Orange Unit: A Person-Centered Launch
3A: The Unknown Tech Innovators
Background Knowledge Probe
- Draw a picture of an innovation in the process of being innovated.
- Looking at your completed drawing, consider the following:
- Describe the innovation in your drawing. What might be its uses? What might be its impact once it is released to the target population?
- Who is doing the innovation? Why? For what goal(s)?
Who Shapes Technology?
“A Critical Social + Technical Perspective” and associated essential resources highlighted ways technologies are a seamless, indivisible combination of social and technical components that are co-created by everyday users. But as Wajcman notes, those things white, male, and middle- and upper-class innovators primarily focus on creating are specific “male machines” rather than broader, everyday life technologies.[1] When workshop and class participants are asked to draw a picture of “an innovator innovating,” many draw individual white men innovating the modern digital technology machine. This tendency towards drawing innovations and their innovators in this way is a representation of the current dominant narrative in much of U.S. culture.
We also considered how once developed and made available for broader use by people, technologies do not remain static, but rather are adapted and co-created to fit within ever-changing contexts.[2] The co-creation happens when uses of technology are done in ways that amplify our individual and group actions in the world.[3] While this mutual shaping of technologies is ongoing, we often think of the digital technology product itself in the more static conceptualization. As such, often in these drawings of an innovator innovating, it’s a certain subgroup of initial innovators, and does not include in the drawing the intermediary and everyday co-creators of a digital technology. Nor do we include in the drawing those who are shaping the innovation and design as part of the engineering, coding, marketing and distribution, and other stages of the product’s life cycle.
Take a moment to review your picture of an innovation in the process of being innovated, and reflect on your considerations of the questions above. In what ways might your readings and works so far in the book have influenced your response to the Background Knowledge Probe?
Broadening our Understanding of Creating
Today’s Maker movements often emphasize a broader set of activities in the process of making something. While some of these spaces emphasize specific digital technologies, many others view this more broadly as craft-making. As Bruce Sinclair notes:
Since the nineteenth century, engineering in this country has depended on a published literature and on advanced formal instruction that has included physics and mathematics. Craft skill depends on a different kind of knowledge, most of it unwritten and learned on the job. Apprenticeship—whether institutionalized or not—rests on emulation and repetitive practice in