wood construction practices like Japan and Norway. The method is linked to a distinctive type of lumber, a major export of North America. It has also been substantially unchanged for a century and a half suggesting that it is a uniquely qualified solution, showing resistance and resilience during a period of considerable technological change - it behaves like it has a thin notion of function displaying a reliable association between input and output. Over time, critical challenges to this technology has led to gradual adaptations that have added up to decreased functionality in favor of function, organized its usability into certain specific ranges of use, and displaced from the collectively intentioned practice flexibly described in multiple overlapped traditions to the equivocal intention to support a massive technological system. Thomas Hughes (1989) claimed that artifacts are socially malleable when industries are young, but resistant to social influence once they have matured. This description rings true for the history of wooden house construction.
In its early stages, North American light wood frame demonstrated a kind of democracy of design; everybody was an agent promoting a collective intent for innovation. Today, it tolerates local variation and limited appropriation, while binding the builder or consumer into a massive technological system of production. This system includes the unintended use of everything from plantation forestry using non-native species to the regularized experience of uniform ceiling heights in houses. The house construction system has combined the three aspects of design, production, appropriation, and consumption, in substantially different ways over the course of its development, currently embedding them into a large technological framework that integrates all aspects of production and consumption.
Balloon frame, a version of light wood frame, exhibited early in its development entirely different propensities. It was part of an assimilative design process, combining in a myriad of ways the diverse set of frontier construction practices. Frequently, first encounters between cultures create a vibrant middle ground. Builders’ guides focused on the frontier, explaining to the settler these new ways and emphasizing utility, expediency, and efficiency. In the process, the technical code was gradually regularized and codified. These early variations tested their performance against the new utilitarian criteria of the frontier; a frontier that saw an estimated 827,000 new homes built between 1830 and 1850 and an associated redistribution of natural resources unprecedented in history. This was the nineteenth century equivalent of rapid prototyping.
Feenberg’s analytical tool of primary and secondary instrumentalization can identify particular properties and/or effects of the construction system in both its historic and contemporary guises. Feenberg (1999) describes primary instrumentalization as aspects of the universal essence common to all technology; “.. .a historical concept of essence which combines the philosophical and the social scientific perspective.” These tendencies distance the user from the lifeworld. Secondary instrumentalization, reinserts these abstracted technologies into a system of human relations, reconstituting a worldview based in or influenced by technology. Designers are agents of these reconnecting tendencies; often described as social construction.
In the case study, it was necessary to establish a discontinuity between the time before and the time after introduction; this becomes a basis for analyzing any technology. It was necessary to distinguish between two stages of technological development: the Working Design Phase (when most design and social construction occurs) and the Established Design Phase (when design might no longer be tolerated). In most of the analytical categories the artifact operates differently while it is open to modifying influence of design than while it finds itself an established part of a massive system of production and consumption.
Because secondary instrumentalization introduces social aspects, the time-based effects are considerable, however, these displace rather than erase properties. For example, in the case study, initiative is more limited today within the construction system (though the technique allows individual and regional variation), but overall there is more potential for initiative. The technique is simpler and requires less experience, making more people potential builders. Perhaps, one method would be to chart the relative strength of each aspect of instrumentalization in each period. However, this is not always straightforward. Initiative, for instance, remains possible in all periods since the building method is never proscribed or specified in a contract. In some ways it decreases and in other ways it increases.
Frameworks for cultural and other non-quantifiable analysis are, at best, ‘loose fit’ descriptions. They can help us discover and disabuse aspects of bias inherent in description and unravel specific technologies disguised by the ordinariness of everyday life. Both the hybrid metaphor and instrumentalization framework are models that abstract and generalize to suit a worldview. This seems particularly appropriate applied to designing for, as Feenberg says, “Design internalizes social constraints, condensing technical and social relations.” Boundaries between technology and the social or cultural world are porous, making definition and analysis elusive. Good design refuses to grant technology any neutrality or view it as a simple instrument, tool or means to an end.
Interestingly, Feenberg (1999) uses houses and construction as examples of “richly signified technical artifacts” - an area of fruitful philosophical analysis. And again: “The tree conceived as lumber, and eventually cut down, stripped of bark and chopped into boards, is encountered for its usefulness rather than for its manifold interconnections with its environment and the other species with which it normally coexists.”
The history of wood construction in North America can be approximated by three stages. These stages are identified with a wood product: log, plank, and lumber. Lumber is the result of the simple linear extrusion of the sawmill and includes particular parameters such as transport to the mill, forestry management, silvaculture, and land procurement. Each parameter reinforces the tendency in each other to normative practice. Building construction methods were designed based on the end product of the mill. Currently, North American wood frame determines lumber properties that, in turn, determine North American wood production creating an integrated system of production and consumption.
The following short descriptions sort some aspects of wood frame construction into the eight categories of instrumentalization. Each category is part of a pair, one primary and one secondary instrumentalization, Feenberg’s key word for each is italicized. Each category is, in turn, divided into an a, b, and c representing the developmental stages of the technology; ‘a’ is just before its introduction, 18th century, ‘b’ is its working design stage, predominantly the middle half of the 19th century, and ‘c’ its established design stage, 19th century to date. The stages are: a) material of choice is whole wood, in the round or squared into timber, b) material of choice is plank or dimension lumber often only uniform in one dimension, c) material of choice is lumber and sheet plywood of standardized dimensions and properties.