Script Analysis

Script analysis, developed by Madeleine Akrich with Bruno Latour, treats technological artefacts like texts. When designers build a device, they inscribe a 'script' into it—a set of assumptions about who the users will be, what skills and motives they have, and how the world around the device is arranged—and the artefact then prescribes roles and conduct for the people and things it encounters. 'De-scription' is the analyst's method of reading that script back out of the object and comparing the user the designer projected with the user who actually appears, revealing the often invisible politics built into ordinary things.