The relationship of humans and technology has changed significantly during the last two decades. It has become closer and multiplex—that is, technology has moved closer to the human body and their interconnections have become entangled and diverse. In this vein, technology is envisioned as being able to support or assist human beings more profoundly than ever before. This change has occurred incrementally and is still in progress. It has led to a diversification of possible application areas, a shift in the landscape of innovation projects, and a different perception of technological possibilities in general.

The reasons for this change are manifold. Big societal trends like globalization, individualization, disruptive technological innovations, and demographic pressures are no doubt important for explaining the change in human–technology relations. All of them push political agendas and channel research funds. But when it comes to an understanding of these transformations, they only yield a universal interpretive frame. The recently enforced closeness and multiplexity of human–technology relations are much better understood when taking into account the expanding connectivity, the distribution and increase of computational power, and the plummeting costs of material components and production. Their combination has a high impact on further technological possibilities, but also on the perceptions, needs, and expectations related to technology.

However, this is still only a part of the story. The shift of the relevant relationships is not only a response to such technical or social pressures outside of innovation projects. It is also an inside job. The myriad micro-processes unfolding in the world’s engineering laboratories, in thousands of projects, and in the corporations’ research and development departments day by day bring forth different and new relations of humans and technologies. Political claims, technological possibilities, funding interests, scientific progress, legal regulations, cultural images, or market-driven demands no doubt influence them deeply. But societal expectations and demands with regard to technology are themselves profoundly shaped by the very form of organization, the underlying beliefs, and the approaches used in the relevant projects. Thus, the internal reason, as it were, for the observable shift is the advent of a different style of developing technology. This book will argue that the idea of support dwells at the center of this shift. It has spawned technological devices that are conceptualized and built with the explicit intention to serve the needs of individuals at work and in everyday life. The objective of this volume is to expound how this is done in detail and what needs to be considered to be able to proceed in a successful as well as responsible way.

Usually, this is considered as the domain of human–machine interaction (HMI). Yet this approach is not equipped to handle the practical, ethical, social, and also technical issues involved. The main lines of this classic program are confined to the interaction of separate units—albeit we are dealing with different forms of entanglement already that blur habitual boundaries and give rise to hybrid entities. Thus, the crucial difference made by a technology that is expected to support, assist, or help people remains obscure when simply seen through the lens of HMI. In contrast, conceiving any human–machine or human–computer interaction and collaboration as support relation gives way to a new approach that certainly draws on the rich tradition of HMI but advances beyond its limitations.

Up to now, discussions about support technologies—from autonomous robots to monitoring systems, wearables, and implants, both in forms of simple tools and complex gadgetry—are preoccupied with engineering issues. It is supposed that if the invented devices are intended to support people, they will do so automatically. This is misleading. No engineering and no design can stipulate the purpose of a device uniquely and unequivocally. A technical invention has to be understood as only one part of a wider support system that also comprises organizational, physical, ethical, legal, and cognitive components. Therefore, the future challenge in research, construction, implementation, and deployment of such systems is twofold. On the one hand, theories and concepts have to be developed accordingly in order to generate fresh, diverse, and surprising perspectives on the relevant problems. On the other hand, new methods and forms of collaboration and evaluation are required to integrate and implement these ideas—in other words, to provide the requisite contexts in which they might grow and get the chance to be cherished and become successful.

This book brings together scholars from heterogeneous disciplines and research fields like biomechanics, engineering, social science, psychology, law, and philosophy to meet this twofold challenge. It integrates both different conceptual perspectives and issues of interdisciplinary development in one volume and sometimes even within single chapters. Since it tries to account for the complex and intertwined technical, social, cognitive, and ethical contexts of technology development and design, this volume gives an idea of how responsible research and innovation is currently realized in developing support technologies. Strictly speaking, the whole endeavor is not about bringing technology to the people. It is about finding ways to design and evaluate technology in tune with the people so that it finds its way to the them in the course of the process—and vice versa.

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“Developing Support Technologies” is not just some title for this book but rather signifies a research program in a nutshell. The following explanation of the ideas and associations of this title will unfold its main characteristics and substantiate the book’s main purpose as well as some of its contents and contentions.

