This collection of participant-observation studies of engineering design and product development, woven into a whole by the sociologist Dominique Vinck, presents the fruits of a decade-long collaboration between sociologists/anthropologists and mechanical engineers at Grenoble. Here we find designing 'in the raw' analyzed in a way which brings the social and the technical dimensions of engineering practice into coherence without slighting the former nor oversimplifying the latter. Its reading should be required of all students headed out into today's world where mastery of the mix of the two is what defines professional excellence. -- Louis L. Bucciarelli, Jr., School of Engineering, MIT What Vinck and his students show is that a great variety of things and people have to collude to create a working technology. A necessary antidote to rationalistic and linear views of design and innovation. -- Arie Rip, Science and Technology Studies, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Dominique Vinck is Professor at Pierre Mend s-France University and at the Polytechnic National Institute of Grenoble. He is also a member of CRISTO, a research center associated with CNRS that focuses on sociotechnical innovation and industrial organizations.
This collection presents multiple worlds of work in an accessible
way that nonetheless emphasizes their complexity—a rarity in any
academic writing, and especially difficult to achieve in
ethnographic studies.
*Prometheus*
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