This thesis presents a pragmatic argument for reconceiving sociology humanistically, proposing that such a reconception can help bring to light certain sources of worth left undetected by the narrowly-defined understandings of value through which academic disciplines are currently being assessed within England. In particular, it suggests that sociology is better conceived and defended not as a disinterested reflector of social reality, but rather as a shifter of perspectives; offering different renderings of social life that demand to be judged on the basis of their utility in helping us cope with that life. It therefore suggests a move away from refining technique towards reviving normative debate about what exactly sociology wishes to achieve, and why it wishes to achieve these things. Three related ends are proposed as substitutes for the redundant one of producing ultimate reflections of social reality. Firstly, the production of empirically-grounded yet imaginatively-rendered forms of transformative knowledge – knowledge aimed at instigating subjective dislocations from tacitly accepted perspectives on social life; secondly, the production of ethical representations of society, in particular those aimed towards the end of demonstrating social interdependence and shared precarity; and thirdly, the generation of narratives of social hope that are both grounded in historical understandings of the past and empirical examinations of the present but nonetheless refuse to see the future as reducible to such understandings, insisting on the subject’s capacity to transcend the conditions through which it is shaped. Ultimately, it argues that sociology’s real value can only be disclosed through replacing its image as a discipline aimed towards providing disinterested social enlightenment with a recognition of itself as a practice both dependent upon, and at its best self-consciously aimed towards, human ends and imperatives.

This thesis presents an ethnographic study of the role of users in user-centered design. It is written from the perspective of science and technology studies, in particular developments in actor-network theory, and draws on the notion of the assemblage from the work of Deleuze and Guattari. The data for this thesis derives from a six-month field study of the routine discourse and practices of user-centered designers working for a multinational microprocessor manufacturer. The central argument of this thesis is that users are assembled along with the new technologies whose design they resource, as well as with new configurations of socio-cultural life that they bring into view. Informing this argument are two interrelated insights. First, user-centered and participatory design processes involve interminglings of human and non-human actors. Second, users are occasioned in such processes as sociotechnical assemblages. Accordingly, this thesis: (1) reviews how the user is variously applied as a practico-theoretical concern within human-computer interaction (HCI) and as an object of analysis within the sociology and history of technology; (2) outlines a methodology for studying users variously enacted within design practice; (3) examines how a non-user is constructed and re-constructed during the development of a diabetes related technology; (4) examines how designers accomplish user-involvement by way of a gendered persona; (5) examines how the making of a technology for people suffering from obesity included multiple users that served to format the designers’ immediate practical concerns, as well as the management of future expectations; (6) examines how users serve as a means for conducting ethnography-in-design. The thesis concludes with a theoretically informed reflection on user assemblages as devices that: do representation; resource designers’ socio-material management of futures; perform modalities of scale associated with technological and product development; and mediate different forms of accountability.