Apple Technology Review, Fall 1997: Book Review

Aramis, or the Love of Technology, page 4

As a reader, what I often find most valuable in a book is what it provokes rather than what it says. Certainly that first resolution of the mystery is provocative enough, with its implicit demand that researchers and designers learn the political art of negotiation and compromise with respect to their designs. And Latour does not mean negotiation and compromise just in the sense of listening to users or involving users in the design process. He means negotiation and compromise in the design of the thing itself in accordance with a project's political, economic, technical, consumer, and institutional environment--in other words, its whole environment.

Another resolution, though, is suggested at the very end of the book. As I mentioned earlier, the book follows three parallel paths: the course of the investigation, the chronology of the Aramis project, and the relationship between the two investigators. This second resolution occurs at the end of that last path. Norbert has acted as mentor to his intern engineer throughout the better part of the book, until he withdraws and leaves the intern engineer to finish the investigation on his own. The intern leads us to think that Norbert has become uncomfortable in the increasingly technical milieu of the investigation, but it may just as well be that he has finished his mentor's role and is leaving the intern to reach his own resolution and learn his own lessons. Since it is the intern who provides the crucial insight about Aramis' purity and unresponsiveness to its environment, the mentoring is successful.

But then Norbert, now returned to the scene, would like the intern to continue working with him, to continue what they had begun by way of understanding what research is and how it can be done successfully. But the intern has different plans. He says he wants "to be an engineer again, a real one; I'm going to work for a big software company." In fact, he wants to work on a new project, a "smart car" project that smacks of every facet of Aramis itself. And the project, maybe a little too obviously, is called "Prometheus."

The dark side has claimed another one. The attitude that created Aramis is addictive, and, even knowing all that he now knows, the engineer succumbs. Prometheus, he says, has been proven viable. "It's technologically state of the art," he says, "but feasible." Of course, Prometheus, despite its viability, no more exists at this stage than Aramis ever did. Norbert laughs at him and promises to do a postmortem on that project as well in five years' time.

This second resolution suggests a different realm of discussion from anything remotely constrained to the strategies of successful research and innovation. It has to do with the compellingness of a "technological world view," in which the technological problems are the real problems and in which the social problems are amenable to technological solutions, and even in which value is determined in technological measures (efficiency, productivity, and so on). Latour is certainly a participant in that discussion, as evidenced in Science in Action by his awareness of the same pull toward the scientistic world view, in which truth is what science discovers rather, say, than what we (scientists included) socially construct.

All of that is to say that the book is provocative, and then some. It does not reduce to a simple moral, such as "all technological innovation is also social innovation" or anything else that we might congratulate ourselves on already knowing. Latour's story is especially relevant to researchers trying to find their niche in industry and to refine their methodology of design. As with his treatment of science, he broadens the discussion well beyond the usual boundaries. It isn't enough to say that your design is "user centered." Users are only a part of the story for successful design and innovation. And it isn't enough to design your new device or its practices of use. If you fail at its environmental care and feeding, choosing your test sites, generating its acceptance within the organizational decision-making structure, adjusting its demands to its financial environment, and so on, you will never get to a device or its use. Latour doesn't offer a new methodology. Perhaps that is one of the reasons he wrote a novel about Aramis rather than a traditional philosophical or sociological study of research and innovation. In fact, he suggests early on in the book that the solution to the mystery of Aramis' death will not provide any universal theories about the failures of technological innovations. The investigation is particular to the case of Aramis' death. Perhaps Latour is suggesting that a methodology per se for technological innovation is neither needed nor possible, as each case is unique. Innovation is a social, historical enterprise, with all the peculiarities of its age, domain, and particular circumstances.

Aramis, or the Love of Technology, by Bruno Latour. Translated by Catherine Porter. Published by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996.

Interview with Latour by T. Hugh Crawford, Virginia Military Institute

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