TY - JOUR
T1 - Sensing defects
T2 - Collaborative seeing in engineering work
AU - Sargent, Adam
AU - Vinson, Alexandra H.
AU - Stevens, Reed
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank our research participants for taking the time to discuss their work experiences with our research team. Our thanks to Ella Butler, Anna Jabloner, Erin Moore, Malavika Reddy and Jay Sosa for providing input on early drafts of this paper. We would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and the editors for their close readings and useful suggestions. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (#1252372).
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2021.
PY - 2021/8
Y1 - 2021/8
N2 - This paper explores how professional engineers recognize and make sense of product defects in their everyday work. Such activities form a crucial, if often overlooked, part of professional engineering practice. By detecting, recognizing and repairing defects, engineers contribute to the creation of value and the optimization of production processes. Focusing on early-career engineers in an advanced steel mill in the United States, we demonstrate how learning specific ways of seeing and attending to defects take shape around the increasing automation of certain aspects of engineering work. Practices of sensing defects are embodied, necessitating disciplined eyes, ears, and hands, but they are also distributed across human and non-human actors. We argue that such an approach to technical work provides texture to the stark opposition between human and machine work that has emerged in debates around automation. Our approach to sensing defects suggests that such an opposition, with its focus on job loss or retention, misses the more nuanced ways in which humans and machines are conjoined in perceptual tasks. The effects of automation should be understood through such shifting configurations and the ways that they variously incorporate the perceptual practices of humans and machines.
AB - This paper explores how professional engineers recognize and make sense of product defects in their everyday work. Such activities form a crucial, if often overlooked, part of professional engineering practice. By detecting, recognizing and repairing defects, engineers contribute to the creation of value and the optimization of production processes. Focusing on early-career engineers in an advanced steel mill in the United States, we demonstrate how learning specific ways of seeing and attending to defects take shape around the increasing automation of certain aspects of engineering work. Practices of sensing defects are embodied, necessitating disciplined eyes, ears, and hands, but they are also distributed across human and non-human actors. We argue that such an approach to technical work provides texture to the stark opposition between human and machine work that has emerged in debates around automation. Our approach to sensing defects suggests that such an opposition, with its focus on job loss or retention, misses the more nuanced ways in which humans and machines are conjoined in perceptual tasks. The effects of automation should be understood through such shifting configurations and the ways that they variously incorporate the perceptual practices of humans and machines.
KW - automation
KW - engineering work
KW - human-machine interaction
KW - perception
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U2 - 10.1177/0306312721991919
DO - 10.1177/0306312721991919
M3 - Article
C2 - 33530886
AN - SCOPUS:85100504639
SN - 0306-3127
VL - 51
SP - 564
EP - 582
JO - Social Studies of Science
JF - Social Studies of Science
IS - 4
ER -