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 about their practice as a form of political intervention: “Objects already participate in political debates. Objects often function as expressions of matters of concern, encapsulating aspects of an issue to make them accessible to a broader public” (DiSalvo et al., 2014). The design of technical solutions can thus profit from taking sociotechnical crash tests seriously by crafting designs that are deliberately unfinished and open to multiple uses and appropriations. In their analysis of the Zimbabwe bush pump, Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol have, for example, shown how what they call a “fluid technology” can better adapt to multiple sociotechnical contexts and thus constitute a more robust, because less developed, solution (de Laet & Mol, 2000). Similarly, Giorgio De Michelis (2003) has argued that the traditional Sardinian shepherd’s knife allows for a variety of different uses, from wood carving to sheep surgery, with an elegant open-ended design that does not require the multiplication of blades and tools found, for example, in the modern Swiss army knives.
Mapping for democratic inquiry
Besides being useful to those who study technoscientific arrangements and design them, controversy mapping can also help those who, willingly or not, are affected by their consequences. As we just saw, controversies are hard to handle through the established procedures for managing matters of science and technology. They are especially impossible to manage through the so-called “linear model of expertise” (Weingart, 1999; Pielke, 2007; Beck, 2011). According to this model, sociotechnical problems should be handled by separating science and politics. First, policymakers decide which questions are worth studying and financing. Then, scientists and engineers agree on the answers in full autonomy and regardless of their social consequences. Finally, based on the answers, politicians deliberate to make an informed decision. Such a linear arrangement is not only unrealistic because it requires an impossible separation between facts and values (Jasanoff & Wynne, 1998; Durant, 2016), but also paralyzing because it defers any political decision until scientific consensus is reached. This is clearly not an option in sociotechnical controversies that, by definition, are precisely the situations in which urgent deliberation is needed even if (and sometimes because) expert agreement is still lacking (Callon et al., 2009).
Many of the controversies troubling our collective life demand urgent action in the absence of clear and unambiguous expert advice. In dealing with biodiversity loss, pandemic outbreaks, wealth inequalities, or ethnic and gender discrimination, we just don’t have the time to wait for a scientific consensus, which may in some cases never come. As noted by Harry Collins and Robert Evans, “decisions have to be made before the scientific dust has settled, because the pace of politics is faster than the pace of scientific consensus formation” (2002). This is precisely why the “precautionary principle” was introduced by the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development: to allow action notwithstanding scientific controversies.
Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation (principle #15).
Abandoning the dream of a science-based politics, however, raises the question of who should decide when experts fail to (or delay in) reach(ing) a consensus. One option is to refer the conflicts to political authority. Where science fails, politics could provide resolution. From Machiavelli to Schmitt, the imposition of power is the hallmark of the so-called “realist” school of political science (Korab-Karpowicz, 2018). This is especially the case for “states of exception,” as Carl Schmitt calls them, situations of extraordinary tension where ordinary procedures for reaching consensus prove ineffective (Agamben, 2005). Recently, the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has provided an example of such a situation, with political leaders all over the world invoking a “war against an invisible enemy” to justify extraordinary measures taken with little or no deliberation. This solution, however, can be a slippery slope and lead to authoritarian policies.
But if neither might nor right can take care of our controversies, who or what will? The answer, in short, is that we will have to resolve our controversies ourselves. In a democracy it is the privilege and burden of citizens to serve as the court of last resort for matters of acute public concern. To use the words of Walter Lippmann in the The Phantom Public:
It is controversies of this kind, the hardest controversies to disentangle, that the public is called in to judge. Where the facts are most obscure, where precedents are lacking, where novelty and confusion pervade everything, the public in all its unfitness is compelled to make its most important decisions. (Lippmann, 1927, p. 121)
“Unfitness” is the keyword here. Lippmann is a pragmatist and does not for a moment believe that the public could gather and process all the information necessary to have informed opinions and thus make knowledgeable decisions on complicated technoscientific questions:
The public does not know in most crises what specifically is the truth or the justice of the case, and men are not agreed on what is beautiful and good … if it had seriously to crusade for justice in every issue it touches, the public would have to be dealing with all situations at the time. That is impossible. (pp. 56, 57)
This is why the public is only the court of “last resort.” Whenever possible, issues should be composed by the actors directly involved. If the actors succeed in reaching a compromise, then their disagreements
