Table Of ContentPhilosophy and Design
Pieter E. Vermaas • Peter Kroes
Andrew Light • Steven A. Moore
Philosophy and Design
From Engineering
to Architecture
Pieter E. Vermaas Peter Kroes
Delft University of Technology Delft University of Technology
Delft Delft
the Netherlands the Netherlands
Andrew Light Steven A. Moore
University of Washington University of Texas
Seattle Austin
USA USA
ISBN 978-1-4020-6590-3 e-ISBN 978-1-4020-6591-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007937486
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Contents
List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Design in Engineering and Architecture:
Towards an Integrated Philosophical Understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Peter Kroes, Andrew Light, Steven A. Moore, and Pieter E. Vermaas
Part I Engineering Design
Design, Use, and the Physical and Intentional
Aspects of Technical Artifacts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Maarten Franssen
Designing is the Construction of Use Plans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Wybo Houkes
The Designer Fallacy and Technological Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Don Ihde
Technological Design as an Evolutionary Process. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Philip Brey
Deciding on Ethical Issues in Engineering Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Anke Van Gorp and Ibo Van de Poel
Morality in Design: Design Ethics and the Morality
of Technological Artifacts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Peter-Paul Verbeek
Thinking about Design: Critical Theory of Technology
and the Design Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Patrick Feng and Andrew Feenberg
v
vi Contents
Design Culture and Acceptable Risk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Kiyotaka Naoe
Alienability, Rivalry, and Exclusion Cost:
Three Institutional Factors for Design. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Paul B. Thompson
Part II Emerging Engineering Design
Friends by Design: A Design Philosophy for Personal
Robotics Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
John P. Sullins
Beyond Engineering: Software Design as Bridge
over the Culture/Technology Dichotomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Bernhard Rieder and Mirko Tobias Schäfer
Technology Naturalized: A Challenge to Design
for the Human Scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Alfred Nordmann
Re-Designing Humankind: The Rise of Cyborgs,
a Desirable Goal? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Daniela Cerqui and Kevin Warwick
Designing People: A Post-Human Future? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
Inmaculada de Melo-Martín
Redesigning Man? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
C. T. A. Schmidt
Design: Structure, Process, and Function:
A Systems Methodology Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
Kristo Miettinen
Co-Designing Social Systems by Designing Technical Artifacts:
A Conceptual Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
Ulrich Krohs
Beyond Inevitability: Emphasizing the Role of Intention
and Ethical Responsibility in Engineering Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
Kathryn A. Neeley and Heinz C. Luegenbiehl
Design and Responsibility: The Interdependence
of Natural, Artifactual, and Human Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
S. D. Noam Cook
Contents vii
Part III Architectural Design
Form and Process in the Transformation of the Architect’s
Role in Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
Howard Davis
Expert Culture, Representation, and Public Choice:
Architectural Renderings as the Editing of Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287
Steven A. Moore and Rebecca Webber
Diverse Designing: Sorting Out Function
and Intention in Artifacts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301
Ted Cavanagh
Design Criteria in Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317
Joseph C. Pitt
Cities, Aesthetics, and Human Community: Some Thoughts
on the Limits of Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329
J. Craig Hanks
Nature, Aesthetic Values, and Urban Design:
Building the Natural City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341
Glenn Parsons
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355
List of Contributors
Philip Brey is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Twente and
director of its Centre for Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Science. He
is also a member of the board of the Society for Philosophy and Technology and
the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology. His research
focuses on philosophy of technology, and particularly on the philosophy and ethics
of information technology.
Ted Cavanagh is an architect with a doctorate in the history of technology and is
chair of the School of Architecture at Clemson University, South Carolina. His
investigations in the culture of technological innovation focus on historical and
contemporary wood construction. His work is both written and built.
Daniela Cerqui is a sociocultural anthropologist interested in the relationship
between technology and society (and, more fundamentally, humankind). She
teaches at the Institute of Sociology and Anthropology of the University of
Lausanne (Switzerland) where she is involved in teaching and research on the new
information technologies, and on the ‘information society’ they are supposed to
create. She recently spent two years conducting research in the Department of
Cybernetics of the University of Reading.
