ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some ways of considering the process of artifact making, and some of the ways in which we deal with failures in technical projects, looking especially at contrasts between our cognitive, calculative response to such failed outcomes, and our affective response. The creation of organizational artifacts can then be seen to proceed as the groups directing the organization harness the energy and the resources of the organization in order to create things which they desire. Although it is not usual to look at them in this way, accidents and man-made disasters are closely bound up with the failure of artifacts of one kind or another. Failures of foresight of this kind can be seen to arise from complex forms of information breakdown, usually in an organizational context. Large-scale failures occur when organizations make large-scale technological mistakes. When artifact failures occur, their effects are not normally limited to the material domain, for they create victims.
