This is the final part, part seven, of a review of the book What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. Read part 1 for the overview.

Most of What Things Do is prologue for Chapter 7, “Artifacts in Design,” in which Peter-Paul Verbeek outlines his philosophy for the relationship between humans and things. It can be summarized thusly: “Technology mediates our behavior and our perception, and thereby actively shapes subjectivity and objectivity: the ways in which we are present in our world and the world is present to us.”

Verbeek turns his attention specifically to design in this chapter, albeit limited to industrial design, but I think much of what he claims is also applicable to interaction designers as well. He writes,

Industrial design generally treats products from one or two perspectives: their functionality and their sign-value. A product must first of all be functional; it must do what it was designed and manufactured to do. Besides this, it has meaning or sign-value: human beings are drawn to particular product styles and not to others, and to use a product to express a lifestyle to which they (want to) belong.

Products have two of these sign-value or semiotic functions: denotative functions (which designers know of as affordances) that tell how the product can be used, and connotative functions that represent “the lifestyle with which its users identify, or want to identify,” such as “sturdy,” “traditional,” “cutting-edge,” etc. (It’s not by accident all those Web 2.0 sites look somewhat alike.) Products, therefore, are bearers of meaning. A car, for instance, isn’t only for transportation, but also for showing one’s status and taste.

Verbeek, however, is less interested in this semiotic reading of products than he is in the role of artifacts as mediators between human beings and the world. This mediation, he writes, “is not a product’s function but rather a byproduct of its functionality.”

What things “do” encompasses more than merely “referring” or “functioning.” Things mediate the relation between human beings and their world not in a linguistic but in a material way. They fulfill their functions as material objects, and by this functioning they shape human actions and experiences. Such “material mediation” does not take place on an interpretive level, but on a sensorial level.

One aspect of this materiality is how an object looks. Design has “grown increasingly concerned with the visual appearance of things,” Verbeek claims. But the aesthetics of things goes beyond the visual, and, I would argue, into interaction design.

The sensory relations that are possible in the case of useful objects reach beyond the visual, for such things are meant to be used rather than looked at. The aesthetics of products concerns the practical dealings with them and involves their bodily presence, rather than just what they look like or signify, or how they are interpreted or read.

And here is the crux of the argument, where Verbeek’s thoughts touch fully upon interaction design:

Mediation occurs on the basis of practical dealings with things. When things are used, people take up a relation to the world that these things, thanks to their “hanidness,” coshape. In this coshaping, not only does the human interaction with products have a sensory character, so does the human-world relation that is mediated by the products. Human experience and existence can only acquire a specific shape on the basis of sensory perception and sensory dealings with with world…By extending the domain of aesthetics to include the sensorial in the broadest sense, therefore, it becomes possible to give the notion of mediation an explicit place in the industrial design process…The meaning of aesthetics in design then comes to include not just style and beauty, but also the relations between people and products, and the ways in which products coshape the relation between humans and the world.

This is what interaction design, in the broadest and deepest sense, already (at least partially) does. This “relation between people and products” and between people and the world is at the heart of interaction design. The “aesthetics” of interaction design are more far-reaching than only the visual (although of course the visual is still intensely important).

Naturally, one cannot define design this way without touching upon ethics, and this is what Verbeek addresses next.

Designers engage in “ethics by other means”; that is, their products codetermine the outcome of moral considerations, which in turn determine human action and their definition of “the good life.”

Things help shape the answer of how to act in any given situation. With a gun in my hand, I may react differently when angered. Gerard De Vries says, “Our existence is furnished with many different kinds of devices and technological systems. These are what instruct people in contemporary societies ‘how to live’.” Thus, for Verbeek,

Design ethics requires that artifacts be treated as members of the moral community, conceived as the community in which morality assumes a shape. Things carry morality because they shape the way people experience their world and organize their existence, regardless of whether this is done consciously and intentionally or not. The very fact that they do this shaping charges designers with the responsibility to make sure that things do this in a desirable way.

