Field Guide
Concepts in Science & Technology Studies (STS)
Theories that explain why consistent patterns of AI use and deployment keep happening.
These cards provide the theoretical foundations that explain why the deployment patterns occur. Where the deployment pattern cards ask what do you notice, these cards ask why does that keep happening. Each one introduces a concept from science and technology studies – a field that examines how technical systems and social worlds shape each other. These are not ethical judgments about whether something is acceptable. They are descriptive tools for understanding the structural forces behind what you observe. Use them when you want to move from noticing a pattern to explaining it – in an analysis, a paper, or a conversation about why things work the way they do.
Constructed, not natural
Categories, data, and technical descriptions are built by people with particular goals and assumptions – not discovered as facts about the world. These concepts help you ask who made something, what choices it reflects, and what it leaves out.
AI systems are socio-technical systems
AI is not just code – it is also infrastructure, labor, institutions, supply chains, and governance. These concepts help you look past the model to the larger system it depends on and participates in.
Power & Governance
Technical systems produce and distribute authority. These concepts help you ask who controls what counts as knowledge, how governance happens beyond formal regulation, and whose norms get encoded as defaults.
Anticipation & Change
Governance questions are most open before a technology is widely deployed. These concepts give you tools for reasoning carefully about emerging technologies – their embedded visions, their foreseeable consequences, and the choices that are still available.