ABSTRACT
Why a practical chapter at this point in the book? The earlier chapters argued that software is a made thing, an artefact whose histories, assumptions and affordances are shaping us even as we shape them (Winner 1980; Manovich 2021), and this chapter turns that argument into a more practical method for analysis by bringing together material culture perspectives on artefacts, Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) and socio-technical analyses inspired by science and technology studies (STS) and actor-network theory (Miller 1998, Hodder et al. 1997, Latour 1992). It also picks up on the earlier introduction of critical pathway analysis (CPA) as a pragmatic way to order influences and to reveal the choices that are always being made in the creation and use of software.
