From mundane 'nuclear' solutions to novelty: instrumental rationality in making technoscientific cultures

This article seeks to rethink the concept of ‘novelty’, through use and temporal novelty, beyond the usual focus on competition-oriented science discoveries or the production of aesthetically appealing technologies. Rather, novelty in this instance is another means of injecting fresh approaches to solving mundane, yet difficult, problems faced by economically developing states with limited resources and truncated involvement in technoscientific modernity.
The article critically describes how instrumental rationality, representing means-ends coherence within the normative framing of technoscientific policy-making, needs neither be reductive nor precludes fundamental scientific interest. Moreover, instrumental rationality is also a natural consequence of what would have appeared to be an ad-hoc practice of crafting together accessible approaches (even ‘non-standard’ and ‘non-compliant’ techniques) for localizing imported technologies and creating spin-offs that could hasten epistemic resource accumulation while reducing reliance upon wealthy ‘knowledge-suppliers’.
Instrumental rationality is the framework for investigating the philosophy underpinning a maker culture usually associated with DIY projects involving amateurs. Here, it is applied to the practice of both experimental and development-focused technoscience through the framing of a maker ethos. The importance of techne in advancing instrumentally rational approaches to knowledge production, and the facilitation of the maker ethos, will also be unpacked.
Three examples are developed from Malaysia’s nuclear technoscience to demonstrate how the different forms of novelty, in conjunction with a maker ethos framed by instrumental rationality, operate within a condition of what David Edgerton refers to as creole technologies, which are technologies deployed in more economically-lacking worlds in distinctive ways for facilitating innovative interventions, and not as a replication of what has come before in the wealthier economies. The realities of policy and implementation constraints within localized contexts are also considered, before generalizations are drawn. The concluding section is an argument for a philosophy of maker ethos that reconsiders the pursuit of novelty in both technologically originated and curiosity-driven research.