Introduction

Imagine a scene in a hospital. In the intensive care unit, a nurse is taking care of a tiny, premature baby that moves restlessly in the incubator. When the nurse has reassured herself that everything is okay, she installs the camera that watches over the baby in the incubator. The signals from the camera are sent to the central control unit in the hospital and to yet another location, thirty miles from the hospital where, connected by means of telephone cables, the parents of the child try to operate the video-communication system they have received from the hospital. If they can manage, they will be able to see their baby without leaving their living room. A fourth location, not materially connected to the three previously mentioned locations but nevertheless important to this story, is the hospital management room. The manager in charge of the introduction of the Baby Watch, as this video apparatus is called, discusses the risks of legal claims against the hospital in the case of when something appears to go wrong while the parents are recording their child's medical treatment via the Baby Watch. What all of these situations have in common is that they represent different contexts of use and users that are part of a heterogeneous network of actors – people as well as objects – that jointly constitute a new practice in the supervision of premature babies.

In this chapter, we aim to analyse the role of the diverse actors – both human and nonhuman – in the development of this new practice, this hybrid, heterogeneous network. In our analysis, the design and use of a new technology are intimately entwined. The notion of script is relevant to conceptualising the connection of design and use. Akrich (1992) introduced this concept to visualise the way in which innovators’ representations of users shape technological development. In the design phase, actors construct many different images of users and objectify these representations in technological choices. The very act of identifying specific individuals or groups as users may facilitate or constrain the actual role that specific groups of users are allowed to play in shaping the development and use of technologies.