The Defence
Add comment November 13th, 2007
Posts filed under 'philosophy'
DONE!!
Thursday, I defended my thesis on “Trust Within Technology: Risk, Existential Trust, and Reflective Designs in Human-Computer Interaction”…the doctor is in the house! Find the abstract here...
bliss…
Add comment November 4th, 2007
todays word: ‘pataphysics
‘Pataphysics, a term coined by French writer Alfred Jarry (1873 – 1907), is a philosophy dedicated to studying what lies beyond the realm of metaphysics. It is a parody of the theory and methods of modern science and is often expressed in nonsensical language. A practitioner of ‘pataphysics is a ‘pataphysician or a ‘pataphysicist…
Add comment August 27th, 2007
The Thing about Things
Asking what things do in a way that carefully navigates between the Scylla of essentialist, dystopian accounts and the Charybdis of shiny, utopian futures is a daunting task. I believe that Peter Paul Verbeek of Twente University, Holland, has managed this navigational task quite beautifully in his book with the succinct title What Things Do (with the less poignant, but somewhat explanatory post-dash: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. From Karl Jaspers demonization of technology through Ellul’s and Borgmann’s nostalgia to Latour’s theories of artefactual agency, Verbeek manages to aptly join fierce theoretical insight with design knowledge and visionary design practices. For example, drawing on products by the Dutch environmentalist design community “Eternally Yours”, he sketches out a novel way of understanding objects as not only semiotic or symbolic (i.e. emitting life-styles or choices) but also as “material”, as things that we form relations to and that relate to us in return, guiding and misguiding us, teaching, pleasing, shaping and generally mediating our relations to our world. He shows how the concept of mediation (drawing on US philosopher of technology Don Ihde’s relativist version of phenomenology which he occasionally calls post-phenomenology) is useful for understanding technologies as existential materials - as things that are not only there for us to use on the world, but that take an active part in shaping our world. Designing, in this perspective, then naturally entails ethical as well as practical and experiential perspectives. Verbeek’s book is not an introduction to existential phenomenology vis-a-vis technology, but, rather to my liking, presents a clear cut (if complex) argument for a deeper understanding of things, and how philosophy can position itself as a reflexive/pragmatic inquiry.
Add comment February 19th, 2007