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

在过去25年中，联邦要求在美国销售的所有新汽车都配备被动约束装置的倡议导致了政府官员、保险公司、汽车管理人员和工程师、公共安全倡导者、消费者团体和其他人之间的激烈辩论。争论的焦点不仅是这样一个裁决的可行性，而且是用户在这些计划中的作用。安全气囊一直被提倡作为一种技术解决方案，以解决那些拒绝系安全带的司机，并被攻击为一种不必要的费用和对那些对安全有自己想法的人的危险威胁。本论文的研究项目将探讨用户如何在各种提案中被描绘，这些概念如何塑造技术的设计，以及其他人如何对这些概念和他们所倡导的技术做出反应。它将展示一些安全技术的设计过程，以规避人机系统中的“不守规矩的用户”。通过分析这场辩论的文件，并采访重要的参与者，该项目将构建安全气囊的社会历史，并检查用户的想法如何塑造汽车设计。

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.