This form of
improvisation might be closer to improvisations in TDEs, where tools or
instruments may resist intentional human action (Pickering 1993) and
must be considered not as functioning appliances but as unruly technolo-
gy (Wynne 1988) or clumsy golems (Collins and Pinch 1998).


	
  
Bruni, Pinch, and Schubert                                                 67
     The second and more important difference between musical improvi-
sation and improvisation in TDEs is that artistic improvisation is an end
in itself (the opus operatum), whereas improvisation in TDEs is a means
for ensuring a more or less stable flow of work (a modus operandi). Im-
provising in TDEs means to cope with the numerous contingencies and
complexities by repairing, adapting to or working around more or less
unexpected disruptions in the planned course of events. In contrast to
artistic fields, where improvisation is explicitly made visible (or audible),
improvisation in TDEs largely remains “invisible work” (Star and Strauss
1999). This is not to say that improvisation is not valued at all. Especially
experienced practitioners know about the necessity and skilfulness of im-
provising in technical settings and many ethnographies of work have
highlighted the importance of such “repair work” in various fields (cf.
Strauss et al. 1985; Orr 1996). So, even if improvisation in TDEs is not an
end in itself, but rather a mode of conduct, it is by no means a negligible
aspect of work. Instead, it is a constitutive element of all technical activi-
ties. This also means that we should not conceive of TDEs as clean and
functional settings, but rather as more or less messy places which contin-
uously provide for unexpected situations and call for adapting the course
of work to situational contingencies. Increasing technological density thus
cannot be equated with increasing integration and alignment, but should
be conceived as increasing heterogeneity and the disorderly layering of
manifold technologies one over another. In case of medicine, for instance,
diagnostic instruments or monitoring technologies overlap with docu-
mentation systems and administrative infrastructures. All these different
technological layers are enmeshed with each other and unforeseen con-
nections between them are likely to grow as they are used in practice.
Under such conditions, improvisation denotes the skilful articulation of
all these layers for creating a situationally ordered sequence of events (cf.
“articulation work” in the hospital, Strauss et al. 1985, pp. 151).
     Let us briefly reconsider the argument so far. Building upon the idea
of artistic improvisation as skilled and situated performance, a general
concept of improvisation was put forward which does not equate improv-
isation with mere spontaneity or the absence of order, but with the com-
petent adaptation and situated creation of order in the relation of the old
and the new. In a second step, the specifics of jazz improvisation were
critically discussed with regard to improvisation in TDEs. In the latter
case, improvisation was conceived as a mode of conduct in dealing with
unruly technologies. Following this line of thought, improvisation is nei-
ther an inferior mode of conduct compared to pre-planned control, nor is
it a simple functional addition to otherwise rational technical procedures.
Rather, improvisation itself combines different modes of routine and flex-
ibility or repetition and creativity. It is skilful, situated, technically medi-
ated and embodied, drawing both on explicit as well as implicit
knowledge. Extending the concept from the performing arts to techno-
logically dense environments highlights these features of a professional
	
  
68                                                           Tecnoscienza - 4 (2)

practice, which essentially exists in the intentional and controlled devia-
tion from standardised procedures. With growing technological density,
as messiness and unruliness increase, TDEs do not withdraw into being
ready at hand, but constantly challenge prefabricated scripts and demand
situational adaptations. Stretching the metaphor a little, we could say that
the instruments in TDEs in a way tend to play their own songs (like in
drone), than that they are being played (like in jazz).