1 Developing—A New Field, a Form of Design/Construction, and Transdisciplinarity

“Developing Support Technologies” has a double meaning that must be considered. On the one hand, “developing” has an active meaning in the sense of bringing technologies forth by designing/constructing, building, and evaluating them. This refers to the setting that there are teams of developers, mostly within departments of profit or non-profit organizations, who work on the implementation of concrete technical solutions for certain specified applications and are preoccupied with managing technical uncertainties [Moh17, Ger15]. On the other hand, “developing” refers to a developing field, a new and therefore necessarily incomplete and sometimes fragile strand of technology and its accompanying societal and organizational uncertainties. This refers to support technologies as a developing area within society in general and engineering in particular [Ois10, Bin17].

The twofold understanding of the title unites the two scientific cultures of engineering on the one hand and the social sciences and humanities on the other. Depending on their scientific background, people read the title in one of these two different meanings. The observable division of work between them does also transpire roughly along these lines. Social science and humanities are more focused on the developing field or certain parts of it and ascertain the accompanying structures and their societal embeddings, while engineering pays more attention to finding feasible and reproducible technical principles that lead to viable, reliable, and tangible material results. Although this kind of division of labor and interest with regard to technology exists, these two groups of disciplines have been getting closer recently since it became obvious that support technologies need to function technically as well as socioculturally. A device that does not work in a technical sense will not be accepted, but a device that triggers fear or requires specialized knowledge or clothing will not “work” either—or will only be accepted under certain conditions or by particular groups. To be sure, this holds for any technology, but the advent of support technologies (also called assistance technologies prematurely) has altered the relevant perspectives. The sociocultural embedding of technology has now become explicit. It is not only accounted for in hindsight but before and during development. The social sciences and humanities are now considered as an important part of the development process more frequently—many remaining obstacles notwithstanding [Vis15].

To develop technology proper has been and still is, to be sure, the work of engineers. They conceive, design, construct, test, and improve composite devices, machines, and systems until they meet the defined requirements. But when it comes to support technologies, this classic form of development is expanded. First, the focus on people with their impression on what counts and their expression of demands alters the technical search for suited materials, proper joints, or adequate programming and favors quickly adaptable devices and simple, intelligible controls. However, the requisite requirements can not be defined once and for all. They are refined and redefined during development on many levels [Suc07, p. 278]. Second, the sequence of development from conception to implementation is not fixed or linear anymore but supplanted by parallel and circular processes. Classic waterfall models of project management have not disappeared, but they fulfill a different function: They provide a rough orientation and legitimize the approach vis-à-vis third parties, like investors and funding agencies. Yet progress in the actual everyday work of research and development is not achieved by sticking to some plan. Mixing up the diverse structures and managing their dissonance allows for an organizational responsiveness [Sta09] that is part and parcel of developing support systems. Third, an augmentation of classic development occurs simply because many more diverse people are involved than before—with various disciplinary backgrounds but also without any academic interest: especially potential users, corporate groups, businesses, social media publics, and further stakeholders.

In short, developing support technologies involve/involves participation, interdisciplinarity, and new organizational forms [Bro15]. The true concept for this threefold augmentation of classical development processes is transdisciplinarity: New forms of collaboration have to be found between various scientific disciplines and also between them and potential users, interested citizens, and project partners. To sum up, speaking of developing support technologies entails a double perspective and transdisciplinary approaches to collaboration.

2 Support—Different Forms, Structural Properties, and Antithesis to Substitution

The term “support” might sound a little odd in times when most technologies in this vein are labeled as “assistive.” Most of the time these two are used synonymously, but their difference matters. In our conception, support is the generic term. Assistance and help are particular subcategories of support that require distinctive situational structures [Kar17]. Assistance occurs when a task is divided into subtasks and the situationally participating entities, e.g., human individuals and technical devices, are assigned different subtasks in a complementary fashion. Think of the assistant of a CEO or the assistant devices built into modern cars as examples of such a complementary form of support. A tool, in contrast, does not “assist” its user. Even just saying it sounds awkward. Yet there is no doubt that a tool provides support. Also, a mother does not “assist” her children but supports or even helps them wherever possible.

Whether a gadget assists or helps is negotiable and proves to be crucial for its design and acceptance. An exoskeleton enabling a movement that otherwise would be impossible does not assist the individual but rather helps, because it is granted the control over the activity to constitute the movement after all—when help is understood as a form of support that passes the control of the activity in question to the helping entity. When a different exoskeleton is designed to decrease musculoskeletal stress, it supports an activity that could also be performed without it. In this case, neither exactly “help” nor “assistance” do apply for a proper characterization of the unfolding process. Still, it is providing support.

