Turning Controversies into Questions of Design: Prototyping Alternative Metrics for Heathrow Airport

Public controversies about techno-scientific issues such as food safety and environmental pollution have been extensively studied by scholars of science, technology and society. Classic work in this feld has highlighted the political and epistemic aspects of such controversies, focusing on the ways in which knowledge becomes political when disagreements about seemingly technical issues like the above are made public through media reporting, activist mobilisation, court hearings, government consultations and so on (Nelkin 1997; Wynne 1992). More recently, authors such as Braun & Whatmore (2010) and Marres (2012) have insisted on the important role that materials and technologies play in the enactment of controversies about techno-scientifc issues in social 95 turning controversies into questions of design and public life. Building upon this literature, this chapter ofers methodological and theoretical refections on the project of turning public controversies into occasions for and questions of design. Tese refections are the outcome of a three-year-long research project that investigated and engaged with a controversy over aircraf noise at Heathrow airport in London (Nold 2017). I describe the process of coming to understand the infrastructures that were at stake in the Heathrow controversy, and of designing prototypes to support the formation of new socio-technical collectives around the issues. I argue that such designled approaches have the potential not only to help us understand but also to intervene in public controversies about science and technology.