Project description

• Introduction
• Questions
• Theories and concepts
• Missing links
• Our framework: "User de-signs"
• "User de-signs" sources

Introduction

In modern consumer society the success or failure of a technical artefact is often less determined by its technical properties, measured in e.g. horsepower, kW, MHz etc., than by what one could call "soft facts of engineering". "Soft facts" are frequently sublimated and rarely reflected upon, primarily because they are embedded in the "self-evident" cultural assumptions of designers, before they eventually seep into the design of the technical product. "Soft facts" can be defined as representations of a potential user and her/his wants which are then encoded in the development, marketing and actual use of a particular technology. For example: how does one explain why American washing machines were, and still are, designed to wash at low temperatures, using aggressive chemical detergents, whereas German ones reach boiling temperatures? Thus, from the perspective of the "construction of users", the "Designing the User" project attempts to bridge the gap between the spheres of production and consumption, thereby elucidating their interrelations.

In the course of the last century, because of the increasingly scientific character of technology and the subtle differentiation within the consumption offer, an ever widening cultural divide has grown between engineers in the development departments of industry, and users, immersed in the concerns of everyday life. This divide has therefore contributed to considerable difficulties of "translation" or more generally communication between these two "camps". Looking back on the consumption of technical artefacts as a historian, it appears obvious that the anticipated use of a technology often did not correspond to its actual use, just as user profiles or representations rarely reflected actual users.

During the first phase of the project, we attempted to grasp and describe the various dimensions of this "user construction" and the mediation between these dimensions. These dimensions first range from the user images that lurk in the psyche of product developers to those peddled by the instructions for use or technical manuals, both types of representation being promoted by means of appliance descriptions and publicity. The field of marketing, basing its expertise on aggregated data, then seeks to create an optimal user. Further down the line, we find the various "arts of using" (1) suggested to the consumer by material properties or restrictions. Various semiotic identities (2), which constrain the range of acceptable usages in the collective unconscious, are also encrypted in the products themselves, as well as in the technical discourse about them. Alongside the prospective, constructed user, but on the other side of the mirror so to speak, stands the actual user, who may follow the instructions for use, but may also determinedly experiment with his own "arts of using" sometimes going as far as elaborating subversive uses or re-enacting himself as a "co-producer" of technology. Characteristically, from the consumer perspective, the consumption of technology is often not so much driven by efficiency imperatives as by users' impulses to shape their identity, to organise their lives, to support or subvert their cultural norms.

Our project thus focuses on the "soft facts" in the history of technology: the identities, behaviours and impacts of users behind the figures of success and failure in 20ieth century technology. Breaking away from the dominant angle of production, we examine technical consumption from the perspective of users and usage and have elaborated a theoretical framework entitled "designing the user". It provides a stimulating grid to analyse our two empirical cases: Gwen Bingle concentrates on the technologies linked to the fitness and wellness ideologies, whereas Heike Weber focuses on portable consumer electronics.

(1) or "arts de faire" [= arts of practice] as de Certeau described them.

(2) whether coherent or contradictory, static or dynamic, but almost always endowed with a strong potential for "environmental recombination": new hybrid semiotic identities are created by the confrontation between various artifacts and "systems of commodities", creating new "ecologies of goods" (for the concept of "ecology of goods" see: Pantzar, Mika, "Domestication of Everyday Life Technology: Dynamic Views on the Social Histories of Artifacts." Design Issues, 13, 1997, p. 52-65).

Questions

Building on these considerations, several questions ensue regarding the consumption of technology:

• How do users define themselves and how are they construed/constructed?
  
• Are the users of a given technology those that were originally intended by the designers/producers? Do users behave according to plan? If not, what (occult) instructions/manuals/agendas do they follow then?
• What are the channels that enable the conscious shaping of technology in the 20ieth century? Who controls them? How different is users' and producers' perception of "successful" and "failed" technology?
  
• How does the process of "semiotic attribution" work within the realm of technology, i.e. how is meaning ascribed? What are the main forces behind it? Users? Producers? Advertising?
  
  

These interrogations are, in turn, connected to the larger field of consumption:

• How has consumers' margin of creative/interpretative flexibility evolved? Particularly, in terms of inventiveness or resourcefulness, (co-) creation or DIY, expertise or know-how, appropriation or adaptation, subversion or rejection?
  
  

Theories and concepts

Given the particular position of consumption, at the crossroads between history, economics, sociology, anthropology, etc., the inspiration to help us answer these questions includes concepts/theories from a number of fields:

In a sense, professional marketing researchers seem to have anticipated the role of "soft facts of engineering" because they no longer refer to the fulfilling of consumers' economic needs but to the satisfaction of their wants. They have already come to terms with the fact that production and consumption follow different agendas, and that mediation between the two spheres is required. Recent research on everyday technology - especially on household technology - has also emphasised the role of these "mediators". Historical examples of mediation abound and range from the "electrical woman", demonstrating the latest household gadgets, or the technical fair salesman, to advertising or popular technical journals. These two last fields, advertising and scientific popularising media, have expanded dramatically in the course of the 20ieth century but seem to follow two different trajectories. Whereas popular media attempt to bridge the ever-widening gap between the increasingly scientific character of technological innovations and lay-users by simplifying technical features, the advertising field paradoxically seems to chiefly appeal to culturally or emotionally embedded motivations by creating new technical mythologies. Studying marketing literature and analysing advertisements and popular technical journals provides us with some clues to answer our questions.