Noam Cook is a professor of philosophy at San Jose State University. His publica-
tions, research and consulting interests focus on social and technological change,
the relationship between knowledge and practice, and applied values issues. He was
for ten years a consulting researcher at Xerox PARC. Since 1997 he has been a
member of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. (B.A., M.A., San Francisco State
University, Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
Howard Davis is Professor of Architecture at the University of Oregon and the
author of The Culture of Building, concerning the social frameworks of the pro-
cesses of architectural design and construction. His current research deals with the
typology of urban mixed use buildings, and their role in a diverse economy.
Inmaculada de Melo-Martín, Ph.D. Philosophy, M.S. Biology, is a Research
Ethicist in the Division of Medical Ethics, Weill Cornell Medical College. She is
the author of Making Babies: Biomedical Technologies, Reproductive Ethics, and
ix
x List of Contributors
Public Policy (Kluwer, 1998), and Taking Biology Seriously: What Biology Can
and Cannot Tell Us about Moral and Public Policy Issues (Rowman and Littlefield,
2005). Her current work focuses on ethical issues related to genetic research.
Andrew Feenberg is Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology in the
School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, where he directs the Applied
Communication and Technology Lab. He has authored or edited over 10 books,
including Critical Theory of Technology (Oxford University Press, 1991), Alternative
Modernity (University of California Press, 1995), Questioning Technology
(Routledge, 1999), and Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption
of History (Routledge 2005).
Patrick Feng is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Communication and
Culture at The University of Calgary. His research focuses on the social implica-
tions of new technologies and the politics of international standards-setting. He has
studied the design and use of scientific and technical standards in areas such as
information technology, health, and food safety.
Maarten Franssen is associate professor at the Section of Philosophy of Delft
University of Technology. He has published on the normativity of functions, the
modeling of socio-technical systems and decision methods in engineering design.
His broad research interests include theories of rationality and action and their
application in the design and implementation of technology, and conceptual and
foundational issues in technology related to the notions of system and function.
Craig Hanks is Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Stevens Institute
of Technology for 2006–2007 while on leave from Texas State University. A
recipient of six distinguished teaching awards, his publications include work on
ethical issues in architecture, biotechnology ethics, philosophy of biology, philoso-
phy of technology, philosophy of art, and political philosophy. His new book
Technological Musings: Reflections on Technology and Value, and a new edited
collection Technology and Values will both be published in 2007.
Wybo Houkes is assistant professor at the Subdepartment of History, Philosophy
and Technology Studies of Eindhoven University of Technology. He participated
in the NWO research program The Dual Nature of Technical Artifacts and pub-
lished on function theory and the role of intentions in artifact use and design. His
current research interests include the nature of technological knowledge, the ontol-
ogy of artifacts and the application of evolutionary theory to technical artifacts.
Don Ihde is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Technoscience
Research Group at Stony Brook University in New York, USA. He is the author of
twenty authored and edited books, most recently, Expanding Hermeneutics:
Visualism in Science (1998); Bodies in Technology (2003); and with Evan Selinger,
Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality (2003). His current work includes
research on imaging technologies and the application of advanced imaging and
analytic technologies to human science disciplines.
List of Contributors xi
Peter Kroes initiated and helped develop at Delft University of Technology an
analytically orientated philosophy of technology that focuses on engineering prac-
tices. His main interests are the nature of technical artifacts and socio-technical
systems, and theories of functional and artifact kinds.
Ulrich Krohs is Privatdozent of philosophy at the University of Hamburg and held
a research fellowship at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition
Research in Altenberg, Austria. His publications include work on the structure of
biological theories and on the concepts of function and design. Current research top-
ics are the justification of function ascriptions in biology, technology and the social
sciences, and the relation between experiment, theory, and models of different kind.
Andrew Light is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Public Affairs at the
University of Washington. He is co-author, with John O’Neill and Alan Holland, of
Environmental Values (Routledge, 2007) and co-editor of sixteen books including
The Aesthetics of Everyday Life (Columbia, 2005) Moral and Political Reasoning in
Environmental Practice (MIT, 2003), and Technology and the Good Life? (Chicago,
2000). He is currently working on a book on ethics and restoration ecology.
