Maps, Mirrors, and Participants: Design Lenses for Sociomateriality in Engineering Organizations
This work addresses the challenge of conceptual engineering in organizations, offering insights for researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it builds on existing sociomaterial theories without introducing new methods or data.
The paper tackles the problem of understanding how organizations transition from high-level concepts to designs by examining the inseparable sociomaterial relationships between humans, technologies, and organizations, using metaphors like maps, mirrors, and participants as lenses to analyze these interactions.
When you use a computer it also uses you, and in that relationship forms a new entity of melded agencies, a "centaur" inseparably human and nonhuman. Networks of interaction in an organization similarly form "organizational centaurs", melding humans, technologies, and organizations into an inseparable sociomateriality. By developing a convex optimization toolkit for conceptual engineering we sought to shape these centaurs. How do organizations go from a high-level concept ("let's make an airplane") to a "design", and in that process what blurred lines between humans and computers bring opportunities for research? We present three metaphors that have been useful lenses across our field sites: considering design models as maps shows how centaurs apportioned legitimacy; looking at design models as mirrors illuminates how they sought validation in their perspectives; and treating design models as participants recognizes their opinions and agency as equivalent to other entities in these centaurs.