Cross-functional emerging domains in engineering design: actor-networks and collaborative models, organizational learning and knowledge management

In this topic presentation we visit some of the positions that, being in minority, claim to dispute a growing role in technological systems design and development. The increasing complexity of technology, the widespread of technological use, and some recent discovers in neurosciences, deludes the boundaries between technology and its uses. ANT, interpretive approaches, qualitative methods, collaborative models, knowledge management and some reasoning among different research paradigms were the original setup for this topic (4.1 and 4.2). The submitted papers to subtopic 4.1 was not aligned, so we had a choice: either not accepting the papers submitted to this subtopic because they were out of scope, or accept them if they had the quality to be accepted. We choose the second. But as the subtopic stayed almost uncovered we explain in this short presentation what we had in mind when we opened it.