I'm interested in how people recover a sense of agency and responsibility in a world of large systems, cyber highways and Internets. The story is usually told as a kind of origin story, where Weiner has this cybernetic idea, mathematicians design computers and use them as communication devices or tools for human-machine interaction, and the bond between people and machines gradually becomes closer. Wiener made great contributions, but engineers could often not tell their stories because they were working on secret projects. I'm suggesting an alternate history of computing that's not one solely of mathematicians and great geniuses. People and machines have always been in some kind of relationship.
People build things for different reasons to solve different problems at particular times.
I'm trying to connect the history of computers to a much longer history of industry and manufacturing, to see computers as control systems and not just as calculating machines. By talking to inventors, researchers, and entrepreneurs, they see that the technical problems aren't always the hardest ones. Making a technology successful requires technical skills, but many other skills as well. We teach them that these are not extraneous or irrational, but that they follow different rationalities from those in science and engineering. These ways of thinking are both learnable and important.