Transcript Trading zones, interactional expertise and convergent technologies

Trading zones, interactional expertise
and convergent technologies
Michael E. Gorman
University of Virginia
Presented to NABIS
Chicago
August, 2006
Michael E. Gorman
All rights reserved
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Portions of this talk derived from the
workshop I organized on Trading zones,
Interactional Expertise and Interdisciplinary
Collaboration, supported by the National Science
Foundation (SES-0526096), the Boston Consulting
Group, and the Center for Nanotechnology &
Society
ASU, May 22-24, 2006
Michael E. Gorman
Goal of Convergent Technologies
(nano, bio, info, cogno)
Enhancing Human Performance:
To what end? Super soldier?
Will the enhancements be available to
all?
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Convergent technologies (nano,
bio, info, cogno) require
• Disciplinary depth combined with
• Ability to form interdisciplinary teams
• Integration of societal and ethical
considerations
– Nanotechnology as a model
• Avoiding the problem of
compartmentalization
– “There are no ethical issues in design…”
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Scientists who can serve as
• Entrepreneurs--translating ideas into action
(trading zones)
• Philosophers--communicating across
paradigms (interactional expertise)
• Stewards--linking scientific discovery,
technological innovation and social
progress (moral imagination)
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Problem of Incommensurability
(Kuhn)
• Experts in a new paradigm may not be able
to communicated with those in the old
– J. Polanyi’s first paper on the laser rejected
• Participants in different cultures may not be
able to communicate with each other
• Making it impossible to see a superordinate
goal, and work towards it together
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Trading Zone as solution to
incommensurablity
• Galison-- radar, particle accelerators--scientists and
engineers develop a creole to communicate
• Nanocajun
• Lambert--JPL engineers refer to their negotiations
as trades
• Baird--MRI--incomplete creole between physics and
surgery led to an artifact being treated as a lesion
– Solved by someone whose multidisciplinary
background crossed the zone
– Interactional expert
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Three levels of shared expertise
in multidisciplinary trading zones
(adapted from Collins and Evans)
• None--participants speak different
languages
• Interactional--ability to converse
intelligently with experts from another
culture
• Contributing--each discipline contributes to
a new breakthrough, developing new terms
(Luis & Walter Alvarez)
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Three Kinds of Trading Zones
State 1: One group (or elite: oligarchy)
• has the overall problem representation
• black boxes others into specific roles whose
purpose those persons do not need to understand.
• Communication downward (orders) & upward
(evidence of obedience)--no trade
– Rigid hierarchy
• Examples: Seeing Like a State (Scott)
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Three Kinds of Trading Zones
State 2: Relatively equal trading zones
• Actors often trade with boundary objects
(cowrie shell) or across systems (Radar,
Everglades)
• Boundaries of zone can shift--who is
allowed to trade? Who is left out?
• Zones can be nested within or networked
with other zones
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Service Science involves both 2a & 2b
• Represents a new kind of interactional expertise that
combines technical and business knowledge with cognitive
and social psychology
• Service scientists facilitate human-technological coevolution that enhances human capabilities, world-wide
• Involves trading zones that may become collaborations
Jim Spohrer, IBM Almaden
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Michael E. Gorman
Three Kinds of Trading Zones
State 3: Shared mental model
• All participants share a common representation of the
system and its goals.
• Dynamic representations, so sharing needs to be
continuous.
–
–
•
Flowing to the work
Must avoid groupthink
Joint contribution to development of a new expertise
– ARPANET
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Differing mental models of same
trading zone lead to problems
• Toshiba engineers who work with Lexar also
provide information to competitors working on the
same technology
• Lexar: thinks they are in a strategic partnership,
therefore work on trust--close to a Stage 3
• Toshiba: any sharing that is not expressly
forbidden is allowed--Stage 2
• Story of trust & betrayal & blaming the victim
• Or story about ‘realities’ of business
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Differing mental models can cause
organizational problems
• Boeing engineers who wanted to be in
a State 2 or 3 with management, felt
they were in a State 1
– Airplanes as boundary objects: engineers
as designers or assemblers?
