Co-organizers: Chris Bissell c.c.bissell@open.ac.uk, Amy Dahan-Dalmedico Amy.Dahan-Dalmedico@damesme.cnrs.fr
Chair: Amy Dahan-Dalmedico
Commentator: Chris Bissell

The technological use of models has arguably not been investigated by historians of technology to the same extent as scientific modeling has by historians of science. There are significant differences in the way modeling has been – and still is – employed in different scientific and engineering communities, and this session will explore some of them in the period from 1950 onwards. Other overarching themes of the session are the impact of digital (and analog) computing, and the range of scales of technological models.

The session begins with ‘large scale’ papers by Elodie Vieille Blanchard (elodvb@yahoo.fr) and Antoine Picon (apicon@gsd.harvard.edu) which look at technological modeling at the global and urban level. In her paper Global futures: images and mathematical models, Vieille Blanchard considers the computer-based “future studies” of the 1960s, with particular reference to the influence of Jay Forrester’s system dynamics methodology on the Club of Rome Report. She examines the different visions of the world that were developed alongside different approaches to modeling. Picon, in Cybernetics, system theory, cities and architecture 1950-1970 looks at applications of related ideas on a smaller – but still ‘large’ – scale: the urban environments of New York, Pittsburg and Los Angeles, for example. He includes a consideration of the role of the digital computer in architectural design and the often unspoken assumptions that lie behind such computer applications.

Both of these papers consider epistemological aspects of technological modeling, and this theme is developed further in the two other contributions to the session. Chris Dillon (c.r.dillon@open.ac.uk), in Models – what do engineers see in them?, examines how the models that engineers developed of communication, control, and switching systems changed the very language of engineers and their communities of practice in the post-war period. Specific application areas studied include servomechanisms, process control systems, telephone networks and digital computers. Finally, Charles Care’s paper (c.care@warwick.ac.uk), Analog and digital computers in context of use: the computer as modeling machine, concentrates on the role that computers of various sorts have played in technological modeling. In this context he explores explicitly the relationship between models in science and models in technology. He looks at knowledge generation through the use of computers, with examples drawn from aeronautical engineering, weather prediction and oil reservoir modeling, with particular reference to the role of users.

Given the wide range of applications discussed in the papers, a major aim of the session will be to allow sufficient time for fruitful discussion after the presentations, enabling those present to draw some general conclusions about the nature of technological modeling and the way it differs from scientific practise.