Randi Markussen

Politics of intervention in design: feminist reflections on the Scandinavian tradition

How are we to understand advanced information technologies at a time where their use is becoming more and more widespread? To address this question, the author analyses the discourse of cooperative design. In doing this she draws on recent feminist thinking and her own experiences from a research project. She discusses the meaning of concepts such as experience, users, computers and politics in this discourse. She particularly stresses alternative ways of understanding the political nature of design and that multiple perspectives, including descriptive and historical ones, are relevant to both developing the technology and to deepening our understanding of the politics of intervention in design.

Rhetorical Authority in STS: Reflections on a Study of IT Implementation at a Hospital Ward

In Denmark as in other European countries, information technologies have become an important political topic in ways that relate to the role of the university in society. The politicization is usually based on the understanding that ‘science and technology shape society’ (Bijker et al., 1993, p. 3), which can be named technological determinism. Technological innovation is considered a driving force in social development, as if technology forms a rational structure, effecting progress and anticipating the future. Further, innovation is often understood as the outcome of a collaborative process between researchers at the university and private firms or public institutions in order to develop new technologies. In this view usefulness is turned into a primarily technological and economic issue. But what might one do, if it is precisely this idea of technology and progress one wants to debate? How can we question dominant images of technology, and find ways of reimagining the techno-scientific world we live in? Under the present circumstances, what are our possibilities for intervening and making a difference? This is a challenge that scholars in science and technology studies (STS) face, in general, and that we, in particular, faced when we carried out an STS study of IT in the health sector some years ago. In this paper we will examine the idea of intervention based on this project. We take as a starting point the notion of rhetorical authority developed by Michael Lynch as it expresses a view on scholarly practices that we find important. We sketch the research environment, and the options that we faced when we arranged the project at the outset. Subsequently we introduce the idea of ‘naturally occurring experiments’ as an appropriate methodological device, which can be contrasted with conventional ideas about scientific method. On this basis we account for the course of our project regarding the introduction of a medication module in an electronic patient record (EPR) at a Danish hospital ward. We focus on various discourses on technology that we identified in our experiments and how they perform technology differently, and on how we happened to make ourselves relevant to people engaged in the work of developing and implementing EPRs. Finally we Science as Culture Vol. 16, No. 3, 267–279, September 2007