Doctoral Dissertation: Behind the Air Bag: Constructing the User, Debating Policy, Designing Technology

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Federal initiatives over the last 25 years to require that all new automobiles sold in the United States be equipped with passive restraints have led to an intense debate between government officials, insurance companies, automobile executives and engineers, public safety advocates, consumer groups, and others. At issue have not just been the feasibility of such a ruling, but the role of the user in these plans. Air bags have been advocated as a technical solution to drivers who refuse to buckle up and attacked as both a needless expense and dangerous threat imposed on people with their own ideas about safety. This dissertation research project will explore how users were portrayed in various proposals, how these conceptions shaped the design of technology, and how others reacted to both these conceptions and the technologies they advocated. It will demonstrate the processes by which some safety technologies have been designed in an effort to circumvent "unruly users" in a human/machine system. By analyzing the documents through which this debate was carried out and interviewing the significant players, the project will construct a social history of the air bag as well as provide an examination of how ideas of the user have shaped automotive design.