Slide 8 of 20
Notes:
My own work has involved a series of projects that have placed me increasingly inside the world of professionalized technology production, from the particular point of view of research and development. A recurring question for me as a participant in discussions on design in these contexts is "Who is doing what to whom here?" Within prevailing discourses anonymous and unlocatable designers, with a license afforded by their professional training, problematise the world in such a way as to make themselves indispensable to it and then discuss their obligation to intervene, in order to deliver technological solutions to equally decontextualized and consequently unlocatable "users." This stance of design from nowhere is closely tied to the goal of construing technical systems as commodities that can be stabilized and cut loose from the sites of their production long enough to be exported en masse to the sites of their use. As Mike Hales observes, "[i]n a sense, the very purpose of commodity markets is to secure objective economic connection with a minimum of cultural (communicative) connection" Hales, Mike (1994) Where are Designers? Styles of Design Practice, Objects of Design and Views of Users in CSCW, in D. Rosenberg and C. Hutchison (eds.) Design Issues in CSCW Springer Verlag, pp. 151-177.p. 14).
