Design for prevention and the promises of automated things: two fictional accounts of misanthropic agency from the elevator (lift) to the sexbot

To be sure, a terrible accident is not a material form for allegory that anyone would want to foster. There are allegories, and this is too dreadful to play with. But what is at stake is not the creation of horror. Rather it is about how to think about it and what to do with it when it happens. (Law, 2004:97)

The creative areas of design and fiction writing will be brought together because both imagine the problem John Law sets out above. The promises of safe design are enacted in both fictional and non-fictional accounts, in actual and virtual spaces. Safety is the promise of the designer and an impetus for design. Fiction can be used as a reflection for the practicing socio-technical designer when constructing automated forms of talk.

This paper brings together Colson Whitehead’s novel The Intuitionist (1999) and its account of an elevator crash, their design and maintenance, with a narrative account (by case study) of sexbots to investigate the promises made through a design-for-prevention imperative. Both industrial and digital forms of automation are only related in that they share similar decision-making algorithmic processes. The designer gets caught up in configuring misanthropic agencies involving themselves, the designed artifact and the spaces they both inhabit be that an elevator in a housing block, or a sexbot in an online chat room. I will argue that the territorial agencies of automated technologies have a confining impact on our transient ‘non-places’ (Augé, 1995).

• Author