Abstract
Kroes and Van de Poel (Problematizing the notion of social context of technology. In S. H. Christensen, B. Delahousse, & M. Meganck (Eds.), Engineering in context (pp. 61–74). Aarhus: Academica, 2009) maintain that distinguishing between technology and its social (intentional) context is impossible, because social phenomena are definitive (constitutive) for technology. This raises the problem of differentiating between the social processes that are internal (definitive) and those that are external (contextual) to technology. To explore this problem we distinguish instead between the core and the context of design as object and as process, and we apply them to a case study of the design and development of a new technology for sewage water treatment to find out whether these distinctions make sense in real life engineering practice. Despite the in abstracto plausibility of this distinction between core and context, our analysis reveals that its application may turn out to be very problematic in actual engineering practices. The same holds for characterizing particular design features as being the result of either internal (technological) or external (social) factors.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that if the object of design is a process (such as a service) then a use plan may be associated with this process.
- 2.
Note that from this perspective the borderline between objects (or processes) and their contexts is merely a conceptual and not an ontological affair.
- 3.
Of course, the outcome of the two design projects may be such that after all one design is to be preferred above the other. But that is not the point at issue here; here the question is which contextual factors have a definitive or contingent influence on the object of design.
- 4.
Much of the information contained in this section has been collected by one of the authors and colleagues during ethical parallel research on the design and development of this new waste water treatment technology during the period 2004 until 2006 (De Kreuk et al. 2010; Van de Poel and Zwart 2010; Zwart et al. 2006).
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Zwart, S.D., Kroes, P. (2015). Substantive and Procedural Contexts of Engineering Design. In: Christensen, S., Didier, C., Jamison, A., Meganck, M., Mitcham, C., Newberry, B. (eds) Engineering Identities, Epistemologies and Values. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 21. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16172-3_22
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