Verbeek offers some advice as to the type and character of the types of products designers should be designing. The first is for designers not to try to aim for products that people are “devoted” to, but rather to those people are attached to. “Products to which people develop an attachment are not generally as emotionally charged and irreplaceably present as heirlooms, but neither are they as anonymous as a throw-away item…what distinguishes these goods from our most loved possessions is that they are used rather than cherished.” Transparency helps to form those attachments. Products’ functionality should be “understandable and accessible.” This allows people to fix them (instead of discard them) when they break, but also it “makes it possible for people to become involved with products as material entities. For when a product is transparent, it is not only functionally present but it exhibits how it is functioning.” Users have to be connected to both the commodity and machinery, in Borgmann’s terms.

To this end, Verbeek implores designers to create “engaging products”–products that involve people in their functioning. A cello, for instance, only produces music when a human plays it. Products should become more dependent on human operation, not less. Products should also integrate into everyday practices in a more engaging manner. Computers as they are designed now are for human-to-computer, isolated engagement, for example, but they need not be so. Humans need, in Verbeek’s words, “to deal with the products themselves, and not only with what they do or signify. When only the functionality of products takes center stage, we are merely involved with what products do and not with how they do it.”

In conclusion to this long review, let me note that I certainly haven’t encapsulated all the ideas in this thought-provoking book, which provides a great walkthrough of major points in the philosophy of technology. How this theory can be put into practice is a challenge for us all.

Read parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6

This is part six of a review of the book What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. Read part 1 for the overview.

In Chapter 6, “Devices and the Good Life,” Peter-Paul Verbeek examines the work of Albert Borgmann to answer the question, “How do artifacts coshape human existence?” Borgmann has looked at how technology affects what he calls “the good life” and how it shapes the interactions people have with the world.

Technology for Borgmann isn’t a monolithic force, but should rather be thought of in discreet bits–as devices. Devices create “a characteristic and constraining pattern to the entire fabric of our lives.” This device pattern “inheres in the dominant way in which we in the modern era have been taking up with the world.”

Devices deliver availability, which is to say that they make things available to humans that are difficult to acquire without their help. Something is available, according to Borgmann, if it is “instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, and easy.” Devices obtain what previously humans had to obtain with things. A device isn’t a thing. A thing, says Verbeek,

cannot be separated from its context or its world nor can it be divorced from our involvement with it; dealing with a thing requires us to engage with it and its environment. A device, on the other hand, puts out of play its context and does not require engagement; it does the work for us and without our involvement.

Devices, via their machinery make available commodities. Machinery makes up “the background of technology” and remains hidden as much as possible. Machinery is “pure means”: means that are “independent of the goal, divorced as much as possible from the commodities it delivers.” The reason the machinery is hidden is so that “we can enjoy commodities without having to engage ourselves with their production.”

This, however, leads to a style of life that could be labeled “consumption.” Technology allows us to be disengaged from the social and physical production of commodities, and because the machinery that makes this possible is in the background, this pattern of consumption remains mostly hidden. The irony of technology is that “it promises enrichment but delivers impoverishment…Though the great technological breakthroughs of the past have liberated human beings from misery, most technological innovation nowadays only serves to diminish our engagement with the world.”

Borgmann takes this bleak view one step further, noting that Western societies are mostly built upon this background of technology and consumption.

Technology hooks up seamlessly with [a] specific constellation of ideas about freedom, equality, and self-realization. By making ever more goods available, technology makes it possible for human beings to realize their desires without imposing a content on how they go about it.

“Liberal democracy,” Borgmann writes, “is enacted as technology…[We need to] consider democracy not just as a political system, but as a set of institutions which do aim to make everything available to everybody.” Technology, while making it seemingly possible for everyone to have “the good life” also radically shapes the world to make that goal possible, in order to make the device paradigm work. “The liberal ideal of free self-realization appears in practice to involve mass consumption and work in order to make more consumption possible.” In fact, Borgmann claims, liberal democracies rely on technology to keep them stable. The promise that technology will bring prosperity to all through availability has prevented social unrest because the lower and middle classes “acquire the perspective that tomorrow they will wake up to what the rich have today.”

