Christine Miller

In this chapter, we trace the emergenceEmergence of modern designDesign starting with the German Bauhaus movementBauhaus movement and then to influential design thought leaders. Some of these individuals were trained as professional designers, while others come from various disciplines that suggest the contours and characteristics of design as it leaned toward becoming an interdisciplinary field, moving away from its traditional object orientation, and opened to consider the realms of experimentation and speculative imagination. We see how designers began to exhibit agency especially when not in the service of industry and commercial interests. Finally, we explore the concept of convivialityConviviality and the potential for design to lead in envisioning and enacting an approach toward technology that moves away from the tight couplingTight coupling (which we discuss in Chap. 12) and control that contributes to technological hegemonyTechnological hegemony.

It is the thesis of this chapter, building on what we have observed regarding the characterCharacter of technology, that this increasing vulnerability is not an unfortunate by-product, but rather inherent in the character of a technological society in which attachment and devotion to the machine has replaced attachment and devotion to living, breathing fellow citizens and life in general. The brittleness of the technological society, which many have noticed but not yet factored into its costs and benefits—its externalitiesExternalities—is an institutional choice, obscured by the short-term thinking of contemporary society, specifically in the West. We suggest the common technological thread of all of this is a tight couplingTight coupling, situations where components in a system are highly dependent on each other. Facebook’sFacebookalgorithms Algorithms do not give the user “here’s another viewpoint to consider.” Rather, the algorithms are tuned to elicit arousal, the strongest, usually negative reaction. We know how to create systems that are more reliable and less brittle yet have chosen as a matter of policy and commercial expedience to live in a more brittle vulnerable world.

EmpiresEmpires—national, corporate, and the technological empiresTechnological empires that are built on large-scale technological systemsLarge-scale technological systems—are the topic of this chapter. We describe the relationship between imperial domination and decadence, the decay of ideals of humanity’s salvation into profit opportunities. As large-scale technologies become dominant beginning in the nineteenth century with railways, and now in the twenty-first century embracing numerous systems including online platforms and social mediaSocial media, colonial domination and decadence increasingly becomes ubiquitous and taken for granted. We draw attention of the performative aspect to empiresEmpiresas institutionsInstitutions, whether in the bread and circuses of the Romans or the strutting of Elon Musk. Emperors understand at some level that they have to razzle-dazzle and delight their subjects, and staging this razzle-dazzle is part of their power. Perhaps the ultimate technological performance today isCryptocurrency “cryptocurrency,” the “mining” of virtual tokens of value and units of account through blockchain, a set of complex calculations requiring immense computing power, a technology that took off in the second decade of the twenty-first century. CryptocurrencyCryptocurrency likewise is about razzle-dazzle more than true economic values.

This chapter examinesTotemismtechno-totemismTechnototemism and other aspects of the ways in which modern society define their identityIdentity around technologies. Techno-totemismTechnototemism is the definition not only of one’s identity but of a society’s entire cosmological outlook in terms of technological objects. CosmologyCosmology, a vision of order in the universe, is an integral part of identityIdentity, of who we are, how we connect with our neighbors and kin. CosmologyCosmology unites the social and the natural, the temporal and the eternal, into a singular verity. In America, the perfect example of totemic objects is the car, yet many other examples (guns, computers, smartphones, airplanes, boats) can be found as well. Automobiles not only define who we are, but the entire structure of our lives and the built environment. After establishing the importance of identityIdentity and its relationship to technology, we turn to the narratives that tell the stories about who we are, but also who we are not.

In this chapter, we examine technology from a designDesign perspective, noting how the aesthetic dimensions of technology, notably modernismModernism, figure into popular understandings of technology described the in previous chapters. For most of history, designers and artists occupied separate social and semantic spaces from rude mechanicals and other artisans. With the advent of modernismModernism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, designDesign became a critical element of technology and a critical instrument in shaping society and its built environment. The purpose of this chapter is to sketch the contours of designDesign from a perspective that is beyond technological hegemonyTechnological hegemony in which technology is not perceived as the best and final answer to every need or problem. This perspective takes a critical and nuanced view of technological hegemony and the role of technology in twenty-first century societies. DesignDesign is increasingly questioning established assumptions and beliefs and emphasizing the need for broader societal considerations in the designDesign and deployment of new technologies.