3. Modern medical practice and technological density

    In the last step, I will relate the concept of TDEs and that of improvi-
sation to the specifics of modern medical practice. In order to do so, I
will provide answers to two questions. First, can we speak of modern
medical practice as a technologically dense environment? Second, what
implications does this have for our use of the term improvisation?
    Let us begin with the question, if medicine has become technological-
ly more dense. It can easily be argued that medical practice has always
been technically mediated and socially organised. This way, medicine can
be thought of as having always been technologically dense, at least since
the invention of stethoscope and thermometer. The increasing number of
diagnostic and therapeutic instruments over the last 200 years would then
warrant the claims that medicine has become technologically more dense
and that the organised settings of modern healthcare indeed constitute
prototypical TDEs. However, a mere increase in instruments is not suffi-
cient to make this claim. Technological density is not only a matter of
quantity but more importantly of quality. Because technological density
more often than not creates a messy state of affairs, it does not necessarily
lead to frictionless integration, but to increased fragmentation and the
continual need for conversions between the different layers of technolo-
gies, e.g. between circulating pieces of paper, heterogeneous electronic
infrastructures and instruments and last not least, bodies.
    In case of modern medicine, technological density then does not simp-
ly imply an increase in diagnostic, therapeutic, and administrative tech-
nologies, but leads to manifold interdependencies between them. Infor-
mation infrastructures, such as medical records, fuse diagnostic data with
therapeutic trajectories and cooperative workflows (Berg 1996). In these
cases, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between the epis-
temic and coordinative aspects of work, i.e. between diagnostic and ther-
apeutic knowledge and administrative procedures. Modern computerised
information infrastructures in a way constitute the backbone of many
TDEs and this is also true for medicine. A TDE then is not a mere sur-
rounding or frame for the actions and interactions taking place, rather,
TDEs constitute basic situations which shape and are being shaped by
ongoing work practices. Ogburn (1922) once noted that humans must not

	
  
Bruni, Pinch, and Schubert                                             69
only adapt to a natural environment, but also to a social environment and
increasingly to a technological environment. In contrast to the former
two, the technological environment is in constant and rapid change. It
would thus be wrong to equate a technological environment with stable
frame or surrounding. TDEs like medical care are in transformation, they
change and evolve along with the work that is being carried out within
them.
    But how does this relate to improvisation? Interestingly, the term im-
provisation is also used in medicine. In the late 19th century it was bor-
rowed from the arts to describe the specifics of medical practice under
the conditions of sparsity, e.g. in military field hospitals (Cubasch 1884).
Improvising was considered to be an aspect of practicing the art (sic!) of
medicine without the resources of a fully equipped peacetime hospital.
Even though improvisation was – and still is – considered part of the art
of medicine, it is strongly linked to situations of sparsity which are tech-
nologically less dense than those of routine medical practice. Improvisa-
tion and material abundance thus do not seem to go well together and
improvisation might only occur in situations where other things become
sparse, e.g. the lack of time in emergency situations. Thinking of improvi-
sation mainly as an emergency procedure, a deviation from the norm (no
matter how artistic), however, falls short on two accounts. First it would
imply that improvisation in TDEs is the exception and not the rule. From
the perspective of complex density outlined above, this hardly seems to
be the case. Second, it would overemphasise the creative aspects while
neglecting the routine structure of improvisation itself.
    Finally, this leads us away from the question if improvisation occurs in
TDEs towards the question how it occurs. As a conceptual tool, it makes
us sensitive to the interrelation of routine and flexibility, to the experi-
ence and skill required to competently improvise, to the relevance of ma-
terial artefacts, bodily senses and informational infrastructures. It also
leads us to questions how improvising is practically legitimated and sanc-
tioned in different TDEs and in how far the TDE itself provides and al-
lows for different forms of improvisation. Medical practice, as Parsons
already noted, is inherently uncertain and calls for manifold mutual adap-
tations of standard procedures and non-standard patients, doctors, and
nurses (Timmermans and Berg 1997). Related to this is the question of
how improvisation can actually be learned or trained for. Unlike the per-
forming arts, where improvisation is an end in itself, improvisation in
TDEs is a modus operandi where the deviations from standardised pro-
cedures need to be accounted for in other ways.




	
  
70                                                                   Tecnoscienza - 4 (2)

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Bruni, Pinch, and Schubert                                                    71
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