Two general structural properties of support situations (comprising assistance and help) are observer dependence and asymmetric relations. If technology development is attentive to human needs and societal acceptance, it must not ignore that the provision of support lies in the eye of the beholder. This concerns questions about who or what is supporting whom but also whether somebody is assigned support or rather asks for it. Interests, interpretations, and contextual conditions of the observing agencies (i.e., individuals, groups, organizations or other social systems, maybe robots) might lead either to a fierce rejection or to a passionate use of the support system. The other point in case is asymmetry. The development of support technologies must be aware that any support introduces some asymmetry between the supporting and the supported unit, which cannot simply be programmed and settled purposefully in advance [Suc07, pp. 268–269]. Which form of asymmetry prevails in the end can only be identified in frequent field tests and painstaking observation of real use cases in the wild. Often, the time factor of development projects thwarts such a thorough investigation. Yet, first steps into this direction can be clearly recognized. The importance of iteration and external feedback for constructing both responsibly according to human demands and successfully with respect to acceptance has already been realized indeed—albeit there is still way to go for a wider acknowledgment.

In addition to the distinction of different forms of support and the structural properties of support situations, there is a third significant aspect of the “support” component in the book title. Support is, as it were, the antithesis to substitution. Until recently, the sometimes hidden but mainly overt curriculum and objective of technology development has been automation, that is, the substitution of human workforce by machines. The reasons were economic in most cases, like increased productivity, effectivity, and efficiency but also better product quality, less mistakes, improved ergonomic conditions, and not least, to be sure, honorable ambitions to spare humans doing dangerous, risky, and strenuous work.

Many positive effects of automation could be enumerated, and the downsides are also well known [For15, Car14]. It remains a moot point, whether the positive and negative aspects of automation balance each other or not. However, there is an intriguing issue that is more constructive in nature than any debates about loss or gain of jobs. It concerns less the paradoxes, glitches, or unintended effects of automation but rather its pragmatic and practical limits. Certainly, there are a lot of engineers and entrepreneurs who expect that someday any task and activity can be automated. Maybe they will be proven right some day, but this is not the case in point at all. The crucial question is, how we should invest our time and resources to find adequate solutions for the limits and problems we currently face.

Engineering research in automation remains important and will no doubt continue. But it should not happen in expense of finding solutions that integrate the skills and awareness of humans with suitable technology. It is important to note that this “integration” exceeds the ideas of interaction and collaboration prevailing in automation engineering. Investing in support technologies receives rightly more attention because when it comes to developing new technology, the substitutionalist paradigm has reached certain limits. Many tasks and activities will not be amenable to automation for a long time to come. For example, anybody who has experienced existing robots for elderly care does immediately recognize this. By implication, human beings will remain pivotal for value creation in plants as well as other formal organizations. Physical skills and human awareness will become even more important in future value chains. Whatever the hopes projected into some indeterminate future: with respect to complex assembly tasks, evaluation, sensorimotor skills, judgment, discretion, the recognition of opportunities, diversity, quick adaptability, heedful perception of weak signals, or situational awareness human beings will remain indispensable.

In short, developing support technologies is/are contingent on a closer inspection of the structural conditions of support and their subtle nuances. Support is the proper answer to the practical limits of automation and to the substitution of human work. To sum up, developing support technologies entails to realize that the creation of value and values as well as the evaluation of situations and opportunities cannot abstain from cognition, that is, both awareness and sensorimotor skills.

3 Technologies—Innovation, Customization, and Modularity

Support systems transcend mere technological devices that are devised to assist or support human activities. Yet, the focus on developing support technologies is crucial. Having a techno-material structure available or at least imagining some materially tangible device allows to summon all interested participants effectively [Sta89]. It provides a powerful pretense to think about the sociotechnical design of support systems. Other existing forms of support in society—like neighborhood help, emotional and financial support, or assistive functions in hierarchies—lack this summoning material “thing.” Presumably, this corresponds to the lack of studies that examine the internal structure of support situations more closely. Studies of “social support” [Hou88] have been preoccupied with structural conditions and individual effects of providing support and less with the inner functioning and patterning of support situations proper. Considering support from the perspective of technology urges new perspectives on structure and process of support in general.