Our aim in this chapter is to examine the relationship between technology and economic values, focusing on the “productivityProductivityparadoxProductivity paradoxProductivity,” the undisputed fact that many “labor-saving” technologies create more work, at least for the women of the society. The “productivity paradoxProductivity paradox” results from a focus on private goods at the expense of public goods and common pool resources, which has been the focus of liberal economics for the past three centuries. By considering other types of values, including both sociability and transcendence, the value added by technology becomes more subtle.

In this chapter, we develop a narrative account of technology, building on techno-celebrants such as Lewis MumfordMumford, Lewis, techno-skeptics such as Jacques EllulEllul, Jacques, and critical technology theory from Martin HeideggerHeidegger, Martin, Jurgen HabermasHabermas, Jurgen, and Andrew FeenbergFeenberg, Andrew. It points up the fundamentally irrational attachment to technology that is resolved by seeing technology as a symbolic, rather than a rational construction. We examine the common core of these narratives or myths, to determine what they reveal regarding the characterCharacter of technology in contemporary life. This character, sometimes noble, sometimes villainous, shapes contemporary life in the technological societyEllul, the technological society no less than the institutionsInstitutions of government or religion. Narratives, we argue, are no less important than mechanisms for determining that shape of the technological society.

In this chapter, we establish the boundaries of an engineering approach to technology, considering technology from an engineering perspective and stressing the importance of standardsStandards and other forms of autonomous representationsAutonomous representattions for defining technology. We explain autonomous representationsAutonomous representattions as descriptions of the technology that are independent of the actual tool or object or implement yet are at the core of technology as it is understood by engineers. Finally, we examine how the leading authorities of the technological society, the engineers, have carved out a distinctive role in contemporary society. This role or authoritative voice shapes many of our expectations in the technological and post-technological society.

In this chapter, we seek to unpack the multiple social, physical, and conceptual elements that in the eighteenth and nineteen centuries were assembled to constitute technology as we understand it today. Far from being a natural evolution, “technology” burst forth on the world stage as a deliberate construction of a physical, social, and institutional edifice. The institutional foundations of technology we suggest are no less important than its material or cybernetic foundations. Unpacking the meaning of “technology” in terms of its multiple physical, social, and institutional facets is the objective of this chapter.

In this chapter, we examine the cultural roots of our love affair with technology. Drawing on Marshall Berman’sBerman, Marshall insights in All that is Solid Melts into Air (1988), we examine the close relationships among technology, modernity, and modernismModernism. Technology, we suggest, is as much about images as it is about functionality, and the chief image or style associated with technology is modernismModernism, an artistic movement that came into being only in the early twentieth century. The “MetaverseMetaverse”—Facebook’s construction of its new virtual reality—is the perfect representation of this love affair with technology.

In this chapter, we examine how a new society can be constructed beyond the technological hegemonyTechnological hegemony that we have lived with for nearly a century. We examine how the breakdown of society in terms of trust and shared narratives (such as science) and the rise of vulnerability, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguityVUCA (vulnerability, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity potentially lead to a societal collapse. The emergenceEmergence of Artificial IntelligenceArtificial Intelligence and rising questioning of technological hegemonyTechnological hegemony, as exemplified by the journalism of Kara SwisherSwisher, Kara, understanding the context of technology is no less important than understanding the devices themselves. The choices that we make with regard to our technological objects are no less important than the form and function of the objects themselves.

