Paper long abstract:

I will describe a specific phase of a complex interaction design project related to producing a technology that allows disabled people to communicate using cell-phone networks. Such a project can be considered a way to allow persons which are now excluded by most of our technologies and technological environments to get into a TDE.

But the outcomes of the project will not be the center of my presentation. I will focus on a much earlier phase where, in order to ameliorate the sensitivity of a dataglove constituting the center of this enabling technology, the designers working on the project try in etching an electric circuit on a flexible surface.

This situation, that I observed during a short ethnography in the lab where the above mentioned dataglove is designed, is interesting for few specific reasons:

- it questions the STS-minded ethnographeron how to describe such practices taking into account and accounting for the role of technologies, bodies, materials;

- it presents various instances of solidarity: a material solidarity among the outline of the circuit printed on paper and the sheet of brass on which the former has to stick in order to proceed with the etching; a ethic solidarity related to a certain way of working; a humane solidarity towards the disabled persons to which the final technology is addressed.

- it questions the concept of TDE and especially the subconcept of "density": though the lab is a technology filled environment it is probably not a TDE and this allows the experimental practice that I will describe.