Mike Cooley (engineer)

Mike Cooley
Born Michael Joseph Edward Cooley
1934 (age 83–84)
Nationality Irish
Occupation Engineer
Known for Labor activism in the 1970s Human Centred Systems Socially useful production
Awards Right Livelihood Award (1981)

Mike Cooley (born 1934) is an Irish-born engineer and former trade union leader, best known for his involvement in workplace activism at the British company Lucas Aerospace in the late 1970s. In 1981, he was a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award. Cooley was born in Tuam, Ireland, and attended the Christian Brothers school and was classmates with Tom Murphy (playwright) and the trade unionist Mick Brennan. He studied engineering in Germany, Switzerland and England. He has held several leadership positions in the field of computer-aided design.

Lucas Plan

Towards the end of the 1970s, Mike Cooley was a designer at Lucas Aerospace, and chaired the local branch of the technical trade union TASS. He was one of the militant activists behind the Lucas Plan,[1][2] a radical strategy to avoid workforce layoffs by converting production at Lucas from armaments to civilian products.

The vision of the plan was to replace weapons manufacture with the development of socially useful goods, like solar heating equipment, artificial kidneys, and systems for intermodal transportation. The goal was to not simply retain jobs, but to design the work so that the workers would be motivated by the social value of their activities. The proposals of the alternative plan were not accepted by Lucas management, and Cooley was dismissed in 1981,[3] allegedly because of excessive time spent upon union business or "concerns of society as a whole".[4] Following his sacking by Lucas he was appointed Technology Director with the Greater London Enterprise Board.[3]

Architect or Bee

In 1980, Cooley published a critique of the automation and computerisation of engineering work under the title Architect or Bee? The human/technology relationship. The title alludes to a comparison made by Karl Marx, on the issue of the creative achievements of human imaginative power.[5], On the Sanctity of Work: 'A bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of its cells; but what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is namely this. The architect will construct in his imagination that which he will ultimately erect in reality. At the end of every labour process, we get that which existed in the consciousness of the labourer at its commencement.'

Mike Cooley's pioneering work on human-centred systems and socially useful production was first published in 1980 by Hand & Brain publications; the second edition was published in the USA in 1982 by South End Press with an introduction from MIT Professor David Noble and was followed by a new edition published by Hogarth Press in 1987 with an introduction by Anthony Barnett. The current edition was published by Spokesman Books in 2016 and has an introduction by Frances O’Grady the General Secretary of the TUC. The book has been translated into five languages with the sixth, Chinese, in the pipeline.

Since departing from Lucas, Cooley has been active as an advisor on numerous public and private sector projects. He is a founding member and president of the International Institute of Human Centred Systems. He has published over 100 scientific papers as well as fifteen books, and has been a guest lecturer at universities in Europe, Australia, the US and Japan. Cooley is an adviser to the technical periodical AI & Society.

Human-centred systems

In Architect or Bee?, Cooley coined the term "human-centred systems" in the context of the transition in his profession from traditional drafting at a drawing board to computer-aided design.[6] Human-centred systems, as used in economics, computing and design, aim to preserve or enhance human skills, in both manual and office work, in environments in which technology tends to undermine the skills that people use in their work.[7][8]

Subsequently, a number of projects attempted to see whether and how human-centred systems can be developed:

  • the Utopia project in Scandinavia, where a group of computer scientists, social scientists and print workers combined to design a workstation for newspaper layout[9]
  • in machine tools and computer-aided manufacture[10]
  • in clerical work[11]

The term has now largely been superseded by "human-centered computing".

Books

  • Cooley, Mike (1982). Architect or Bee? The human/technology relationship. Boston: South End Press. ISBN 0-89608-131-1.
  • Cooley, Mike (1988). Produkte für das Leben statt Waffen für den Tod. Germany: Rowohlt Verlag. ISBN 9783499148309.
  • Cooley, Mike (2016). Architect or Bee? The Human Price of Technology. UK: Spokesman Books. ISBN 978 0 85124 8493.

References

  1. ↑ The Lucas Plan by Hilary Wainwright Schocken Books (1981) ISBN 978-0-8052-8098-2
  2. ↑ "1976: The fight for useful work at Lucas Aerospace". libcom.org. 13 September 2006. Retrieved 16 September 2013.
  3. 1 2 Smith, Adrian (2014). "Socially Useful Production" (PDF). STEPS Working Papers. 58. Brighton: STEPS Centre: 17. Retrieved 15 October 2016.
  4. ↑ "The Right Livelihood Award website". Archived from the original on 2 October 2013. Retrieved 16 October 2013.
  5. ↑ cf Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I
  6. ↑ Architect or Bee?, Mike Cooley, South End Press, 1982
  7. ↑ Labor and Monoply Capital. The Degradation of Work in the 20th Century, John Bellamy Foster and Harry Braverman, Monthly Review Press, 1998
  8. ↑ Programmers and Managers: The Routinization of Computer Programmers in the United States, Philip Kraft, 1977
  9. ↑ Ehn, P. & Kyng, M. . The Collective Resource Approach to Systems Design. In Bjerknes, G., Ehn, P., & Kyng, M. (Eds.), Computers and Democracy – A Scandinavian Challenge. (pp. 17–58). Aldershot, UK: Avebury, 1987
  10. ↑ Designing human-centred technology, HH Rosenbrock, Springer-Verlag, 1989
  11. ↑ Gendered by Design?: Information Technology and Office Systems, Eileen Green, Jenny Owen, Den Pain, Taylor & Francis, 1993


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