Script Analysis
Also known as: De-scription analysis, Technological script analysis, Inscription 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.
Key highlights
- Provides a precise, object-centred method for surfacing the usually invisible assumptions and politics designers inscribe into artefacts.
- Symmetrically connects the design side and the use side, refusing to study either intended or actual use in isolation.
- Supplies a sharp shared vocabulary—inscription, prescription, subscription, de-inscription, anti-program—for analysing human-artefact negotiation.
- Reveals how moral and political work is delegated to material objects, illuminating the agency of non-humans without mystifying it.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use script analysis when you want to expose the assumptions, roles, and politics built into a specific artefact and to understand the relationship between how it was designed and how it is actually used. It is ideal for close, object-centred case studies—a device, interface, default setting, or piece of infrastructure—where you can access both the design side (documents, designers) and the use side (ethnographic observation, interviews). It assumes artefacts can be read semiotically as carriers of inscribed programs and that you can study real use, not just intended use. It is less appropriate for explaining large-scale technological change, for aggregate or quantitative questions, or when neither the design rationale nor real-world use can be observed.
Strengths & limitations
- Provides a precise, object-centred method for surfacing the usually invisible assumptions and politics designers inscribe into artefacts.
- Symmetrically connects the design side and the use side, refusing to study either intended or actual use in isolation.
- Supplies a sharp shared vocabulary—inscription, prescription, subscription, de-inscription, anti-program—for analysing human-artefact negotiation.
- Reveals how moral and political work is delegated to material objects, illuminating the agency of non-humans without mystifying it.
- Its fine-grained, single-artefact focus does not scale easily to systems, infrastructures, or long-run technological change.
- Robust de-scription needs access to both designers' rationales and field observation of use, which is demanding and not always possible.
- The textual metaphor can be over-extended, treating designers as authoring coherent scripts when design is often messy, plural, and contradictory.
- It can underplay the wider economic, organisational, and structural forces that lie behind any particular inscription.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
What is the difference between inscription and de-scription?
Inscription is what designers do: they build assumptions, scenarios, and prescribed user roles into the artefact, so that the object 'carries' a program of action. De-scription is what the analyst does: reading that inscribed script back out of the artefact and, crucially, comparing it with how the technology is actually used. Inscription happens in design; de-scription is the interpretive method that recovers and tests it against real practice.
How does script analysis relate to actor-network theory?
It is a core ANT method. Akrich and Latour's shared vocabulary applies ANT's principle of generalised symmetry to artefacts: objects delegate and prescribe action just as people do, and analysing scripts is one concrete way of describing how human and nonhuman actants are assembled into networks. Script analysis can be seen as ANT focused tightly on the artefact-user relationship, using a semiotic toolkit to make that relationship analysable.
What are subscription, de-inscription, and anti-programs?
Subscription is when users take up and comply with the roles the artefact's script assigns them. De-inscription is when they resist, remove, or rewrite the prescribed program—disabling a feature, hacking a device, using it against its design. An anti-program is a program of action that runs counter to the one inscribed in the artefact, as when users actively work to defeat what the designer built in. Together they describe the ongoing negotiation between artefacts and their users.
Sources
- 1.Akrich, M. (1992). The de-scription of technical objects. In W. E. Bijker & J. Law (Eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society (pp. 205-224). MIT Press.ISBN 9780262023382
- 2.Akrich, M., & Latour, B. (1992). A summary of a convenient vocabulary for the semiotics of human and nonhuman assemblies. In W. E. Bijker & J. Law (Eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society (pp. 259-264). MIT Press.ISBN 9780262023382
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Script Analysis. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/science-technology-studies/script-analysis-technology