Bugs and Future Usage – Design As Twofold Problem

My ethnographic field is a design laboratory in which young German designers develop wearable textile-electronic interfaces. It can be observed here that the characteristics of the design-work are quite different compared to the work of scientists, as for example Karin Knorr Cetina or Harry Collins have put it. In short, two types of practices can be found in the field of design: Designers talk about the use and the benefits of their conceptualized design objects systematically in meetings and informally on various other occasions. They ask themselves, what their design object is it good for and who will use it and when. In a less abstract level of their work, the designers are very concerned to create a functioning prototype. They have to arrange every material detail and technical problem of the prototype, as with the interfaces stitching, wiring, programming, de-bugging etc.

According to Bruno Latour, objects are an indivisible compound of contextual meanings and materiality. My data shows that the designers work on both sides of this notion of object: They have to design both, an object's meaning and material function. These two different kinds of goals require two different types of work practices. It shows that these practices interfere heavily with one another, although they are very different in character. Whereas the work on meaning and utility is anticipatory and therefore never concluded, functional and material problems pop up in the present progression of a designer’s work and have to be solved or circumvented to keep the work process going.

For analyzing the creation of new technology, it is crucial to observe the designer’s anticipation of utility over the whole process. They may vary in substance and become less obvious for the ethnographer, but basically the interplay of anticipation and construction constitutes the outcome of a design process.