Invoking politics and ethics in the design of information technology: undesigning the design Martin Brigham and Lucas D. Introna Department of Organisation, Work and Technology, Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YX, UK E-mails: m.brigham@lancaster.ac.uk; l.introna@lancaster.ac.uk Abstract. It is a truism that the design and deployment of information and communication technologies is vital to everyday life, the conduct of work and to social order. But how are individual, organisational and societal choices made? What might it mean to invoke a politics and an ethics of information technology design and use? This editorial paper situates these questions within the trajectory of preoccupations and approaches to the design and deployment of information technology since computerisation began in the 1940s. Focusing upon the dominant concerns over the last three decades, the paper delineates an interest in design and use in relation to socio-technical theories, situated practices and actor-network theory. It is argued that each of these approaches is concerned with a particular form of politics that does not explicitly engage with ethics. In order to introduce ethics into contemporary debates about information technology, and to frame the papers in the special issue, it is argued that Levinas’ ethics is particularly valuable in problematising the relationship between politics and ethics. Levinas provides a critique of modernity’s emphasis on politics and the egocentric self. It is from a Levinasian concern with the Other and the primacy of the ethical that a general rethinking of the relationship between politics, ethics and justice in relation to information and communication technologies can be invoked. Key words: design, ethics, information technology, justice, Levinas, other, politics, undesigning Introduction ‘‘Values, opinions and rhetoric are frozen into code’’, so say Bowker and Star (2000) in their book Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences. Their study of the ways in which categories and standards shape and become embedded in a range of classifi- cation systems depicts ‘classification work’ as often invisible. For Bowker and Star, drawing upon the interactionist tradition, the moral and political implications of classification practices are significant because infrastructures embody particular assump- tions and downplay others. That the design of information and communication technologies is vital to the way we live our lives, how work is conducted and how societies are ordered is a self-evident truism. But how are choices made, what kind of knowledge is brought to bear upon ‘classification in the making’, and on what terms the development and deployment of IT is amenable to examination, intervention and reworking remains a prescient issue. Such concerns prefigure a number of questions. What might it mean to invoke a politics and ethics of information tech- nology design? How are the boundaries between design and use delineated? How is the movement between politics and ethics in relation to IT enacted? What practices are conducive and desirable for a political and ethical encounter with IT? These are indeed questions of our time – ones that we suggest deserve urgent, serious and sustained attention. Information and communication technologies are associated with a pressing and under-researched paradox despite the burgeoning literature on tech- nological infrastructures. IT is equated with trans- forming the practices of everyday life, affording new ways of working that are increasingly mediated by technological infrastructures and software packages, but IT systems are also an often taken for granted ‘black-box’, the background ‘furniture’, of our actions. How might this paradox be understood? Does it point to the difficulties of getting to grips with the invisible operations of infrastructures that are increasingly large-scale, standardised and interde- pendent? Does it say something about how evalua- tions are conducted? One of the most discernible characteristics of debates about IT is that systems are often appraised in terms of specific risks, opportuni- ties and effects. Issues and problems arising from Ethics and Information Technology (2007) 9:1–10 Ó Springer 2006 DOI 10.1007/s10676-006-9131-1