Technologies transcend isolated devices. They involve networks of people, skills, material things, certain knowledge, and particular stances to the world [Mac99]. The technical devices in these networks seem like reliable islands of functioning causality that are intimately integrated in a scaffolding of unreliable components. Thus, the concept of “techno-logy”—and not simply: “technics.” The Greek word logos implies a specific form of reason that accompanies the technics (though not necessarily philosophical reason as a universal). There is always a peculiar logic that pervades technical gadgets and their causal functioning. Next to this “grammar” of technology, there is also a pragmatic knowledge. The term techno-logy indicates that knowledge about construction principles, interaction, and handling is an integral part of its functioning. Finally, technologies are surrounded by a particular wording before, during, and after their development: for example, by justifications and policies, the engineering and design parlance, or the typical marketing vocabulary. In this vein, techno-logy incorporates the syntax, pragmatics, and semantics of a causally constructed material structure that is expected to produce certain determined effects repeatedly and reliably [Ram07, p. 45].

Exactly this societal embedding of technologies also distinguishes mere inventions that constantly pop up in laboratories, garages, and institutions on the one hand and durable, accepted, and disseminated structures called innovations on the other [Ram10]. Any path to innovation needs to be paved through the muddy grounds of society. Previously, this has been done unconsciously and in passing. In developing support technologies, this aspect is brought to mind explicitly and allows to account for it from the outset. This is not a guarantee for innovation and success but nonetheless gives new design options and some leverage in a process that has been considered stochastic so far.

Technologies are both about products and production. To develop support technologies means to develop products that people and organizations really want. At the same time, it means to develop technologies that are deployed in the production of products and become part of value chains and production processes—not only in the conventional sense of industrial production but also in the unconventional, generic sense of production, which includes the production of services and private DIY production. The switch to the idea of support tightens the intimate connection of these two aspects.

One of the most salient effects of the support paradigm is the approaching of the human body by technology [Vis03]. This makes any technical product also accessible, deployable, and potentially beneficial for production processes, which are transformed in consequence. From there, new forms of technical products and even innovations can arise. The distant machine hall in which products are produced far removed from everyday life is losing the importance it had since the industrial revolution. The German term “Industrie 4.0,” cyber-physical systems, sociotechnical systems, or digitization of production are all expressions of this transformation. Citizen science, the democratization of production, or the character of the “prosumer” characterize the same issues from the opposite side. The same smart gadgets that are used in daily life are now integrated into organized work processes and production plants. An exoskeleton might help the residents of a nursing home to maintain some autonomy but can also be used by the personnel to manage their work load and reduce physical strain.

The proceeding (mass) customization of products can likewise be linked to the idea of support. The major response to customization demands is no doubt automation. Today, it is possible to specify the own preferences for a product online and to thereby trigger an automated process in some machine park to produce the desired product that is then automatically packaged and dispatched. Three issues are important in this scenario. First, support technologies need not necessarily operate in the proximity of human individuals. They can be distributed over time and space. Second, support does not necessarily preclude substitution. In the described case the customer is supported to design its own product (within certain limits) while the corporation substitutes human workforce. Third, there are moments in this automated process, for example, quality control, that are difficult to automate. Furthermore, there are also sectors where customization depends completely on human skill, for example, the construction and adaptation of prostheses, many forms of surgery, haircuts, all forms of nursery, or most products of construction industry, especially the completion of the interior. The people involved in such customization procedures are already supported by proper software or (smart as well as classical) tools but there is much more potential, in particular with respect to physical support.

A last facet of this unfoldment of the volume title is the necessary plural of “technologies” in connection to support. It should have become clear that support itself cannot be automated. It is the customized product per se because it involves and generates hybrid entities that merge certain activities, human bodies, technical devices, perceptions, norms, and social situations. That is, there will always exist many suitable support solutions for diverse activities and contexts—but also for seemingly identical activities and contexts. The latter points to another crucial engineering challenge in developing support technologies: to achieve adaptability and modularity. Since the hybrid combination of the human body, its perceptional capabilities, and technical equipment has to be considered as unique in every situation, the standardization prospects are disappointing. Support technologies are thus drivers of devising new forms of technical adaptability to bodies, perceptions, and situations with the objective to form one integrated system.

