Substantive and Procedural Contexts of Engineering Design

Abstract

Kroes and Van de Poel (Problematizing the notion of social context of technology. In S. H. Christensen, B. Delahousse, & M. Meganck (Eds.), Engineering in context (pp. 61–74). Aarhus: Academica, 2009) maintain that distinguishing between technology and its social (intentional) context is impossible, because social phenomena are definitive (constitutive) for technology. This raises the problem of differentiating between the social processes that are internal (definitive) and those that are external (contextual) to technology. To explore this problem we distinguish instead between the core and the context of design as object and as process, and we apply them to a case study of the design and development of a new technology for sewage water treatment to find out whether these distinctions make sense in real life engineering practice. Despite the in abstracto plausibility of this distinction between core and context, our analysis reveals that its application may turn out to be very problematic in actual engineering practices. The same holds for characterizing particular design features as being the result of either internal (technological) or external (social) factors.