Every design is itself historically and politically situated. Yet, much computing design has relied on formal representations, designed precisely to extend local knowledge past parochial barriers. Although there is no such thing as a neutral vantage point, even for mathematics (or especially for mathematics?), it has been a long conceptual struggle for social informatics to understand how formalisms work pragmatically. Goguen (this volume) poses a continuum of "wetness" and "dryness" of representations, with highly formal representations being quite dry. The empirical investigation of the relation between the two has opened up new ways of thinking about representation itself.