Paper short abstract:

My presentation explores how becoming a user implicates specific maps of responsibilities (Akrich, 1992). Tracing the work of adapting users and artefacts in personalised assistive technologies, can unsettle the naturalised figure of user and relations of use and valuation.

Paper long abstract:

My presentation explores how becoming a user entails becoming accountable; the exchange of technological artefacts encompasses passing on obligations, what technologies can do also delineate what users should do. To understand how does this re-assignment of responsibility is imagined and materialise in manuals, designs and forms of exchange, and what is naturalised in the figure of user, I revisit Akrich's notion of the script to unpack the idea of maps of responsibilities (1994), and how these are contested and re-made in the case of assistive technologies.

Personalised technologies for disabled people offer an intriguing case of negotiating the user's role, insofar as here the individual is often not alone, she is accompanied by medical professionals who take active part in selecting and purchasing technologies but also making adaptations, conducting maintenance work and monitoring by establishing an ongoing care relation with the client. Comparing these maps between artefact and user are drawn differently can problematise and refigure largely naturalised figures such as user and (commodified) device. The participation of medical professionals not only blurs the boundary between work and consumption, development and use, but unlike in the case of commodities, marks the work goes into making artefacts and users connect (Star and Strauss, 1999; Suchman, 2013).

In sum, recognising the work of adapting users to artefacts can unsettle certain naturalised relations of use and valuation, and point not only how becoming a user is the site of implicit ordering, but how commodified technologies rely on making users responsible.