• Ed Wells Institute as boundary
organization
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A Small Nanobiotechnology Trading
Zone
Goal: to explore how scientists, engineers, ethicists and social
scientists could collaborate on nanotechnology research
• Graudate student had two advisors: a materials scientist
(Groves) and a social scientist (Gorman). Together, we
explored how depositing nanodots of one metal oxide on
another can be directed toward ‘world ills’
– Decided on medical or environmental sensors--added a
biomedical engineer
• All three of us keep diaries of our cognitive processes and
send them to a cognitive scientist (Shrager)
• Supported by NSF (SES-0210452)
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Metaphor: Mountains and Bridges
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Trajectory of Gorman’s expertise in
nanotechnology
• None--where G started before project
• Interactional--after learning about selfdirected assembly and metal oxides, G had
the judgment to help shape the research
strategy but not the skill to do experiments
• Contributing--G’s name is on a patent
application
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Michael E. Gorman
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3 States, Emerging Technologies and the
Environment
State 1: Control of the environment; ignore
most stakeholders
• Engineers and scientists develop
nanotechnologies, leaving others to deal
with ‘end-of-pipe’ environmental
consequences
• NGOs mandating a moratorium on new
technologies without consulting researchers
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State 1 Extractive Industry:
Quincy Mine Shaft, UP
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State 2: Balancing interests
• The potential environmental impacts of new
technologies need to be monitored and negotiated
with agencies like EPA, with environmental
scientists and with multiple stakeholders
• Current environmental regulations are not
adequate for nanotechnology (Wardak & Rejeski)
– Regulatory assumption that nanoparticles can
be classified and treated like their macro-scale
counterparts
• New trading zones necessary to develop new
regulations and complement existing ones
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The impacts of breakthrough
technologies on complex systems are
not entirely predictable, therefore
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State 3: Adaptive management of a reflexive
historical system
The Earth Systems Engineer has “to
be in continued dialog with the
creation that we are responsible for,
and part of”—creating “new and
more self-aware cognitive systems”.
Brad Allenby
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Requirements for such a dialogue
• Continuous and fine-grained monitoring
• Reversible technologies
– Should be designed to permit alteration of technological systems as
we get more data on their effects
– And hear from stakeholders
• Adaptive management of resilient systems
– What aspects of system most need to be resilient?
• True interdisciplinary collaboration
– Stage 3 trading zone at the level of systems goals
– Axiological (values) component must be considered
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But values are often based on
incommensurable ideological
differences
Prohibiting any kind of State 3
agreement, unless participants
exercise
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Moral Imagination
• We learn practical ethics from stories, which become
mental models for virtuous behavior (Johnson: Werhane)
• These mental models can become unquestioned
assumptions--’realities’
• Moral imagination consists of seeing that these ‘realities’
are mental models, and that alternative models, e.g., those
of other stakeholders, are worth understanding
• NOT relativism--the hope is to evolve improved models
for how to progress, as a civilization
Michael E. Gorman
A Failure of Moral Imagination & Trading
Zones: IP example
GMOs: Monsanto’s story:
• Will lead to next green revolution
• Reduce environmental damage due to
pesticides, fertilizer
But how to protect R&D investment?
• Prevent re-use of seeds
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Seed re-use as farmer’s right,
especially in developing world
• Farmer contracts that result in field
inspections
• A technology developed by USDA and
Delta & Pine that ‘turns off’ trait--labeled
‘terminator’ by RAFI (now ETC)
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Share knowledge with scientists
from the developing world
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McDonough’s Principles as statement of values
that can be translated into action
• Waste = Food
– biological/organic nutrient
cycle
– technological nutrient cycle
– Cradle to cradle design
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Successful example of
moral imagination
• Design of an environmental furniture fabric
• An architect, a fashion designer, an
environmental chemist and a textile
manufacturer adopt a shared mental model
(story) --waste equals food--and
collaborated on product development
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Arizona State University’s decision theater
permits development of a visual creole that
allows multiple stakeholders to engage in
moral imagination by seeing the impact of
their assumptions on the growth of Phoenix
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Convergent Technologies promise to
extend human capabilities to realms
reserved for Gods in traditional stories
• Control of evolution, including invention of new
organisms
• Management of the global ecosystem
• Change ‘human nature’ by
– Cyborg: expanding cognition, distributing it among
technologies
– Supersoldier
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Each individual scientist may not
be able to be
• Entrepreneur
• Philosopher
• Steward
But in order to create technologies that
represent social progress, scientists will
have to work with others who can help them
navigate these responsibilities
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Innovation exceeds the pace of
regulation
• Current regulation depends on known risks
• Leading to the precautionary principle,
which would prevent discoveries that might
be beneficial
• Degrees of freedom are greatest at the point
of breakthrough
• Therefore, scientists need to exercise moral
imagination, in company with others
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Enrepreneur and steward roles
could be in conflict
• Entrepreneur wants ownership of IP, shuns
transparency
• Steward prefers transparency, looks for
ways of sharing new ideas that have
potential benefit
• The two roles do not have to be in conflict:
entrepreneurs can create markets that
represent social benefit
Michael E. Gorman
Technological development as
freedom
“Economic unfreedom, in the form of extreme poverty, can
make a person a helpless prey in the violation of other
kinds of freedom” (Amartya Sen)
• Technologies for Tier 4 markets--increased affluence,
education (especially for women) could both limit
population growth and environmental damage
• Technological progress should involve enhancing human
capabilities in ways that give us the maximum opportunity
to gain intelligence about ourselves, our relations with each
other and with the universe we are transforming
Michael E. Gorman
Michael E. Gorman
Michael E. Gorman