Ideas of Impact: Interrogating Innovation as a Value in Design

• In Event: Interrogating Ethics & Values in Technology Design & Engineering Practice

Abstract

From Blaise Pascal to Joseph Licklader, advances in computing have historically been driven by an impetus to reduce the drudgery of routinized work. Contemporary discourse around innovation continues to present new technologies as a way out of repetitive action and a way into the future. These conversations produce value for the intellectual and cognitive workers at the “super-creative core” of technology industries and obscure others. Like the concept of genius, innovation is a historically gendered construct. Women’s participation in technology industries has been under recognized largely because their work has been relegated to the repeatable, “menial” tasks that exist just under the surface of discovery or invention.

In this paper, I probe innovation itself as a value, and ask what it can tell us about the uncertain place of women in technology design. It draws on 2-years of ethnographic field research in an academic “makerspace,” a creative prototyping studio embedded in the university division that manages intellectual property for discoveries made at the university. Here, budding engineers and designers prototype automated systems using automated digital fabrication tools as administrators laud the economic possibility of innovation and its potential to solve social problems. I argue that when innovation guides the imaginaries of designers, educators and administrators, value is reinscribed to practices that reinforce entrenched hierarchies of knowledge. They lose sight of the myriad of work, beyond moments of invention, that constitute a technology’s success. In order to renew the possibilities of inclusive technology design, we must resist the analytic closure of innovation and value a greater diversity of practices.

Author

• Samantha Shorey, University of Washington