Technology, Space & Society

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, American families negotiated the arrival of a new object in their living rooms. The negotiation was extensive, public, and contested. Furniture had to be rearranged. Family routines shifted. Dinner moved from the kitchen table, where conversation had been unavoidable, to a room where conversation could be — for the first time — deliberately avoided. The new object required darkness to be fully appreciated. It required silence from everyone who wasn't watching. It required that the room be organized around it, furniture angled toward it, lamps repositioned so they didn't produce glare on its surface.

This is not a story about television.

It is a story about what technologies do to the spaces we inhabit — and, by extension, to the social arrangements, power relations, and daily rhythms that those spaces make possible.

This course takes that observation as its starting point. Technologies do not merely function within spaces; they reorganize them. They make certain uses possible and foreclose others. They require spatial accommodations that ripple outward — from the room, to the house, to the neighborhood, to the city — in ways that are often invisible until they are named. The course's task is to name them.

The Question We Will Keep Asking

The course is organized around a single question, which will be written on the board in the first session and remain there for fifteen weeks: How do technologies reshape the spaces we inhabit?

The question sounds simple. It is not. It contains within it a prior question — what counts as a technology? — that scholars have been arguing about for the better part of a century. Langdon Winner, in his canonical 1980 essay "Do Artifacts Have Politics?", argued that technologies are not neutral tools; they embed within their design the social relations and authority structures of the people who built them. A bridge can be built too low to allow buses to pass beneath it, and that design choice can persist for decades, excluding from a public beach the communities who depend on public transit. The bridge is not just a bridge. It is a decision, congealed into concrete.

Consider a more contemporary example. When a dockless bicycle is dropped at a street corner — GPS-enabled, rentable by smartphone, free of any fixed station — it appears, at first, to be a simple convenience. But it is also a spatial intervention. It redistributes curb space. It changes who can reach which jobs. It generates data about urban mobility that may or may not be shared with city governments. It is regulated differently in different cities, which means its spatial consequences are different in different cities. Its design embeds assumptions about who has a smartphone, who has a credit card, who lives in a neighborhood that the company has decided to serve.

I know something about that argument from the inside. The product that became JUMP — the electric bikeshare system that Uber acquired in 2018 — was built by a team I was part of at Social Bicycles. We made choices that had spatial consequences. Some of those consequences we anticipated. Many we did not. The course asks you to hold that insight — that spatial and social consequences are design — and apply it across history, across technologies, and across scales from the living room to the global platform.

Three Analytical Moves

The course's method is borrowed from Science and Technology Studies, a field that developed over the second half of the twentieth century at the intersection of sociology, history, and philosophy. STS asks how technologies come to be the way they are, what social forces shape their design, and what consequences follow from the choices that were made. It also asks who benefits from those choices and who bears their costs. The method can be compressed into three moves.

The first is defamiliarization. We are surrounded by technologies so deeply embedded in our environments that they have become invisible — not because they are unimportant, but because they have been so thoroughly domesticated that we have stopped noticing them. The course will ask you to look again at the familiar: at parking minimums and elevator buttons and WiFi signals and doorbell cameras. Defamiliarization is the act of making the background foreground.

The second move is tracing consequences. Technologies have effects that ripple outward from their point of introduction in ways that are often invisible at the time. The automobile did not just provide personal mobility; it restructured the geometry of cities, created the demand for parking minimums that consumed urban land, and produced the suburban form that required more automobiles to navigate. Tracing these ripples — forward from design decisions, backward from spatial outcomes — is the course's primary analytical activity.

The third move is asking who. Technologies do not just happen to people. They happen differently to different people, along lines of race, class, gender, disability, and geography that are rarely neutral and rarely accidental. Judy Wajcman, in Feminism Confronts Technology, showed that the labor-saving technologies introduced into the postwar American home did not reduce domestic labor; they raised the standard of cleanliness, shifted the labor to a different kind of worker, and were often built on assumptions about who would be doing the work. Asking who — who designed this, who benefits, who bears the cost, who was not in the room when the decision was made — is the course's normative anchor.

The Texts and What They Ask of You

The course's reading list is deliberately eclectic. You will read historians of technology (Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Henry Petroski), sociologists of science and technology (Bruno Latour, Langdon Winner), feminist scholars of domestic space (Lynn Spigel, Dolores Hayden), urbanists (Kenneth Jackson, Jane Jacobs), and contemporary critics of the platform economy (Shoshana Zuboff, Nick Srnicek). You will also read practitioner accounts drawn from my own professional experience and from colleagues who have built products that reshaped urban space.

