While Bruno Latour’s Aramis or Love of Technology is chock full of interesting lessons about factors that affect project outcomes, three particular elements attract my attention in terms of distributed decision making within a project network. Latour employs an unusual approach, which he calls scientification, to provide the reader with a well-rounded view of project stakeholders’ perspectives. He also ascribes human characteristics to nonhuman objects and ideas (NHOIs), proposing their inclusion in a monistic Actor-Network Theory. Finally, he calls into question the very definition of reality by making a distinction between concepts, objects, and the institutions manifested from those concepts. These three aspects shed light on Latour’s assertion that successful projects give agency to NHOIs and focus on the translations and transactions between society and technology, rather than looking for ways in which society creates technology or technology creates objects. I believe a case can be made to show, further, that persistent information seeking better informs decision making, which contributes significantly to project success.

Scientification
The approach Latour takes to relating the story and lessons from the Aramis project is instrumental in revealing the decision-making difficulties that led to the program’s failure to launch. He calls his approach “scientification,” relating true events while retaining creative license to reveal the factors that contributed to Aramis’s demise. The narrative form serves as a mechanism for explaining the events and their effects on the outcome of the project, as well as a methodology in and of itself.

Latour uses the narrative to examine the actions of multiple constituents of the Aramis project. Each of the stakeholders provides insight into the decision making that led to pulling the plug on the Aramis project. We can consider these accounts to be data sets of a sort, along with the project outcome. It is interesting to note that the collection, analysis, and discussion of this data creates the narrative, which is unusual in post-mortem studies.

Latour provides the perspectives of Aramis project constituents (including those of the people studying what went wrong) through first-person accounts of what and how events transpired. Project constituents also comment on the lack of knowledge regarding who made certain decisions and why those decisions were made. These accounts serve as lenses (or, as Kuhn would characterize them, paradigms) through which the program is viewed over time. As the narrative evolves, Latour’s Holmes-and-Watson-style quest to identify the Aramis murderer unfolds, adding further personification to a project failure.
Ultimately, the narrative paints a picture reminiscent of the blind men and the elephant.

In other words, Aramis died because the people involved did not have a comprehensive and consistent understanding of what the project was and what its measures of success should be. Each stakeholder had different motivations for his or her vision of what Aramis is. For example, the mayor looked to Aramis to appease dissatisfied citizens. The engineers TKTKTK. And the Much of this confusion could have been avoided had a systematic approach to decision making been implemented across constituencies. Instead, decisions were so opaque that it could not be determined by most of the people involved in the program who pounded the final nail into Aramis’s coffin.

An analysis of each of the actors to whom Latour gives voice in the narrative demonstrates how the lack of appropriate information seeking contributed to decisions made without regard for factors of import to various constituencies. Each party concerned itself with its own vision of what Aramis should be, without accounting for the premises and expectations of others.

Latour describes in detail how he came to settle on scientification as the format for his research of the Aramis project. This approach emphasizes Latour’s desire to develop a representation of the elephant from the combined accounts of each observer. This methodology implies an omniscience that clearly was not present during the project. However, it speaks to several of Latour’s points.

First among these points, the format exposes discrepancies in understanding what Aramis means to various parties. For example, the project was a way for TTKTK to TKTKTK, while it served as a TKTKTK to TKTKTK. Certainly, decisions based on information that does not account for these varied meanings are unlikely to contribute to a project’s success. In fact, success is not even consistently envisaged. On the other hand, failure is easy to identify—Aramis does not exist today (except as a museum exhibit).

Personification
Secondly, Latour advocates broad personification by crafting a story about a transportation project that did not materialize, despite significant investment of time, money, labor, and emotion. The story is related with first-person accounts from a network of related actors whose decisions affected the trajectory of the Aramis project, as well as those who are trying to understand why the project never came to fruition. Included in this cast of characters is the Aramis project itself, an engineering student, the student’s mentoring professor, and a set of records that document—with first-person quotes—interviews with project stakeholders.

Latour’s personification of the Aramis project helps the reader ascertain how different actors ascribe meaning to it. The personification reveals a different way in which the project might have been considered, which likely would have yielded decisions based on more representative information. Had the various actors thought of the project as a living being, the many facets of its existence would have been easier to recognize and contemplate.

The phenomenon under consideration is distributed agency beyond human actors within a project network. Such a project network includes a hierarchy of knowledge and power, particularly in the authority to make decisions. And project decisions ultimately affect all actors in the network.

Despite the case-study nature of the work, the expansion of agency to NHOIs, can be related easily to other collaborative projects with which the reader is familiar. In other words, the proposition to extend agency to NHOIs is generalizable.

