Unintended consequences and the politics of urgency
Joost writes in Risk and Technological Culture that “modern technoscience needs risks to legitimize its claim to scarce resources to speed up its capacity for interventions and to respond more quickly to emergent risks.” But the “politics of urgency…inhibits reflection and reconsideration, and as a result ultimately contributes to the proliferation of uncertainties, latent contingencies and thus risks.”
I remembered this when I was thinking about the “unintended consequences” of new technologies. Every designer I know is quick to cite the unexpected and unintended ways people use their designs. It can simultaneously be a humble admission in which the designer concedes that she is not the ultimate authority, and a dismissive manoeuvre in which the designer extricates himself from responsibility and accountability. I’ve been told, rather matter-of-factly, that design is simply a risk we have to take. That if we’re lucky, we can turn that risk into opportunity! And, in a staggering move of self-reflexivity, that we can even take on risk itself as a design challenge, because (damn it!) we have to do something before we all die of avian flu.
Sometimes my arguments for slowing things down in design have been met with the equivalent of a pat-on-the-head. If only I wasn’t an academic and could understand the real pressures of working in the real world, they say. So tell me, I say. Well, there are deadlines that need to be met. Sales quotas too. Managers breathing down their necks. Not enough money. Not enough time. And (for some, the worst prospect of all) the longer they have to sit around and talk and reflect on things, the less they actually get to make or do!
As one might imagine, rapid-prototyping methods are highly favoured in these contexts. The ability to test an unfinished product serves to mitigate the substantial risk of product design failure. They allow designers to work iteratively and adaptively with users, and thus also share risks with them. But how much of the pro-am revolution is also a way for technology companies and media producers to avoid certain risks entirely? And what new risks emerge from these relationships?
(Illustration by Toronto’s Blair Kelly)