Look around you. Most of what you’re interacting with right now is technologically mediated, and each artifact quietly shapes your perceptions and behaviors. The screen you’re using to read this—even before its content—is already acting on you. Its brightness, its legibility, the layout of this text, the tactile feel of the device, its recommendations, notifications, gestures of swipe and scroll—all of these comprise a relationship between you and the system. As Lucy Suchman noted, “the boundaries of human and machine agency are never fixed, but continually renegotiated through practice.” What you experience as an interface is actually a choreography of intentions—technical, economic, political and cultural.
It is easy to think of technology as something invented by isolated designers or engineers. But as Bruno Latour famously argued, “technology is society made durable.” Every seemingly neutral design decision embeds past debates, institutional negotiations, market pressures, regulatory constraints, and long histories of cultural expectation. A smartphone does not simply exist. Its form is the sedimentation of competing visions over decades—by corporations, standards committees, patent offices, engineers, UX researchers, advertisers, and even activist movements.
Peter-Paul Verbeek and Cynthia Breazeal both advance this view in different ways. Breazeal writes, in “What is a Social Robot?”, that robots are not merely tools, but “social actors” that participate in shaping human emotional and behavioral spaces. Verbeek similarly argues that technologies mediate moral and existential conditions—they help “co-shape who we are and how we act.”
At Everit, we begin from the assumption that technologies are not static products. They evolve through relationships. Gilbert Simondon referred to this as “individuation,” the process by which technical objects come into being through continuous adaptation within their environments. A technology gains meaning only as it interacts with users, constraints, markets, infrastructures, and worlds of practice.
We therefore see technology as part of a living network—shaped by people, cultures, and the ecologies it touches. This perspective demands humility. Instead of asking, “How do we make users adopt this?” we ask, “How does this technology need to evolve to coexist well within a broader ecology?”
Andrew Pickering calls this the “mangle of practice”—the unpredictable dance of resistance and accommodation between humans and artifacts. Technologies resist us in their limitations; we adjust them; they transform us; we adapt. This is not a linear deployment. It is a coevolution.
Our work begins in this shared responsibility: understanding how technology can evolve with care and intention. We look at how it will shape gestures, habits, expectations, communities, knowledge structures—and how those same contexts will shape the technology in return. Yuk Hui adds that we must think about “cosmotechnics”: the way technologies are always embedded in specific cultural and cosmological frameworks. No technology is universal; each is situated.
To design and guide technology responsibly, therefore, is not just a matter of engineering or strategy—it is a matter of cultivating relationships across these networks. Careful technology is relational technology. And relational technology is ultimately humane technology.