1. ENGR101/HUM 200 Technology and Society
October 4, 2005

2. Agenda What is an engineer? What impact do engineers have on society?
Technology and society or engineering and society?
Politics of artifacts

3. What is an Engineer?

4. Who is an Engineer?

5. An Engineer is… Someone who does research
Someone who develops a functional prototype process, structure, or device
Someone who designs a working process, structure, or device based on real world constraints
Someone who establishes production and testing facilities for mass production
About half of you here think you want to be engineers. The other half, well, you may not have even considered the possibility of being an engineer. But for both groups of people, how well do you actually know what is an engineer?
(research: perceptiveness, cleverness, patience, self-confidence)
(development: use existing knowledge and new discovers from research to build and test scale models(Design engineer: have to know the current state of the field and the object) (Production and test: have to be able to visualize overall process)

7. Engineers also…
Work as construction engineers (counterpart to production engineer)
Work as facilities/operations engineers
Find or create a market for a product (sales engineering)
Work in management, consulting, teaching

9. Impact of Engineering
From who does the engineering, and what kind of tasks they do, to what kind of influence do they have…
Just talked a little bit about who does the engineering. Now, what is it they actually do?

10. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”
How is the “goodness” of a technology measured?
Contributions to efficiency and productivity
And also…
Positive and negative environmental side effects
Really just another measure of “cost”
Manner in which they facilitate or re-establish certain power structures
When is stuff more than just stuff?
First line of article” In controversies about technology and sopciety, there is no idea more provitactive than the notion that technical things have political qualities

11. “It’s not the technology; it’s how it’s used”
A “thing” can’t have politics
Technology is neither inherently good nor bad
People have politics, and people use the technology to achieve certain ends
The social or economic system in which the technology exists is more important
Fair enough in that we need to look beyond the social impact of a technology. We also need to look beginf techniucal things to see the social circumstances of their development, deployment, and use.

12. Corrective to Technological Determinism
Technologies are shaped by social forces
Technologies are shaped by economic forces
But, do technological things matter in and of themselves??

13. Artifacts Can Have Political Properties
First:
Invention, design, or arrangement is a way of settling an issue in a community
Second:
Inherently political technologies that are created to reinforce specific political relationship

14. Inventions as Extension of Social Order
Example: Overpasses on the Long Island parkways
Over 200 of them
As little as nine feet of clearance
Built to discourage the presence of buses on the parkways
Buses are public transportation: class issues
Builder (Robert Moses) also blocked extension of the LIR
Jones Beach access

15. Bridges then…

16. And now.

17. The Hutchinson Parkway

18. Example: Broad boulevards of Paris.
Built by Napolean
Prevent street fighting
Example: UT Austin student union public space
Example: Soviet architecture.
Large plazas
Broad boulevards
Huge scale of blocks, government buildings
Soviet: non user friendly. Awe inspiring. Larger than life scale. Literally. unapproachable

19. Inherently Political Technologies
Technologies that require specific social infrastructure to be effective (or even to work)
Technologies that are “highly compatible with” certain social infrastructures
(Social infrastructure vs. physical infrastructure?)
Wat do I mean by social infrastructure?

20. How Do We Measure “Good?” Or “Better?”
Economic costs and benefits:
jobs created, income generated, etc.
Environmental impacts
pollutants distributed, cancers created
Risks to public health and safety
exposure to natural disaster impact, “unsafe at any speed”
“Consequences for the form and quality of human associations”

21. Myth of Efficiency as Motivator
Innovation has many “muses”
McCormick factory example. Inferior quality at higher cost. Why did the factory owner take this path?
Not all designing for social uses is intentional
Not all intentional: activists for the disabled

22. Massive Change
“It’s not about the world of design, it’s about the design of the world”
Consciously or not, deliveraltely or inadvertenyl, societies coose structures for technologies that influence ho people are going to work, communicate, travel, consuem and so forth over a long time

23. Choices are Made, or, We Make Choices
Importance of introductory stages of a technology
Every decision is based on assumptions -- often unexamined assumptions
Centralized vs. decentralized technologies

24. Next class Read “The Machine Stops” Read The Diamond Age
Introduction of Design Assignment