This adaptability can also be achieved by inventing modular solutions. Modularity, however, also refers to a more intriguing, though very challenging, aspect: the modularity and customization of support that is achieved by coupling different technical systems which in turn requires the construction, standardization, and design of compatible interfaces for different components of support systems. That is, for example, various interfaces for signal and information transfer, energy transmission, physical contact surfaces, or handling and control. Both variability within interfaces and between interfaces are highly relevant.

In short, support technologies are embedded in a whole apparatus of non-technical components and rely on them to function properly. Innovations come from finding a proper fit between all of these components. To sum up the consequence, developing support technologies pose/poses some challenges for engineering. They compel the profession to rethink the connection of products and production, to reconsider the relation of automation and customization, and to develop adaptable and modular systems as well as relevant interfaces that make them compatible.

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The contributions in this book display the diversity of the people, disciplines, and topics in this field of research. Not all of the above aspects of the presented research program are discussed in this publication. However, the diversity is explicit, and its management is not an easy task. This includes the editing of the book. We selected distinguished scholars that are not only experts in their respective field but who additionally have some experience with participatory and interdisciplinary research projects regarding technology development for support. As editors we had a general concept for the book in mind and targeted the relevant researchers to send us articles treating a particular subfield, presenting subject-specific views on support systems, or reporting about deployment contexts from the perspective of their expertise.

The chapters that made it into the book are grouped into four major parts: “Demands and Expectations,” “Constructing and Construing,” “Forms and Contexts of Deployment,” and “Values and Valuation.” They are followed by two concluding chapters that discuss some prospective further developments of (support) technologies. The four parts represent main clusters of research activities in developing support technologies. They seem to form a sequence, but this is owed to the book format only. More likely, they set up a circular process. Starting with a demand analysis seems natural, but there are already valuations in place or earlier prototypes that lead to certain demands. Furthermore, all of these activities run concurrently in relevant projects and permanently influence each other. This implies that none of these discrete yet interfaced “stages” is ever completed as long as the project unfolds. Demand analysis is an ongoing concern in the development of support technologies as are valuation, construction, and deployment.

The main ideas framing each subsection and short introductions to the individual chapters are given in brief introductory notes at the beginning of the book parts. Due to the just mentioned circularity and simultaneity of the empirical processes, there are overlaps. Some of the articles could appear in more than one subsection. Yet there are good reasons to arrange them this way. One of the editorial decision premises in this respect has been to demonstrate the multiplicity of perspectives within each research cluster as represented by the subsections of this volume. We have decisively refrained from making special sections for, e.g., science, engineering, and humanities. There are no leading disciplines in any of the research areas for developing support technologies.

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The papers collected here come from many different disciplines. The volume contains inputs from biomechanics, engineering, information science, philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences—to name only the most generic denominations and sparing the internal specializations. Each of the chapters cherishes its own terminology and quirkiness. All of them, however, can also be read by researchers who are not familiar with the subject-specific debates of the disciplines. The language they use is generally intelligible. Despite that, no article is able to deny its origin and background. Such a denial or disguise of disciplines would have been detrimental to the idea of this book. A seminal reference between disciplines is only possible when the difference between them is retained and accepted.

Certainly, to some extent this book displays the personal, regional, and institutional networks of the editors and their research group. But this Central European bias is not simply accidental. The transdisciplinary research community on technical support systems is actually prevalent in Central Europe. This may be due to research policy decisions or some other factors not yet explored. In the end, it may be just our ignorance. But there is no doubt that an international publication putting the common thread of these multiple perspectives on developing support technologies into focus is overdue. In this respect, this book is also an appeal asking for further international communication and collaboration in this developing research field—and also an appeal to prove us wrong that the form of transdisciplinary research on support technologies as expounded in this introduction is mainly happening in Europe (see, however, [Ois10] and [San14] with similar ambitions). Any further information and suggestions are welcome by the editors as well as all of the contributors.

This collection and arrangement of research papers is not the classic “how to” book. It contains reflections and descriptions of the different processes that accompany any development of support technologies. Its effect is a change in perspective and this generates, then again, we hope, a plethora of ideas how to approach and implement one’s own projects. Therefore, it is a book of research in two respects. First, it allows to observe and thus research how support technologies are developed; and second, it gives some leverage to do research based on these suggestions and experiences from others.