[Sci-tech-public] STS Colloquium with Matthew Wisnioski

[Bianca Sinausky]

MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society

Colloquium 

 

 

Bridges to Creative Renewal: Engineers and the "Design Revolution" in 1960s
America

Matthew Wisnioski, Virginia Tech

Commenter, Kelly Moore, Loyola University and NSF STS Program Officer 

 

Abstract:

This colloquium explores engineers' ambitions to remake society and the
character of their profession under the banner of "humane" technology. In
the late 1960s and early 1970s, engineers wrestled with criticisms that
technology was an out of control force and that they were its willing
"organization men." Reformers in member societies called for renewed ethical
codes, radicals protested their role as cogs in a military machine, and
conservatives lambasted "intellectual Luddites" in a partisan battle that
rocked their profession. But thousands of engineers sought to avoid overt
politics in a series of collaborative, networked projects in what
Buckminster Fuller called the "design revolution." I focus on three
organizations with very different missions linked by a set of common
practices and moral virtues: Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT),
Volunteers for International Technical Assistance (VITA), and the Innovation
Group. I show that so-called "legitimacy exchanges" to make technology human
in the late-1960s were never far removed from partisan conflicts and that
they contributed to the engineering profession's loss of rhetorical command
over the meaning of technology.

 

*****Please note that we have changed our format for colloquia in STS:
Speakers will share precirculated papers, and we will have a commenter to
help lead discussion. If you would like to have an emailed PDF of Professor
Wisnioski's  paper, please contact Bianca Sinausky, singleta at mit.edu. 

 

 

 

Monday, February 13, 2012

4pm

Located at MIT Building E51-095

 

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