In this book, we interrogate that imagination and the ways we have built the imagination of technology into the world around ourselves. This book represents an ethnographic expedition in search of the core idea, perhaps the key symbol, that permits us to designate such diverse objects as video games, X-ray machines, thermonuclear weapons, space probes, electric power grids, and monumental architecture with the common denominator of “technology.” We explore and critique the near-universal faith in “progressProgress” that derives from modernist assumptions and thereby afford these objects with a common set of attitudes and a belief that they represent progress. These attitudes include respect for their usefulness, awe at their great powers, mystery in their functionality for most of the population, and certainly an expectation that these devices will make our lives more comfortable, more secure, more enjoyable, and more fulfilled. When our devices fall short of these expectations, it simply means that we must redouble our efforts: improve the design, install a more powerful microprocessor, write some new lines of code, or fine-tune the “human factor.”

In this chapter, we examine the engineering accomplishments of Western society before the concept of “technology” appeared. These accomplishments, some quite impressive and enduring even today, suggest a historical specificity for “technology,” an invented concept from the nineteenth century as more than simply an aggregation of tools and instrumentalities. We posit that technologies always exist in an institutional context, just as the concept of “technology” exists in a specific historical context. As obvious as this is, many efforts to deny or at least ignore the institutional context of technologies abound. We show that the building blocks of technology, like the bricks and beams in the construction of a cathedral, were all present at the outset of the Industrial RevolutionIndustrial revolution making possible the assembly of the edifice that we now label as technology, a word that was only coined in the seventeenth century.

In this chapter, we trace the evolution (or, perhaps, devolution) of citizenshipCitizenship in society under the deployment of increasingly sophisticated technology, examining how the material abundance offered by the Industrial RevolutionIndustrial revolution made greater demands on the population to fulfill their obligations as consumers and eventually “users,” a concept that reached an inflection point at the beginning of the cybernetic revolution in the 1960s, to sustain the industrial society. The interaction of the pragmatic order, now dictated by advanced technologies, with the civil order as codified on the statute books, is our primary theme. With the coming of post-industrial society, as traced by Daniel Bell in 1973, “human capitalHuman capital” eclipsed finance capital as the engine of prosperity, and “intellectual technology” came to the fore as the guiding force. Today, in the society dominated by technology, attention and “eyeballs” are the new circulation, and the algorithms of attention, whether on FacebookFacebook(Meta), TwitterTwitter (XXTwitter), Google (Alphabet), or Amazon, are now in the saddle. Social capitalSocial capital—the investments people have in their relationships, both actual and artificial—is now a major driver of the economy.

Student researchers encounter ethical issues daily, but little is known about their unique perspectives. This article presents the results of 30 qualitative semi-structured interviews exploring students’ views and experiences around ethical issues in research groups. During the interviews, students were asked to describe challenges and successes they have encountered in their lab, their conception of what counts as an “ethical issue in research,” and how they handle these issues when they arise. Against this background, the article discusses students’ conceptions of ethical issues in research environments, the types of issues students reported facing, how these issues were ultimately resolved, and finally, the factors, internal qualities, and lessons learned that help students thrive in research environments, as well as some of the challenges students face – especially international students. Many of the ethical challenges interviewees discussed focused on interpersonal issues, highlighting the intense collaboration most graduate students have with their colleagues and supervisors. Findings from this study point to the need for targeted training programs for students and faculty supervisors focusing on building mentoring relationships and finding space in the lab where open communication can occur around ethical research practices.

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields are central to any educational system. The term started with the National Science Foundation as “SMET” and was changed to STEM at a later date due to phonetic reasons. The term was not widely used until Virginia Tech University began offering a “STEM education” degree in 2005 (Friedman 2005). The term STEM covers a broad spectrum of different disciplines. While, in general, STEM is used as an umbrella term for the natural sciences, engineering, mathematics, and technology-related fields, there are some variations in its usage. For example, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) characterizes STEM as including chemistry, computers and information technology, engineering, geoscience, life sciences, mathematical sciences, physics and astronomy, psychology, social sciences, educational research, and STEM education (Gonzalez and Kuezi 2012). Whereas this approach considers the social sciences to be of central importance to STEM and the STEM workforce (Spalter-Roth 2004), in the United Kingdom, STEM is seen to include fields such as medicine, dentistry, and architecture but exclude the social sciences and education (United Kingdom, House of Lords, Science, and Technology, Committee 2012).

