Controversy Mapping. Tommaso Venturini
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revolution and the more established continental natural philosophy. Boyle was one of the co-founders of the Society for Experimental Methods, soon to become the Royal Society, and was famous for his experiments with air pumps (which eventually led him to formulate Boyle’s law, stating that the volume of a gas varies inversely to its pressure). For many of his contemporary natural philosophers, proving natural laws by way of experiment was unthinkable. Among them, Hobbes was a particularly vocal critic. He argued that Boyle’s experiments were not valid because they were carried out in an artificial setting (i.e., the void created by the air pump) and thus impossible to reproduce in real life. On top of that, the air pump was an unreliable device, which made it conveniently possible for Boyle to blame an air leakage when experiments failed. Besides, the high cost of building an air pump meant that the reproduction of experiments was limited to a small elite of wealthy “gentleman scientists.” This did not disturb Boyle who only recognized members of the Royal Society and his so-called “Invisible College” as a legitimate audience for his experiments. To make matters worse, given that direct witnessing of the experiments was not always practical, Boyle accepted that it could be replaced by meticulous descriptions of the research protocol and transcriptions of the results. For Hobbes, and other seventeenth-century natural philosophers, the idea that truth could in this way “travel in literary form” was simply absurd. In their view, reliability hinged on first-hand observation.
This controversy between Boyle and Hobbes, then, becomes an instrument for Shapin and Schaffer to reveal how scientific knowledge depends on established conventions. The acceptance of Boyle’s findings hinged on the material technology of the laboratory (represented by the air-pump), the social technology of the peer community (represented by the Royal Society), and the discursive technology of the scientific literature (represented by Boyle’s meticulous style of reporting).
Another example of the methodological power of controversy is provided by the so-called “Climategate” affair (Maibach et al., 2012). In November 2009, a group of hackers leaked thousands of emails and documents stolen from the servers of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (a key actor in the global warming debate). By quoting a few carefully selected exchanges, climate skeptics used the leaked emails to convey the impression that climate change research was nothing more than a scientific conspiracy. Exploding a few days before the Climate Summit in Copenhagen where the international community was expected to agree on a successor of the Kyoto Protocol on CO2 emissions, the Climategate scandal offered a convenient excuse for those wanting to stall the negotiations (Leiserowitz et al., 2012). While Climategate is a disturbing example of the use of a made-up scandal to influence the media and the diplomatic agenda, it is also an example of how every cloud has a silver lining. The leak gave social scientists access to an extraordinarily rich dataset that would otherwise likely have required a lifetime of archival work (Ryghaug & Skjølsvold, 2010).
Mapping as a method for design and innovation
Besides facilitating the study of science and technology in society, controversies can also be helpful when developing new sociotechnical arrangements. Climategate, for example, was not only an opportunity to observe the making of climate science, but also an occasion to strengthen the procedures of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The scandal and other controversies on errors found in the 4th Assessment Report led to a reform of the IPCC procedures and an improvement in their quality and transparency (Beck, 2013). Something similar happens in innovation projects where objections and resistance from stakeholders can, if taken properly into account, produce more robust solutions. For those who design and develop new products and services, controversy can be an occasion to understand users and foreground issues that would otherwise be hard to anticipate.
Think of controversies as a form of crash tests. How do we know that we can bet our life on the brakes, safety belts, and airbags in our cars? How do we know that we can rely on car manufacturers and trust in their safety systems? In the automobile industry, such questions are answered by subjecting prototypes to impact trials. Only after having passed these crash tests are vehicles allowed into commercial production. Likewise, stress tests are common for computer hardware and software; furniture is subjected to load tests; electric appliances undergo accelerated life tests; and toys are submitted to destructive forces like those that kids can unleash on them with their teeth. In all these cases, products earn their “right to exist” by overcoming a series of trials. Controversies are, in this sense, sociotechnical crash tests. How do we know that pesticides will not break our alliance with pollinating insects or that our email provider will protect our privacy? How do we know that medical techniques are compatible with ethical principles or that the development program of our city will not destroy biodiversity? These are the kinds of questions we test in sociotechnical controversies.
A famous example of how new technologies develop in an interplay with their “relevant social groups” is provided by Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker (1987) in their analysis of the controversies surrounding the introduction of the modern bicycle. Rather than a brilliant and original solution deliberately engineered for the needs of its intended users, Pinch and Bijker describe a long period of “interpretative flexibility” in which different bicycle designs competed against each other, followed by a phase of “closure and stabilization” in which the symmetrical-wheels design eventually became the unique standard. The shift from one phase to the other required the intervention of a multitude of actors: from long women’s skirts (which could not cope easily with bicycle wheels), over cycling races (which allowed comparing the speed of different designs) and safety concerns, to the pneumatic tire (which solved the vibration problems associated with the symmetrical-wheels design). These sociotechnical crash tests, you could say, forced relevant social groups to emerge and make their stakes in the design explicit. For bicycle developers at the time, controversy mapping would have been great business intelligence!
Whenever possible, trials are performed in controlled settings where they follow protocols and can be systematically evaluated. This is true for physicists examining the speed of neutrinos in a particle accelerator, for philosophers examining the foundations of ethics in a library, and for design engineers developing a new product on their drawing boards. Most ideas do not survive this stage. They are born and killed within the day and habitually by their own creators. And yet, once out of the R&D shell, even tougher trials await. Debuting in society is no cotillion ball. The edited volume from which the bicycle example is taken comprises a wide selection of comparable cases ranging from dye chemistry and Bakelite processing to missiles and medical imaging techniques (Bijker et al., 1987). As part of the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) school in STS, they illustrate how technological development is subject to immense social pressures and demands. Going public means entering an environment where only the fittest will survive. In product design and development, controversies therefore not only slow down the pace of technological development, but can also be appreciated for their capacity to ensure that new inventions earn their place by adapting to their social environments.
Controversies constitute the high pass through which the most robust innovations exit the laboratory, but far from being perfect or definitive, their outcomes are always contingent and unpredictable. In a similar way, controversy mapping is not a form of risk management (Power, 2008), which would suppose that dangers could be anticipated and, at least in part, controlled. Controversies cannot be managed. At best, they can be channeled into spaces where their violence is partly and temporarily contained in the arenas of scientific conferences, patent offices, parliaments, markets, or citizen conferences. In some cases, this strategy has worked; in many others, it has failed. In France, for example, the organization of dozens of conférences citoyennes and the establishment of independent authorities (such as the Haut Conseil des Biotechnologies) has not stopped hundreds of faucheurs volontaires (volunteer mowers) from destroying experimental GMO fields as an act of civil disobedience (Hayes, 2007). What controversy mapping can offer in these situations is not to tame the interventions of the actors, but simply to appraise them.
In Adversarial Design (2012), Carl DiSalvo argues that realizing that technological artefacts cannot enter social life without interfering with the identities of existing actors, or provoking the emergence of new ones, should make designers think