The narrative mode of expression Latour employs has overt, as well as subtle, implications for the reader. The first-person narrative, particularly by NHOIs, explicitly indicates accordance of agency. Perhaps more stealthy is Latour’s word choice; for example, he personifies non-human objects by using the articles he and she, rather than it.

Also, since the narrative is created as the research is conducted, the political backdrop is well documented, on national as well as local and institutional levels. The bureaucracy encountered by the engineer and his mentor contributes to their understanding of the complexity of “doing science.”

From a recordkeeping perspective, we note that the documents examined as evidence don’t encapsulate everything that contributed to the project failure. It is only when the engineer finds a particular document that he can make the conclusion and solve the mystery.

Latour proposes that non-human objects and ideas (NHOIs) are or can be active agents of impact on others and the environment, based on scripts that are symmetrical to patterns of behavior. This goes beyond the typical anthropomorphism seen in literature that attributes human characteristics to animals, ascribing motivation and emotion. Latour personifies machines, objects, even ideas and projects in this case-study-as-narrative novel.

Reality
The program went on for TKTK years. And, it would seem by the accounts from engineers and administrators, incremental progress occurred. However, as Latour exposes in the style of Thomas Kuhn, continuous progress does not manifest into a successful project. It never manifests. Just because the project seemed to progress with the development of specifications and prototypes, in the end there was no progress made. In fact, the resources directed toward the project may have been better allocated to other initiatives with more favorable outcomes.

I find it difficult to differentiate between Aramis as the project idea, and Aramis as the project system. It’s certainly true that the concept of a single person transport system was conceived and discussed. However, Aramis doesn’t exist today. Or does it? The idea is still there, we’re reading and writing about it. The concept is real, but the manifestation and implementation does not exist. It would be helpful to define real such that it accommodates such definitional nuances.

Perhaps as an aside, or maybe even central to any attempt I make to rethink this paper, Latour is questioning the very essence of an idea as reality. He says that Aramis was murdered, yet he also says that Aramis really never existed, as the various constituents never have a clear vision of how the idea should manifest as a real entity. I would imagine I could explore this conundrum in terms of Kuhn and his paradigms, and TKTK and his notion of reality and perception. Because the project never materialized, it does not exist as an entity. In Kuhnian terms, an entity is evaluated by a community with a shared recognition of achievements, agreement on TKTK, and a common language with which to speak about it. It’s clear at the end of the book that the constituents of the project are not viewing it from the same paradigm, because the descriptions of the project have not been altered to accommodate the needs and abilities of others.

Was Aramis real? Latour says no. This seems a bit hasty to me in that the definition Latour uses excludes ideas from the domain of real. An idea must manifest physically to exist in reality. Certainly, there was an idea for a personal transport system that would be superior to existing mass-transit systems. Whether that idea qualifies as something real is an area better suited for debate by philosophers.

We know this, because there exist other personal transit systems (even one created by one of the Aramis partners)

In an effort to frame the project in a way that respects Latour’s definition—yet acknowledges the existence of Aramis as an unmanifested idea—I draw an analogy that, admittedly, will strike some as being in poor taste. If we consider Aramis as a fetus, the decision whether to abort it or carry it to term obviously raises issues in a variety of realms, including religion, medicine, economics, TKTKTK. For an individual to make such a decision, she must have certain types of information, and ascribe value to each type of information she has and acquires. Thus, the fact that she has the opportunity to decide necessitates weighing the options.

To translate in terms of Aramis, the fact that a decision could be made to abort the project creates a scenario in which options must be weighed. And the weighing of these options requires information from a variety of realms, including engineering, marketing, finance, human resources, and policy. Decisionmaking in the development of Aramis, however, remained localized within each area. Thus, the ability to weigh options was severely compromised to the point that each group functioned with a completely different set of criteria for making decisions, as well as a different set of factors by which value and priorities were determined.

“If we say that a successful project existed from the beginning because it was well conceived and that a failed project went aground because it was badly conceived, we are saying nothing. We are only repeating the words “success” and “failure”, while placing the cause of both at the beginning of the project, at its conception… All projects are stillborn at the outset. Existence has to be added to them continuously, so they can take on body, can impose their growing coherence on those who argue about them or oppose them.”

The engineering intern questions whether the project was flawed at its outset. The professor explains that the project was, indeed, feasible. Rather the limitations of perspectives and the decisionmaking resulting from limited information killed Aramis.

NHOIs
Latour’s proposed solution in situations like the Aramis project is inclusion of nonhuman objects and ideas (NHOIs) in Actor-Network Theory .