Meeting 1 Notes

Co-ordinator = Chris Atkinson

PARTICIPANTS

• The topic of this group comes from reflection upon a project that I was undertaken in the Health Service where I tried to use SSM and I find no way to account for technology in the way that SSM account for human acting. On the other hand I found that Information Sciences define human beings as "users" and I thought that it was interesting to find a way to reconcile this different positions in terms of the relation between human beings and technology.
• I have being interested in exploring methodology as an artifact in itself, which human beings enact and shape in their processes.
• On the other hand, we could also see epistemology as a knowledge creating artifact. 
• In this same sense we can see technology as a mode of enframing. Can we see technology as the grand epistemological artifact that is ruling out other possibilities of disclosing reality?
• Let us notice that any artifact and technology in particular is the outcome of a human creation, so we can ask ourselves what was the original purpose of creating technology?
• We can say that they were means to increase our human capabilities and also to act as mediators between the social and natural domains.
• Technology as epistemology is something that control the way we construe the world.
• Actor networks (AN) are a combination of artifacts and humans.
• We can ask how to bring an AN into being? We may do a mapping of the archeology of intersections in a particular situation (as breast cancer) to create new actor networks as problem solvers in response of what they saw as a problematic situation.
• One of the things that we developed as part of this process of looking at breast cancer treatment was a preadmission treatment by changing the roles of nurses to support the preadmission process. That allow us to bring in other actors in the shape of clinical protocols, so a protocol serves as an actor which was brought into the network. 
• We are acknolowledging here human beings and technologies as actors. In AN there is no distinction between human beings and artifacts.
• By considering architecture as the study of the relationships between buildings and their occupiers we can see, over a period of hundred of years, the change of the technology of building in quiet considerable ways in terms of those relationships.
• This close relationship between technology and human being opens up a possibility of the reconfiguration of what it means to be a human subject.
• Information Science is interested to understand what human beings require in order to design a suitable technology for that particular requirements, it is not interested in understanding how to create new actor networks. The latter is the concern of AN theory.

CRITICS

• Is AN really adding something new to the relation between technology and humans or is it just calling the same things with different names? 
• How AN changes the way you actually carry on interventions? How can we improve the conditions in which we are assuming and accepting the restrictions in which we are operating so that the proposition that you are making becomes an avenue for improvement and action rather than a way of complaining about the current situation? 
• I think that technology, people and epistemology operate differently. We do not expect, for instance, that technology operate reflexively.

PARTICIPANTS

• In methodological terms, notice that the actor-network becomes the object of intervention. 
• My discipline is Human Computer Interaction and it is an action-network sort of environment. 
• Yes, but what sort of tools, techniques or approaches you bring to change people at the same time that you develop or change a piece of technology? 
• Well, how can you design human computer systems without influencing the way people work. 
• What is the role of the context in which actor-networks intervene? Can you abstract from the particular level to the general level?
• Well, I am particularly interested in the micro level and I work on this level.
• Systeme is a method that we have used in particular interventions in the Health System. It is a participative approach where participants in an AN take responsibility.