Each of these texts models a different way of asking the course's central question. Spigel asks it through women's magazines, sitcom scripts, and interior design advertisements. Jackson asks it through mortgage records, highway appropriations, and zoning codes. Latour asks it through the sociology of scientific facts and the enrollment of nonhuman actors into human networks. These are not interchangeable methods; they produce different answers, and part of the course's purpose is to develop your capacity to choose the right tool for the question in front of you.

Three concepts from STS are introduced formally in Week 3 and deployed throughout the rest of the course.

The Social Construction of Technology (SCOT), developed by Pinch and Bijker, argues that the form a technology takes is not determined by technical logic alone. Technologies go through a period of "interpretive flexibility," during which different social groups attach different meanings to them and push for different designs. The bicycle in the 1880s meant something different to safety-conscious middle-class women than it did to young men performing athletic feats; those different meanings shaped the subsequent design of the bicycle itself.

Actor-Network Theory (ANT), associated above all with Bruno Latour and Michel Callon, pushes further: not only are technologies shaped by social forces, but technologies themselves become actors that shape what humans can do. A speed bump "acts" to slow cars. A door-closer "acts" to keep doors closed. To understand a technology is to map the entire network of human and nonhuman actors that must be enrolled and aligned for it to function.

Domestication theory, developed by Roger Silverstone and his colleagues, focuses on the household as the site where technologies are made meaningful. Technologies do not arrive in homes fully formed and immediately accepted. They pass through stages of appropriation (acquiring), objectification (placing in the home), incorporation (integrating into routines), and conversion (using to signal identity to others). Each stage involves negotiation, resistance, and adaptation that is as consequential as any engineering decision made in the design lab.

These frameworks are tools, not verdicts. No single framework captures everything that is interesting about a given technology-space relationship, and all of them have their critics. The course's position is that frameworks are most valuable when you can hold multiple of them simultaneously — applying SCOT to understand how a technology's meaning was contested, then shifting to ANT to map the network of actors required to stabilize it, then using domestication theory to track how it was integrated into everyday life.

The Arc of the Course

The course moves in three broad arcs.

The first arc (Weeks 1–6) establishes the method through historical cases. We begin with the television and the living room — a transformation recent enough to be culturally legible, distant enough to be analytically tractable. We move through the STS frameworks, the automobile and urban form, the telephone and the threshold between public and private, and the personal computer and domestic labor. Each case deepens the methodological toolkit while introducing the specific arguments of that week's readings.

The second arc (Weeks 8–12) turns to the contemporary. The smartphone, platform urbanism, micromobility, ambient AI, and remote work are all technologies in the process of reshaping space right now. The analytical frameworks developed in the first arc are brought to bear on cases where the outcomes are not yet settled — where you, as a researcher and practitioner, can still intervene.

The third arc (Weeks 13–15) asks the normative question that the preceding analysis has earned the right to ask: what should architects, planners, product designers, and policymakers do with what they know about how technologies reshape space? The question is not naive — the course has spent twelve weeks establishing why it is hard — but it is urgent. Week 14's session on designing the response is the payoff for everything that came before it.

A Note on the Practitioner Perspective

This course is taught by someone who has been on both sides of the questions it asks. I have built technology that reshapes urban space; I have watched those reshapings produce consequences I did not predict; I have had to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty that no academic framework fully resolves. That experience is the course's primary practitioner resource, and it will be made available throughout — not as a substitute for the scholarly literature, but as a complement to it.

I am telling you this not to claim special authority — the scholars on this syllabus know things about technology, space, and society that I do not — but to be transparent about the course's epistemological position. Theory without practice tends to be too abstract to act on. Practice without theory tends to repeat its own mistakes. The course is designed to move between them, using each to sharpen the other.

What We Will Ask of the Living Room

In the first session, I will show you a photograph. It is a picture of an American living room from approximately 1953, taken as television was spreading into middle-class homes. The furniture is arranged around a set. The room has the look of a space in transition — organized for a new center of gravity but not quite settled into it yet.

I will ask you what you see. I will not tell you what to see. Part of the course's purpose is to train the kind of vision that would let you look at a photograph of a room and see not just furniture and objects but the social relations, the design decisions, the spatial politics, and the historical forces that the room contains.

At the end of the semester, in Week 15, I will show you the same photograph. What you see then — and what you are able to say about it — will be the measure of what the course accomplished.

We begin with a living room. We will end, I hope, with a much larger sense of what a living room is.