SPT: Technology and Designing

I have been accepted to present at the 14th Biennial International Conference of the Society for Philosophy and Technology hosted by Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management of Delft University of Technology in Delft, The Netherlands. The conference theme is “Technology and Designing”:

One of the central characteristics of modern technological products is that they are designed by agents: modern technological artefacts are typically described by agents in drawing, text or diagrams before they are manufactured in workshops, industrial plants or constructed on site. It is a caricature to take designing as a process in which a single agent generates a full-fledged blueprint of an artefact in response to a client’s well-defined request. Designing is a complex and not well demarcated activity. The processes of designing the product and of defining the client’s aims can get intermingled, and so do the processes of designing, of manufacturing and of using the product. Moreover designing is typically done by teams of agents, takes place within companies and is shaped and regulated by design traditions, standardisation rules, and safety and other requirements.

I will be presenting a version of my reasearch on the privacy implications of vehicle safety communication (VSC) technologies. This conference will be held in conjunction with CEPE 2005.