Paper short abstract:

Powerful entanglements and meanings of difference between machine and human, designer and user, women and men get enacted in technical devices. Is there a potential for emancipatory interference with laser gravers, their users and their designers?

Paper long abstract:

Although being workers with industrial machines since centuries, women's requirements have never before been systematically considered in the design process of machines. Moreover, technological devices designed either for the general user or especially for women or for men often show and enforce gender stereotypes. In this sense, industrial machines are powerful agents in material-semiotic networks of production. More than marketable goods, meanings of difference between machine and human, designer and user, women and men get produced and enacted. In this way, political issues are negotiated with and within technological devices.

"New materialism" offers a new attempt to look at the entanglements of natural and cultural becomings within these social-cyber-physical systems more closely. How are questions of responsibility for justice and injustice encoded in technological innovation? Is it possible that emancipatory space is enacted beyond outdated gender norms? Relying on Lucy Suchman's insight in human-machine-reconfigurations, industrial production machines (laser gravers), their processes of development and their interferences with humans were focussed in a three-year research and development project. My hypothesis is, methods of design practices as well as methods of production, including all persons involved in the process, are open to change. To prove this, I draw on Karen Barad's ethico-onto-epistemological insights in the material entanglements of research apparatuses in processes of becoming. The goal is to show the potential for emancipatory interferences with machines made visible and possible by an interdisciplinary research and development project on laser gravers, their users and their designers.