ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Sciences of the Artificial: Modern Science and Design Expertise

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

When Herbert Simon outlined ‘the sciences of the artificial’ in a lecture series in 1968, he did so in order to name a powerful new ambition: to create a science “concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent, not with how things are but with how they might be – in short, with design.” He reckoned that as humans increasingly encountered the world as something made rather than found, or as artificial rather than natural, so did that work of making demand scientific attention – and in turn, the guiding hand of scientific expertise.

This panel aims to provide various historical perspectives on that ambition to assert scientific authority over design. It takes Simon’s claim that the ‘sciences of the artificial’ formed as a coherent unity over the twentieth century as its starting point: if Simon is correct, how should we tell that story? How did adaptive or creative practice in general become topics of scientific study, specifically via the categories of ‘artifice’ and ‘design’? We seek papers that help to tell that story, and in doing so to situate the definition and consolidation of design expertise in relation to twentieth century science more broadly.

Those large-scale questions about the sciences of the artificial provoke others in turn. What forms of making or creative practice did these sciences ignore or occlude? Is there a fuller history of design expertise, contrary to Simon’s account, driven either ‘from below’ or from beyond the elite scientific institutions of Europe or the United States? What kinds of design expertise did scientists legitimize and which did they not? What forms of scientific authority did makers or designers invoke? In what contexts did scientific forms of design expertise succeed or fail to assert authority, and why?

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Henry Schmidt

Commentator

• Massimo Mazzotti, UC Berkeley

Individual Presentations

• Plastic Design Expertise: The Filament Wound House and Cold War Politics of Housing and Development - Daniela Diaz Blancarte, Harvard University

• Making Problem Situations: from Psychology to Design - Henry Schmidt

• Designing the Ocean for Theme Parks and Laboratories - Kristine Ericson, USC