A few suggestions for new ways of thinking about things

Think networks when thinking innovation

We can reframe our thinking about innovation as less about the identification and satisfaction of new latent consumer needs, and more about the re-arranging of existing objects, ideas and practices to create something new. How can you identify and re-configure or re-distribute the different properties spread throughout the socio-technical network?

Think hybridity or networks of things and people

Once we start thinking about, and researching, things and people as a continuum we can re-focus 'cause and effect' as relationship. In the early C19th, Josiah Wedgwood understood such relationships. His black jasperware tea sets were designed to "show off to better advantage the current feminine vogue for bleached white hands" (Molotch, 2003). He understood hybridity -- the merging of the material and the human.

Think what non-humans demand of humans

Whether intentionally or not, the design of a technology embeds particular expectations of purpose, context, practice and use. This is what is meant by 'scripting' in STS literature -- the way a technology constitutes or 'configures its user' (Woolgar, 1991). Scripts can be intentional (on the part of the designer) or not, they can be material or semiotic, and they can be relatively open (flexible) or closed (prescriptive). They can also be resisted.

Scripting is most obvious when objects are designed to configure the user in specific and practical ways. For example, Bruno Latour (Latour, 1992) analyses hotel key fobs which are bulky enough to be an encumbrance, thereby 'telling' guests to return them to the desk. An everyday example is the car that beeps to remind its driver to fasten their seatbelt. But such a script can be ignored or resisted. The taxi driver who puts the passenger seat belt into his own seat's buckle to stop the reminder beeps is resisting the script.

Start asking questions of things

What would an interview guide for an inanimate object like a microwave look like? What questions would you ask of a fridge to uncover its owner's culinary practices and preferences? "Is that the remains of re-heated coffee I can detect on your insides? The dirty fingers on the door suggest that the kids are using you quite often -- is that right?" The history of a microwave could be read as a history of ideas about freshness, convenience, taste, cosmopolitanism and cooking. Closer examination reveals much otherwise unrecognisable detail.

Such an approach demands new methodologies. For example, we would need to be able to account for how things change and evolve just as much as any 'user' evolves. Shove and Southerton (2000) have demonstrated how the domestic freezer has changed from a technology focused on preserving home produce and thereby 'beating the seasons' to that of a time machine -- to help meet the scheduling dilemmas of modern life. Such an approach would demand historical analysis and case studies across time and space but, in so doing, could potentially open up all manner of future opportunities for the 'same' technology.

Go beyond consumer 'behaviour' to 'practice'

Ideas of consumer behaviour have dominated market research -- as has the idea that consumers behave on the basis of some need. Such models have been challenged, for example by Valentine and Gordon's 'The 21st Century Consumer: A New Model of Thinking' (2000). It is, however, as the title suggests, a new way of thinking about the consumer. STS is much more radical in shifting attention to networks of humans and non-humans, and thereby abandoning any notion of the sovereign consumer. STS is in this way anti-consumer research.

Shove and Pantzer (2005) have been prominent in putting forward theories of practice and practice-based approaches for understanding innovation. Focusing on practice puts the 'doing' at centre stage rather than any particular person or thing. This subtle shift is important for it avoids the need to privilege any particular entity within the socio-technical network -- which is exactly the simplistic formulation that we're trying to get over. Kelley and Littman of the design consultancy IDEO argue in a similar way for attention to doing, in that they think of products 'in terms of verbs, not nouns: not cell phones but cell phoning' (Kelley, Littman, 2001).

Practices exist as sets of norms, conventions, ways of doing, know how and requisite material arrays (Schatzki, 2001). Importantly, they are constituted through performance -- for example the practice of football would not exist if people and the ball did not play it. If they played it to different rules, or with a different ball, the game and therefore the practice would change. There is a great deal that could be said on theories of practice. For the time being, however, we simply want to make the point that through focusing on practice, the doing, we can start to unpack the 'complex knots' (Michael, 2000) of humans and non-humans.
 

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