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On Being the Right Size: Science, Technology and Scale
A one-day workshop taking place at UCL, 29 April 2015
Location: Gordon House 106
Scholars in the Science and Technology Studies community, broadly construed, have had much to say about specific kinds of scale and ways of scaling. For example, we have asked how measurement scales are built, how science travels from local to global and back again, how laboratories transform microcosm and macrocosm, how models stand for the world, and how big science differs from table-top experiment. Likewise history, sociology and philosophy of technology have much potential to bring scale and scaling into view. But what can we say about scaling in general? What do models, games, photographs, maps, instruments, units, inscriptions, amplifiers and laboratories have in common?
We want to ask: how is scale in science governed? Can, or should, big science ever become small again? What scales should STS and HPS study? Is there too much, or not enough, emphasis on the local and the global? What are the relationships between materiality and scale? Are technologies always implicated in changing scale? Is the human scale the best scale for science?
10.30 Jon Agar, Jean-Baptiste Gouyon, Simon Werrett (STS, UCL)
‘Introduction: Science, technology and scale’
11.00 Andrew Fisher (Visual Cultures Department, Goldsmiths)
‘Photography and scale’
11.30 Jane Insley (Institute of Education, UCL)
‘Models: So what size SHOULD it be? ’
12.00 Charlotte Bigg (CNRS, Paris)
’From the atom to the universe: scalar thinking in the history of science’
12.30 Lunch
1.30 Jack Stilgoe (STS, UCL)
'Geoengineering and the magnification of experiments'
2.00 Megan Barford (Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge)
‘Attention to scale: brass, paper, and Royal Naval hydrography’
2.30 Emma Tobin (STS, UCL)
‘Scale and classification’
3.00 break
3.30 Albena Yaneva (Director of the Manchester Architecture Research Centre, University of Manchester)
‘Scaling in architectural design’
4.00 Mark Miodownik (Professor of Materials & Society, Department of Mechanical Engineering, UCL)
‘The size of things’
4.30 Discussion, chaired by Simon Schaffer (History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge)
5.30 End
The location, Gordon House 106, is on Gordon Street, University College London, and can be found here:
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You are very welcome to attend, but if you are planning on joining us then please email Jon Agar, one of the organisers, so that we can keep track on numbers for room and catering purposes: [log in to unmask]
Organisers on behalf of the STS department:
Jon Agar
Jean-Baptiste Gouyon
Simon Werrett
More information on the STS department can be found here: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sts