In the engineering world, you often hear the phrase that technology or -broader- things are just a means to an end. An object on one side (like this bridge) versus the human on the other (in this case, the motorist).

You could say of this bridge that it efficiently separates traffic on the parkway from traffic across the bridge. The a priori goal of the bridge from a traffic engineering perspective is an efficient flow of traffic. In this case, cars to and from the beaches of Long Island, New York. Efficient, by the way, is a word often used to justify the deployment of smart city technology.

Yet there is something more to this bridge. In 1980, Langdon Winner, professor of science & technologies studies, wrote a landmark article called "Do artifacts have politics?" In that article, he defended the hypothesis that the design of a specific technology can be used to solve a societal problem in a particular community.

Technologies are never technologies in themselves but have a social impact (that is why some scholars define artificial intelligence as a socio-technological construct). This bridge was designed in the beginning of the last century by Robert Moses, a New York city planner. The bridge was laid across the highway connecting New York to the beaches of Long Beach. As you can see, only passenger cars cross the highway. It is claimed that this was a conscious decision by Robert Moses: he wanted to keep out city buses, among other things. And poor and coloured people in particular depended on bus transport. However, the bridge kept them away from the beaches, or at least made it more difficult for them to reach the beaches.

We see here that the bridges are more than a mean to an end. The bridges are not neutral but value-laden. The bridge actually scripts: the beach is for white people only. If we do not recognize this then we might shy away from our responsibility of value based design.