In recent decades scholarship has revealed the various ways that technologies may influence cultures, but rather less attention has been devoted to the complementary question, how does culture shape technology? Yet this question is at the heart of the history of technology, which aims to understand the design and invention process. Beginning with the well-established premise that technical criteria and economic forces are not sufficient in themselves to explain technical choices, this project proposes to elucidate the role of symbolism in bringing cultural forces to bear on technologies. The final product will be a framework that integrates the varied and scattered work on this topic, preparing the ground for subsequent empirical investigation.
