The role of hybrid communities and socio-technical arrangements in the participatory design

Abstract

This paper highlights the importance of "hybrid collectives " in the design process. In the first part, the active role of technologies and broadly speaking of non humans, in the construction and the functioning of those collectives, is emphasized: they allow heterogeneous actors to coordinate their projects; they contribute to the emergence and the transformation of social identities; they help to frame the spatial and temporal settings in which these collectives exist and act; they are directly engaged in action and cognition. For all these reasons non humans are to be considered as strategic players in the dynamics and the organization of these collectives, and in particular of design communities. Symmetrically, the very existence of hybrid collectives induces a new vision of human agency, that must be considered as diversified and variable: needs, demands, expectations, feelings, capacities of action and cognition depend on the socio-technical configurations of their environment, i.e. of the collectives they are part from. Finally some general lessons for participatory design and information ecology are drawn from the recognition of the centrality of hybrid collectives in our advanced societies. Keywords actor-network theory, human agency, socio-technical devices, distributed cognition and action, hybrid collectives, epistemic community, information ecology Recent studies on innovation have shown that conception is a critical phase for the success or failure of an innovation. They

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