Shifting Practices: Reflections on Technology, Practice, and Innovation by Giovan Francesco Lanzara (review)

In my history of technology classes, I run a class T-shirt project. To emulate the challenges of creating a new product, groups of students have to develop a design, figure the shirt's cost, market it to the class, compete against the other groups, and, if they win, then convince enough of their classmates (all with losing designs) to buy the shirt. It's harder than it looks and each class has its own quirks.

Those experiences resonated as I read Giovan Lanzara's tale of how he used two case studies (American musicians learning Music LOGO in a university computer lab and Italian courts introducing VCR taping of proceedings) to observe the disruptive uncertainty and unfamiliarity workers faced when using new technologies, forcing them to redesign, restructure, reframe, and reposition how they work.

Part of the MIT Press Acting with Technology series, "the study of meaningful human activity as it is mediated by tools and technologies" (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/series/acting-technology), Shifting Practices is more anthropology than history, but it provides a deep dive into the mundane realities and larger organizational and practical contexts of individuals and groups being introduced to new technologies. This fits well with user-oriented history of Ruth Schwartz Cowan's "consumption junction" and How Users Matter, edited by Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch.

Here, the micro-level units of analysis are the individuals and groups grappling with the challenges of adaptation. Lanzara convincingly argues that adapting a technology is a process of innovation encompassing "transformation of artifacts, practices, and cognitive frameworks" (p. 14) as well as explicit and tacit knowledge. At that local level of the user, the focus is on the journey, not the result.

What makes Lanzara's work intriguing is not only that he is deep in the mud of the trenches, but also the researchers involved are actively manipulating the battlefield to try to alter outcomes while reflectively thinking about what they as well as their subjects are doing. These on-the-spot cooperative interventions, experiments with the practitioners, and self-reflective experiments—as well as the language—may put off some, but reading about other gardens may help improve one's own garden.

An important methodological tool is "backtalk," where researchers submit their observations to the participants for their feedback, which provides more material for the researchers. A second concept is "unremarkability," things to which researchers and their subjects do not pay attention because they are so accepted or ingrained in their minds and procedures. The disruption of adaptation often illuminates those assumptions and practices. Integration of the VCR required thoughtful thinking and rethinking about existing practices and physical space. One implication is that studying and understanding the "before" is essential for understanding the "during" and "after."

Lanzara argues that the workers he studied, in coming to terms with new technology, did not resist change to their established ways and understanding of work, but instead used the opportunity to learn and to innovate. This may be an optimistic reading of technological change in the workplace. Unemployment threatened no one and the participants were truly innovators, given the opportunity to experiment instead of responding to a fixed mandate from above.

Studying two different domains of practice illustrates the benefits of comparative analysis. In both cases, the new technologies raised philosophical and pragmatic questions. The character of a musical object (is a numerical sequence music?) and of court testimony (how do you integrate gestures preserved on tape with the written testimony?) reflected similar changes created by new technologically mediated realities.

Shifting Practices is a demanding but stimulating (if jargon-rich) analysis of how institutions and individuals negotiate with new technologies and how researchers conceive and reconceive their work.