Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, PDF - Dss-edit.com

they have to change the motor, multiply the redundancies, redo all thesoftware, redesign all the chips. But the laughter may keep on coming. Let'simagine that all the aforementioned engineers are congratulating themselveson their success and breaking out the champagne to toast Aramis.Others, at the RATP, will be laughing up their sleeves: "A transportationsystem isn't just a moving object, no matter how brilliant; it's an infrastructureand an operating system. They're toasting Aramis, but they don't havea single passenger on board! A prototype doesn't count. What counts isa system for production and implementation, an assembly line; and there,more often than not, you have to start all over again." Still others, insteadof laughing, will get upset and pound their fists on the table: "A transportationsystem exists only when it begins to make a profit and when it haslasted without a major breakdown for at least two years."The frontier between "the bulk of the work" and "fine-tuning thedetails" remains in flux for a long time; its position is the object of intensenegotiation. To simplify its task, every group tends to think that its own roleis most important, and that the next group in the chain just needs to concernitself with the technical details, or to apply the principles that the first grouphas defined. Moreover, this way of looking at things is integrated intoproject management: by going from what is less real to what is more real,you often divide up projects into so-called phases: the conceptual phase,the feasibility phase, the scale-model phase, the full-system site study phase,the commercial-demonstration phase, the acceptance phase, the phases ofqualification, manufacturing, and homologation.If Aramis fit into this grid, there would at least be a regular progression.Unfortunately, not only are the phases ill-defined, but they may notcome in order at all. People who are studying a project may indeeddisagree about the sequence. Does Orly prove that Aramis is feasible? Yes,if you believe those who define Aramis as a moving object endowed withoriginal properties. No, if you believe those who define it as a transportationsystem that can be set up in a specific place that meets certain useconstraints. You can even argue over whether more was being done in1973 than in 1987. So it is possible to imagine that you lose in terms ofthe project's degree of reality over time. Consensus about the length,importance, and order of phases is not the general case. It is a specialcase-that of projects that work well. With difficult projects, it is impossibleto rely on phases and their neat arrangements, since, depending on theinformant and the period, the project may shift from idea to reality or fromIS ARAMIS FEASIBLE?