Designing Technology, Work, Organizations and Vice Versa

" [...] the product of competent scholarship [...] an original approach and a smooth way of presenting a difficult argument on a topic at the frontier of several disciplinary interests."

Silvia Gherardi, University of Trento

" This edited collection of ethnographic essays uses the theme of design to explore how technologies, work, and organizations interact with each other. Taking the post-humanistic shift seriously, the essays attempt to show what happens when in technologically dense environments we remove the human from the center of the design process and focus instead upon the materials, practices, technologies and organizations with which designers and design teams interact. The result is a fascinating process of configuration and reconfiguration which provides a fractal gaze into the minutiae of practices, work routines, and organizations which are constantly entangled with each other.

The case studies, as one might expect, are wonderfully diverse including studies of hospitals, Italian furniture design, science museums, and the practices involved in designing a new video game. This work is theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich and will appeal to scholars in Science and Technology Studies and Organizational Studies and all those interested in work practices and design."

Trevor Pinch, Goldwin Smith Professor of Science & Technology Studies, Cornell University