The Challenge of Responsible Design

"Design," conceived broadly as the process of joining the possible and the desirable, poses a singular challenge to the individual, to society, and to political institutions. As a creative process once the strict preserve of superhuman (mythical or divine) beings, design in Western practice today descends, at times, if not to the basest level of pecuniary interest, then at least to previously unplumbed depths of a seemingly unselfconscious hubris. "Why not change the world?" asks the new (surely well-intentioned) advertising motto of my own elite engineering university, without any of the reticence that might be expected to flow from the fact that "the world" does not necessarily "belong" to those students or faculty openly, audaciously, and it may appear unilaterally engaged in changing it. From a time in which the mere investigation of the workings, say, of the human body was a forbidden blasphemy, we seem to have arrived at a stage at which change and the redesign (re-"creation") not only of the conditions of life, but of life itself, may be taken without further qualification as the very definition of improvement.1 The cat is, however, definitely out of the bag. Given the state of knowledge in the modern world, a measure of design is inevitable, if only in the sense of choosing "by design" not to develop or adopt certain technological instantiations of that knowledge. At a certain level, given what we know, we cannot help but be designers, if not actively then by default. And again the design task we have taken upon ourselves poses a profound challenge both to individual and collective wisdom, and to the political traditions and institutions to which we are constitutionally committed in all matters of public choice. The question I will pursue here is: "Can the insights central to the contemporary study of science, technology, and society make us more responsible designers?" The process of joining the possible with the desirable already calls on the full range of human knowledge from science and engineering to human and social studies. What, after all, is possible? What is desirable? But as makers or remakers of the world-as designers-can the insights of a relatively new interdisciplinary pursuit, the study of science, technology, and society (STS), make us "better" designers? Can those insights, for example, enhance accountability or contribute to a more forthright handling of material reality? 1 Cf. L. Marx, "Does Improved Technology Mean Progress?" TechnologyReview (January, 1987): 33-41, 71.