Changing Things by Design

ART VS NATURE

Changing Things by Design

The material dimensions of alienability, rivalry, and exclusion cost represent a

“given” or natural infrastructure in which informal institutions evolve, either by

chance or by design, and a set of background conditions against which formal

institutions are formulated and enforced. When those background conditions

change, by chance or by design, the entire significance of social institutions can be

altered. All of which raises the question: if changes in the formal institutions of

society are appropriate targets for political philosophies and theories of justice, why

not also the technological transformation of alienability, rivalry, and exclusion cost?

This is, I take it, a somewhat more focused restatement of a question that has been

asked many times before. Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man suggests that

the failure to subject technical systems to normative scrutiny is both a political and

a philosophical failure. The political failure resides in the increasing power of

capital and commercial interests to dominate all forms of discourse in industrial

society, while the philosophical failure consists in positivist doctrines that created

an epistemological space in which questions about technical efficiency were

regarded as “value free,” (Marcuse, 1966)

For most people involved in the practice of design, Marcuse’s characterization

of technology has seemed to be too metaphysical, too Heideggarian, and simply too

vague to be of much use. Langdon Winner has had more success in calling for critical

evaluation of technology and technical change by describing what he calls “the

technological constitution of society.” This is a material and organizational

infrastructure that predisposes a society toward particular forms of life and patterns

of political response. Winner illustrates his idea with a number of examples,

notably technological systems such as irrigation systems or electric power grids

that dispose societies toward centrally administered, hierarchical relationships of

political power (Winner, 1986). We should notice that what accounts for such tendencies

is the way that these systems affect the alien ability, rivalry, and exclusion

cost of the respective goods, water, and energy, that they produce and distribute