Design–use Relationships in Sociotechnical Change

The last decades have witnessed a significant shift in the orientation towards users in management, design, and innovation research. “Science discovers, technology applies, man conforms,” the motto of the 1933 Chicago World Fair, was for long the received view on the design–use relationship. The linear model of innovation was the norm in textbooks up until the 1980s. Its legacy is still strong. Tens of thousands of large marketing departments in both corporations and universities churn out technologies and research on technologies. In contrast, only a few hundred programs explore what happens with technology after it is purchased and how those events translate back to production. A further twist in this imbalance is that, by far, the most common social science approach to technology focuses on “technology diffusion.” Here, technology is expected to be diffused as is, and the main research methods, such as the diffusion surveys, were until the late 1980s structured so that the practices of using—that is, the local variations and modifications—do not easily come to the fore (Rogers, 1995). The significance of users in innovation has remained below the radar because of these widely held assumptions. When Eric von Hippel interviewed R&D managers in the 1970s, they were firmly convinced that their products originated in their internal research labs. It was a great surprise to all, for example, that a closer scrutiny revealed that 80% of inventions in medical instruments were in fact initiated by users (von Hippel, 1988). Today many companies and policy makers argue for a drastic transformation in innovation and design–use relations. Open innovation (Chesbrough, 2003), living labs (Living Labs Europe, n.d.), user innovation communities (von Hippel, 2005), open-source