Lucy Suchman Department of Sociology, Lancaster University
Tuesday 22 June 2010
Slides from this presentation
This paper explores the question of what new possibilities might be opened through some undoing of prevailing discourses of ‘the new’. More particularly, my focus is on critical engagement with rhetorics of innovation within the context of information technology research and development. I take this to be both a theoretical and an empirical project, involving the analysis of material practices within the research lab and beyond, informed by explorations within science and technology studies of the imaginaries and arrangements that inspire and legitimate the initiatives that those practices enact. This includes understanding the ways in which, as Barry (2001) suggests, a translation of innovation as speed of change might work less to expand the space of possibilities than to hold things in place. The aim of undoing the trope of innovation is not to do away with it, but rather to respecify the 'new' as a strategic category, and as a gloss for more deeply ambivalent and contested forms of ongoing practical activity.
Professor Lucy Suchman came to the Sociology Department and the Centre for Science Studies at Lancaster after twenty years as a researcher at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. Her research has centered on relations of ethnographies of everyday practice to new technology design. Drawing on studies of work, science and technology studies, and feminist theorizing, She has been concerned to recover the specific, culturally and materially embodied identities, knowledges and practices that make up technical systems. This involves, among other things, reconstructing technologies from singular objects located at the center of a surrounding social world, to heterogeneous assemblages of social and material practices. I've explored these reconstructions both through critical studies and through experimental, interdisciplinary and participatory interventions in new technology design. Along with colleagues at Xerox PARC She carried out a series of projects sited in particular workplaces (an airport, a large Silicon Valley law firm, a state department of transportation) that combined ethnographic studies of work and technologies-in-use with the in situ development of new prototype information systems.
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