Designers and Users
Akrich, M. (1992). The De-Scription of Technical Objects. In W. E. Bijker & J. Law. (Eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (pp. 205-224). Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Thus, if we are interested in technical objects and not in chimera, we cannot be satisfied methodologically with the designer’s or user’s point of view alone. Instead we have to go back and forth continually between the designer and the user, between the designer’s projected user and the real user, between the world inscribed in the object and the world described by its displacement.
This is precisely what is at stake in my project - key to tracing the connections between patients, doctors and ICT is going back and forth between the designer and the user. The literature tends to focus on one or the other, but tracing involves moving back and forth between both.
