Make Maintainers: Engineering Education and an Ethics of Care

the way people talk about it. On the one hand, there are the various acts that we can refer to as innovation. On the other hand, there is all the talk about innovation, a public discourse that we refer to as “innovationspeak.” These things are related but conceptually distinct; indeed, for over ten years now we have seen prominent professionals complain about innovationspeak as a way to defend the act of innovation. For example, in 2005 designer and writer Michael Bierut bemoaned the “cult of innovation,” complained that innovation was a “euphemism,” a “bandwagon,” and a “fad,” and reminded his readers of a warning from the legendary designer Charles Eames: “Innovate as a last resort: More horrors are done in the name of innovation than any other.” Bierut’s skepticism places him in a distinct minority. Innovationspeak flourished over the next decade, despite warnings from cheerleaders of business and technology that innovation had become “the most overused word in America” (Wired) and that the term had “begun to lose meaning” (Wall Street Journal). Academics also began to wonder what the appealing term was obscuring. In 2008 historian Benoît Godin began a critical history of the idea and concept of innovation; by early 2014, we were regularly pointing out the overuse of the term “innovation” in our classrooms, at conferences, and in online discussions. We published our views in the online magazine Aeon in a 2016 essay titled “Hail the Maintainers,” which laid out a critique of innovationspeak and proposed an alternative vision of technologyinsociety with maintenance at the center. The starting point of our critique is a simple idea: innovationspeak does not adequately capture the essence of human life with technology. It is true that our culture’s recent obsession with innovation has generated a deeper 13 Make Maintainers: Engineering Education and an Ethics of Care