To obtain a true “good life,” Borgmann feels we need an alternative to to technological consumerism, yet one that still exists within the device paradigm. To which he offers focal things and focal practices. Focal things “draw together human involvements, things that invite engagement with themselves and what they make possible” and that concern things greater than just ourselves. These focal things create focal practices “[sponsor] discipline and skill which are exercised in a unity of achievement and enjoyment, of mind, body, and the world, of myself and others, and in a social union.” Focal things and practices are meaningful and not necessarily efficient like a machine would be. Verbeek uses the example of a marathon: no one runs one because it is more efficient than a car. Focal practices aren’t the most convenient path to reach a goal, but are more about the realization of a goal.

Verbeek (justifiably) takes Borgmann to task for his stark view of technology. He notes that

Borgmann does not see that technology can not only reduce engagment but also amplify it. Technology not only gives rise to disengaged consumption, but also to new possibilities for engagement…Technology indeed makes things available, but the lack of human involvement in the process does not mean that humans are not involved in the product. Reduction of one form of involvement usually goes hand-in-hand with the amplification of other forms.

Looking at involvement, Verbeek contrasts Borgmann’s views then with Latour’s from the previous chapter. Involvement can be direct or indirect. “By encouraging particular actions (invitation) and discouraging others (inhibition), some forms of involvement are called forth and others are suppressed or excluded.” Verbeek rightly notes that devices themselves, instead of being simply machinery for delivery of commodities, can also invite involvement both with themselves (a video game) and with what they make available (the music my iPod plays). Verbeek calls these “engaging devices” and rightly notes that

Some artifacts such as a piano indeed create involvement with their functioning and thus give rise to the intriguing situation of both withdrawing from people’s attention and calling attention to themselves at the same time…A piano is never entirely ready-at-hand, but neither is is exclusively present-at-hand–its machinery is not completely in the background but not entirely in the foreground either…Heidegger’s binary opposition…needs to be challenged, but also the idea that artifacts need to be ready-at-hand to be useful.

Next: the final installment: A Philosophy for Things.

This is part five of a review of the book What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. Read part 1 for the overview.

Chapter 5, “The Acts of Artifacts,” asks, What role do things play in human life and action? To answer this, the author Peter-Paul Verbeek looks closely at the philosophy of Bruno Latour, particularly his actor-network theory. Verbeek writes,

For Latour, reality cannot be adequately understood if humans and non-humans are treated “asymmetrically.” The two cannot be had separately, but are always bound up with each other in a network of relations. Only by virtue of this network are they what they are, and can they do what they do.

The actor-network theory basically states that agency, the ability to act, isn’t limited to humans alone. Objects can also act when in relationship–a network–with other actors (or “actants”). Things don’t have an “essence” until they are part of a network, although they do have “existence.” In a network, there is no real difference between things and humans. Both only are present and have meaning from their relationship with other nodes, human and non-human, on the network. “Actors can be as much human as non-human, and networks are not structures but relations in which translations take place of entities that assume relations with each other,” Verbeek writes.

The separation of things and humans (“subjects” and “objects” in Enlightenment thinking), is becoming “less and less believable.” We’re now surrounded by things that straddle the boundary between human and non-human: “embryos, expert systems, digital machines, sensor-equipped robots, hybrid corn, data banks, psychotropic drugs, whales outfitted with radar sounding devices, gene synthesizers, audience analyzers, and so on.” That is, many of the things that interaction designers have to create and work with every day.

In Latour’s view, humans and objects are deeply intertwined. Objects aren’t simply neutral objects, but mediators that actively contribute to the ways in which ends are realized. Latour calls this technical mediation and it has several facets:

• Translation. Technology can translate a “program of action.” Verbeek uses a gun as an example: a gun can translate the action of “taking revenge” into a new action of “shooting someone.” “Both the gun and the person change in the mediated situation…they are transformed in their relation to one another.”
• Composition. Mediation always involves several actants that jointly perform an action. Thus, action “is simply not a property of humans but an association of actants.” Latour calls this composition.
• Reversible Black-Boxing. The blending of humans and objects in a network is usually invisible, a “black box”, but it can be untangled if, say, an object in the network breaks, revealing all the interconnected relationships.
• Delegation and Scripts. This is the most important facet of mediation, especially for designers. Latour uses the example of a speed bump to illustrate this concept: “Engineers “inscribe” the program of action they desire (to make drivers slow down) in concrete (the speed bump).” Thus, not only is it a “transformation of a program of action, but also a change of the medium of expression.” The task of a policeman (getting people to slow down) is delegated to the speed bump. This creates “a curious combination of presence and absence: an absent agent [such as a designer] can have an effect on human behavior in the here and now,” notes Verbeek. Latour says we should “think of technology as congealed labor” that can, in Verbeek’s words, “supply their own user’s manuals. They co-shape the use that is made of them.” Latour calls these built-in actions or behaviors that an object invites scripts. The perception of which, I would add, are what we designers (after Gibson and Norman) call affordances.

In the next installment: what role does technology have in obtaining “the good life?”

This is part four of a review of the book What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. Read part 1 for the overview.

Chapter 4, “A Material Hermeneutic” continues where chapter 3 left off, examining the work of philosopher Don Ihde. This chapter’s central question is “What role do technological artifacts play in the manner in which human beings interpret reality?”

Ihde, according to Peter-Paul Verbeek (the author), takes as his basis this premise: “Technologies help shape the way in which reality is present to human beings; not only how they perceive the world, but also the frameworks in which they interpret it.” Ihde outlines three ways that human beings relate to technological artifacts:

• Relation of Mediation. The human isn’t directly relating to the world, but only through the artifact. For example, when we wear glasses or watch television. There are two types of mediated relations. The first is embodiment relations in which technology is part of the experience and thus broadens our physical senses (such as the wearing of eyeglasses). The second is hermeneutic relations in which the artifact isn’t transparent. The example of this is a thermometer, which presents a representation of something humans can’t otherwise perceive: the temperature.
• Alterity Relation. A relationship not to the world, but to the artifact itself; for instance, when we play a video game or operate a machine.
• Background Relation. When technology “shapes our relation to reality” but remains hidden. For instance, the heating system in our houses.

Technology has two roles to play in how humans interpret reality: a direct role and an indirect role. The direct role is about the mediation of sensory perception–being able to experience more and thus have more ways for reality to be interpreted. The indirect way is about the “frameworks of interpretation” that technology provides. Verbeek writes,

Humans and the world they live in are the products of technological mediation, and not just the poles between which the mediation plays itself out…Mediation, for Ihde, is indissolubly linked with a transformation of perception. Naked perception and perception via artifacts are never completely identical…Mediation always strengthens specific aspects of the reality perceived and weakens others.

Verbeek calls this amplification and reduction. He writes, “Mediation always strengthens specific aspects of the reality perceived and weakens others.”

Ihde has a much more ambivalent attitude towards technology than does Jaspers or Heidegger discussed earlier. Our technologies don’t control us, nor do we control them. Instead, humans are intertwined with them, and visa versa. Technologies can be extremely transformative, but this is because of their position within the culture already, not from any imposition from the outside.

As mentioned in chapter 3, artifacts are always related to the humans who use them. This is what gives them stability and what Ihde calls multistability. Artifacts can have different meanings in different contexts, and in deed, different cultures can lead to the development of radically different technologies.

Technology has turned much of human culture into pluriculture, Ihde argues. “Thanks to the media, we are confronted with many other cultures than our own…it effects an exchange of cultures on a daily basis.” This isn’t multiculturalism; instead, it’s about being able to pick and choose from the fragments of cultures all around us and, using our “compound eye” place them into a mosaic-like framework in which we are able to see several different ways at one time.

But it’s not all positive. Verbeek writes

technologies also create a “decision burden” because of the many new choices they make possible. It is less and less obvious that events or occurrences unfolding now will forever remain what they are because ever more things that hitherto seemed inescapable are now falling under human control, or at least influence, through technological developments. Having children, for instance, is no longer something that simply befalls us but has become a conscious decision.

Technology creates more instances and kinds of choices people have to make.

In part 5: Bruno Latour on agency. Can things act on their own?