Heinz C. Luegenbiehl is Professor of Philosophy and Technology Studies at Rose-
Hulman Institute of Technology in Indiana. He has published extensively on engi-
neering ethics and liberal education in engineering education. His current research
interests are in the areas of cross-cultural engineering ethics, especially in relation
to Asian countries, and on developments toward an international code of engineer-
ing ethics.
Kristo Miettinen is a Senior Technical Fellow at ITT Industries Space Systems
Division in Rochester, New York. His current technical work in image chain analy-
sis focuses on automated image restoration and enhancement, image distortion
parameter estimation, and modeling of image utility and interpretability as a func-
tion of engineering parameters.
Steven Moore is the Bartlett Cocke Professor of Architecture and Planning at the
University of Texas at Austin where he is Director of the graduate program in
Sustainable Design and Co-director of the University of Texas Center for Sustainable
Development. Moore is the author of many articles and four books on sustainable archi-
tecture and urbanism.
Kiyotaka Naoe is Associate Professor at the Philosophy Department of Tohoku
University, Japan. His interests include contemporary continental philosophy and
philosophy of science and technology. His recent research is about the phenomeno-
logical and ethical aspects of technological actions, especially the relationship
between technology and the body.
Kathryn A. Neeley is Associate Professor in the Department of Science,
Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia. She is author of Mary
Sommerville: Science, Illumination, and the Female Mind, published by Cambridge,
and co-editor, with David Ollis and Heinz Luegenbiehl, of Liberal Education for
xii List of Contributors
st
21 Century Engineering: Responses to ABET 2000. Her research focus is on the
aesthetic dimensions of scientific and engineering practice.
Alfred Nordmann is Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Darmstadt
Technical University. In recent years, he has focused on nanoscience and the conver-
gence of enabling technologies. He wants to understand not only how these might affect
society and how they alter the very notion of technology, but views them primarily as
a symptom of more general changes in research practice and epistemic values.
Glenn Parsons is a member of the Philosophy department at Ryerson University
in Toronto, Canada. His main research interest is the role of scientific knowledge
in the aesthetic appreciation of nature. His essays have appeared in the British
Journal of Aesthetics, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and the
Canadian Journal of Philosophy. He is currently writing a book on the aesthetics
of nature.
Joseph C. Pitt is Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct Professor of Science and
Technology Studies at Virginia Tech. He graduated from the College of William and
Mary, taking his MA and Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario. He authored
three books, Pictures, Images and Conceptual Change; Galileo, Human Knowledge
and the Book of Nature; and, most recently, Thinking About Technology. His research
interests concern the impact of technological innovation on scientific change.
Bernhard Rieder is a postdoc researcher and teacher at the Hypermedia
Department of Paris 8 University. He worked as a Web developer and published on
the relationship between technology and culture. Current research interests include
semantic computing, collaborative culture and the epistemology, methodology and
ethics of software design.
Mirko Tobias Schäfer is a junior teacher/researcher at Utrecht University at the
Department for Media and Culture Studies. He studied theater, film and media studies
and communication studies at Vienna University in Austria and digital culture at
Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He is currently writing his dissertation on the
collective and participatory production in user communities and cultural industries.
Colin Schmidt is a specialist in the Epistemology of artificial and natural intelli-
gence as well as the relation between them. As such, he is interested in Human-
Computer Interaction, Humanoid Robotics and novelties in Communication. To
further his research agenda he draws on universal notions in the Philosophy of
Mind and Language like Intentionality, reference, and categorization. His approach
is often anthropological in nature and his methodology is always deliberately
p robatory and terminological.
John P. Sullins, (Ph.D., Binghamton University (SUNY), 2002) is an associate
professor at Sonoma State University in California. His recent research interests are
the technologies of Robotics, AI and Artificial Life and how they inform traditional
philosophical topics on the questions of life and mind as well as its impact on
s ociety and the ethical design of successful autonomous machines.