During the mediation processes, technical artefacts are encoded with meanings. The semiotics of technology remains a very fragmentarily studied field, but a very promising one too, as one can see from the deep insights drawn from studies that concentrate on the active gendering of a technology (e.g. Ruth Oldenziel, Cynthia Cockburn, Susan Ormrod).

Material Culture can also teach us a lot about the function and usage of artefacts and reminds us not to overlook the actual objects and their materiality when talking about consumption. Focusing on the dimension of the "prospective user", sociological and historical studies on the process of innovation demonstrate how certain user representations on the production side influence the way in which objects are designed and marketed. These "soft facts of engineering" together with marketing research and usability trials, while providing knowledge about potential consumers, then merge into a particular construction of the user.

Additionally, the following concepts/theories have helped us to elaborate a general reflection on the function of consumption from the user perspective:

Jean Baudrillard developed the notion of "consumptivity", a process in its own right, distinct from consumption envisaged simply as the necessary pre-condition and counterpart of production. Ruth Schwartz Cowan introduced the "consumption junction", a consumer-focused analysis, in the history of technology. This theory suggests a network concept to study the diffusion of technologies and focuses on the web of social relations at a certain point in time and space, within which the consumer makes his choice. Other authors we refer to include Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood who pioneered in defining consumption as a nonverbal medium and goods as part of a cultural information system. More recently, Helene Karmasin has extended this theory in her writings on the semiotic dimension of food and consumption in general, evolving a hermeneutics of goods as "messages". A more embodied perception of consumption includes Michel de Certeau's "subversive user", who draws our attention to unpredictable individual practices by which the user of a technology subverts the instructions that the designer originally devised, thus effecting a personal re-appropriation of technology. Whereas de Certeau's user acts as a creative and cunning individual, confronting the producers long-term strategies with his spur-of-the-moment tactics, Bourdieu argues for practices structured by the "habitus", which itself is determined by the class structure and history of a society. The "habitus" consists of a system of dispositions, which in turn generate users' practices and values. Finally, in a number of contemporary theories, we have found the vision of the "co-producer" or "co-sumer", meaning the consumer as an active user and modifier, particularly stimulating.

Missing links

The following points suggest what (in our opinion) are some of the missing links in the theory of consumption:

• examples and analyses of users' (auto)biographies, i.e. the usage of technological artefacts/services over time as it interacts with the evolution of a particular subjectivity within a distinctive but changing cultural context
  
• "affordances" (cf. Gibson) of an object: limitations linked to the physical properties of the object and its users
• semiotics: the ascribing of meaning to a technology
  
• users as co-producers

Our framework: "User de-signs"

This framework promises the following benefits: Firstly, it focuses on the users by analysing user practices and the representations and constructions of users in the development of 20th century technology. Secondly, it includes the mediation between producers and consumers as well as between anticipated and actual use. Hence, it allows to bridge the gap between consumption and production and their histories. Thirdly, it emphasises the "soft facts of engineering" and the social, cultural and emotional dimensions of consumption in the history of technology.

The term "user de-sign" designates both the user configurations that are rooted in the producers' sphere and prospective user images, and those user designs that are contributed by the users themselves:

On the one hand, under "configuration of users", we subsume the visions around the use dimensions of a technology on the producers' side, be it conscious ones, resulting from market research or usability trials and the like, or unconscious ones, mainly resulting from the general cultural assumptions of engineers and designers, e.g. the reasoning along gender lines that still is rarely reflected upon. These images and assumptions then condense into concrete prospective user representations such as those shown in advertising, manuals, and other materials accompanying the technical product on the market which explain or demonstrate how to use it. They also materialize in the design of the artefact in the form of the chosen material properties or restrictions.

On the other hand, "user de-signs" are produced in the users' sphere through actual use. The actual use, ranging from non-use to any kind of subversive use, may not correspond to the use that producers had initially envisioned. The dash in the term "user de-signs" stresses the fact that users always have the potential to deconstruct the meanings previously encoded in or ascribed to a technology, thereby creating individualised new meanings or practices, which in turn serve to shape their identities, to organise their lives, to support or subvert their cultural norms, etc.

Through mediating agents (e.g. retailers, consumer organisations) these different "user de-signs" are exchanged, disseminated and negotiated between producers and users. In this process then, technology is shaped by users, producers and mediators as dynamic agents.

"User de-signs" sources

The obvious snag in the User De-sign approach is the difficulty of finding appropriate sources, a topic that we have already intensively discussed with our network colleagues. It was suggested that avenues such as novels, poetry and film have seldom been explored within the historical realm. These sources can be added to contemporary correspondence, magazine and newspaper readers' letters, diaries and autobiographies, as long as the latter are relatively contemporary with the events discussed. However, the ideological danger here is -as in the use of oral history sources- that users, when recalling their past use of a technology, are systematically engaged in an act of memory reconstruction. Some aspects of their practices are thus neglected, others emphasised, while others still are completely transformed or invented. Moreover, whilst being aware of phenomena such as anticipation, idealisation of technology and publicity imperatives, serials or soap operas can also potentially provide interesting vistas on the cultural perceptions and appropriation of technology in a particular context. Finally, objects themselves can be used as historical sources. They tell us something about the technology that produced and shaped them, they also provide us with information about their function and display user traces that point to their user(s)/use. Furthermore, objects at least hint to symbolic aspects that have to be correlated with the above-mentioned sources.

"Siemens Sportmotor", 1933