Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

What kinds of knowledge have unions produced as patrons? This paper examines union collaborations with prominent computer scientists in 1970s Norway. I argue that this work sutured information designs to social democratic means of mobilization, demonstrating a radically democratizing potential.

Paper long abstract

At the turn of the 1970s, the Norwegian computer scientist Kristen Nygaard embarked on a long-term collaboration with the labor unions on worker-centered informational design. Nygaard drew on his insider’s perspectives from the security establishment and management consulting to warn the labor movement about the emergence of new digital planning tools, budgeting, strategy, and automation practices. The goal was to develop a knowledge strategy and research program under union patronage, closely coordinated with the labor party, This work laid the foundations of the Scandinavian School of System Development’s participatory information design, a long-standing alternative to the corporate, top-down tradition of User Experience (UX) that came to dominate in the Silicon Valley.

Union patronage of knowledge production is an underexamined topic in the history of science. In this paper, I will focus on how Nygaard’s affiliation with unions and the worker perspective shaped his approach to the “user” in information design. The “user”, I argue, is a central figure in digitalized societies, a form of subjectivation of comparable importance to the “citizen”, the “voter” or the “worker”. Defining the “user”, however, was simultaneously a matter of politics and expertise; Nygaard recruited anthropologists to aid the mediation between factory workers (and in his second project, hospital nurses) and computer scientists. By insisting on the specificity of working-class users, the Scandinavian School beckons us to question the generality of the “users” coproduced by more commercially oriented information science.