There is interpretative flexibility both in the understanding of technologies and in their design. We should see trajectories of technologies as the result of rhetorical operations, defining the users of artifacts, their uses, and the problems that particular designs solve…
the success of an artifact depends in large part upon the strength and size of the group that takes it up and promotes it. Its definition depends upon the associations that different actors make.
Interpretive flexibility is thus a necessary feature of artifacts, because what an artifact does and how well it performs are the results of a competition of different groups’ claims. Thus the good design of [an artifact] cannot be the move behind its success; good design is instead the result of its success.
