Staff Spotlight: Neil Johnson-Rogers

How and why did you become involved with the Center for Socially Engaged Engineering & Design? 

I came across the job while I was finishing my PhD in summer 2024, and it resonated with me because I have a background in the history of technology. One of the things that I learned in that field is that, although technology (like science) is often described as neutral or somehow separate from society, it is actually deeply enmeshed in and influenced by our social relations, our culture, our politics, and everything else that we encounter on a daily basis. 

It was clear to me from the job posting that C-SED shared this perspective, so it seemed like a good match!

 

What area/field is your PhD in? 

I studied U.S. labor history, with a particular emphasis on employment policy in the second half of the twentieth century.

 

How did any of your past work experiences prepare you for this role?

One of the essential tasks of a historian is to interpret the past through archival sources, or the “raw material” of history. Although I haven’t spent much time in the archives at C-SED, I do get to work with many different kinds of primary sources on a daily basis, from shareholder reports to newspaper articles and oral histories. It’s a real perk of the job! I find these obscure sources and assemble them into something that is accessible to students.

 

If you can share, what is a project that you’re currently working on? 

One of the cases I’m currently working on is about the spirometer, which is a device used to measure lung capacity. The case explores the clinical algorithms that are programmed into spirometers and enable clinicians to compare one patient’s lung function against another’s. I’m interested in how those algorithms are built, how they’re used in a clinical setting, and how their diagnostic accuracy can be improved with closer attention to social context.

 

We already touched on this a little bit, but how has your work as a historian impacted your work so far at C-SED?

One thing that historians do well is contextualize the past. And this applies to teaching, as well as research. I was once a teaching assistant for a History of Science course, and here I learned what it means to situate “science in context.” We covered some dense, technical material – like Einstein’s theory of relativity. But we also situated this stuff in the “working worlds” of real scientists, so that students learned, for example, about the theory of relativity alongside the changing conceptions of time and space that accompanied the popularization of railroad travel. This sort of attention to context,  is what C-SED does so well. 

 

What was your previous experience with design or user-experience design? 

I did spend a lot of time as a graduate student reading about the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT). One of the central insights of this field was that a technology is shaped by the competing perspectives of different groups of users. The classic example is the bicycle. In the early twentieth century, there were lots of different uses for it; you had the “penny farthing” with the great big wheel, which was really a novelty;  you had another model with a smaller, slimmer frame for racing, and so on. The fact that the penny farthing eventually fell into obscurity was not inevitable, but the result of user feedback. Most groups of users insisted that it was too dangerous. And rightly so!

 

What have you enjoyed about your role so far?

Case writing at C-SED is a very collaborative process. I write a draft of something, I receive feedback from faculty partners and the rest of the Case Study Initiative team, and I write some more. This iterative approach to writing is really refreshing; it makes for a nice contrast with archival research, which can often feel quite isolating.

I also like that I’m usually working on at least two cases at a time. I can be writing about lung function and biomedical devices one day, and reverse osmosis or granular activated carbon the next. It keeps things fresh!

 

What have you learned so far in this role?

How to read medical journals! This is a genre of writing that I had very limited experience with before joining C-SED, so I’ve had to learn how to immerse myself in a new literature, or become familiar with (for example) the vocabulary of pulmonology and respiratory disease. I’ve also had to become a bit more comfortable around quantitative research!

 

What goes into the thought process of helping other people learn material for the first time? 

For me, it’s all about assembling a narrative. Every C-SED case has a pre-reading, which is a great opportunity to present students with a compelling story, rooted in empirical research, that can highlight the stakes of an issue.  With spirometry, the story I’m telling is about the history of health statistics, but it’s one that speaks to the problem of diagnostic accuracy in the present. However you achieve it, I think the way to make information accessible is to make it readable. 

 

What do you wish more people knew about design and engineering education/research? 

I think a lot of people are familiar with the concept of “engineering ethics,” but I think it’s worth emphasizing just how much this differs from “socio-technical” learning. It is possible to make disciplines like history and engineering speak to one another, and to look at the technical content and social context of an engineering problem in the same class. 

 

How has your career developed over time? What did you want to be as a kid?

I’m sure I had all kinds of outlandish plans as a child, but I can’t really pinpoint one. I think at some point I figured out that I liked reading books, and it became my goal to find a career that would let me do that for a living. I gravitated towards history, not because I wanted to escape into the past or anything like that (although I’m sure there was an element of that) but because I wanted to use the past to better understand our present. Fortunately, I have plenty of opportunities to do that here at C-SED. 

 

What’s a project, current or past, that has inspired you?

There’s a book I read a little while ago called Science in Action by Bruno Latour. Latour is interested in the making of scientific facts and how something becomes accepted as fact; his argument is that fact-building is not just something that happens in laboratories or on university campuses, but a social process that involves all of these other actors – government agencies, corporations, journalists, and consumers. 

This approach, which Latour describes as “following scientists” through the world, has been a really useful foundation for my work as a case writer. 

 

Any other passion or expertise areas that you enjoy exploring? Is there anything that people who are reading the spotlight can say, “I want to talk to Neil about this”?

I’m interested in the relationship between technology and work. One of the things I’ve fixated on recently is the history of coding boot camps.  For the last 10 years or so, coding bootcamps were everywhere, and “learning to code” seemed like the solution to everything. But then it seems like they kind of just disappeared overnight. I’d like to know why that is.

 

Outside of your work with C-SED, what are some activities that you just really enjoy?

I currently live in Santa Cruz, California, which is surrounded by state parks and redwood forests. So I like to go on long runs. I also spend too much time shopping for records and not enough time playing guitar. And I’m very close to finishing the final season of Downton Abbey.

 

The interview ended with a conversation about Downton Abbey and an exchange of our favorite folk artists.