This chapter describes the development of a workshop series focused on helping students develop research lab ethics guidelines. The workshop was developed through a National Science Foundation-funded project that situates ethics education within the research environment. Students in four departments at a private research university were recruited to join a Student Ethics Committee that collaboratively developed context-specific codes-of-ethics-based guidelines for their departments. These bottom-up developed guidelines were revised in an iterative process, including feedback from faculty, other graduate students, and the original Student Ethics Committee. The goal of the workshops was to promote the cultivation of an ethical culture in experimental laboratories by integrating research stakeholders in a bottom-up approach to developing context-specific guidelines and to identify factors that students consider relevant to the ethical conduct of research. After describing the workshop series, this chapter presents a qualitative content analysis of the guidelines. The guidelines developed by the Student Ethics Committees reflect the current culture of experimental labs in these departments and the ethical issues that students think are important. The content of these guidelines and the ethical issues the students focused on contrast in some key ways with what ethical issues faculty who head research groups saw as paramount. The chapter describes the first two iterations of the ethics education workshop module, a qualitative analysis of the first draft of these guidelines, and finally reflects on future work in this area of in situ ethics education.

This book shares innovative approaches to effectively engage students and faculty working in research labs, lab-based classrooms and courses to build inclusive ethical cultures. The frameworks and approaches presented move beyond traditional research ethics training to strengthen the ethical culture in research labs. The chapters in the book showcase best practices and approaches to embedding educational interventions in courses, research labs and departments. The book is based on the two-day workshop “Building Inclusive Ethical Cultures in STEM” (April 23-24, 2021). Moving beyond the two-day conference that inspired this collected volume, the various chapters address questions like: What are approaches and tools to integrate ethics education in STEM effectively? How can STEM ethics education be improved? What can researchers do to build more inclusive research environments? How can meaningful discussions about ethics be effectively integrated into STEM courses, research labs, and workplace environments? While each chapter takes a different perspective and is located in its respective context, the contributions are united by the goal of effectively including ethical reflection in STEM education. Instructors from both four-year and two-year colleges who teach STEM and lab-based STEM courses; young principal investigators/junior faculty who are in the process of building their research groups; departmental chairs interested in programmatic approaches for improving mentoring, research ethics education, and the research culture of their department, will find this work to be a very valuable resource in their daily practice.

:In this article, we present an educational intervention that embeds ethics education within research laboratories. This structure is designed to assist students in addressing ethical challenges in a more informed way, and to improve the overall ethical culture of research environments. The project seeks to identify factors that students and researchers consider relevant to ethical conduct in science, technology, engineering, and math and to promote the cultivation of an ethical culture in experimental laboratories by integrating research stakeholders in a bottom-up approach to developing context-specific, ethics-based guidelines. An important assumption behind this approach is that direct involvement in the process of developing laboratory specific ethical guidelines will positively influence researchers’ understanding of ethical research and practice issues, their handling of these issues, and the promotion of an ethical culture in the respective laboratory. The active involvement may increase the sense of ownership and integration of further discussion on these important topics. Based on the project experiences, the project team seeks to develop a module involving the bottom-up building of codes-of-ethics-based guidelines that can be used by a broad range of institutions and that will be distributed widely.

A close scrutiny of a European Community directive on habitats and of the statutory instrument by which it is implemented in Britain reveals small but nevertheless significant concessions towards an ecocentric approach. Planning law now allows interference in the habitats of protected species only when human interests are demonstrably overriding. Recent decisions of the European Court of Justice have given a very restrictive interpretation of the circumstances in which such interference may be permitted. The implications for further ecocentric influence in environmental law are discussed