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

Chapter 2, “The Thing About Technology” takes a look at technology and objects from the point of view of philosopher Martin Heidegger. This is a meaty chapter that is nearly a quarter of the book, so my summary is going to be inadequate and, for you philosophy-scholars out there, probably wrong. I’m a designer, not a philosopher! But bear with me, since I think there’s a lot interaction designers can get from Heidegger, despite his Nazi leanings. (It’s almost obligatory to mention that when discussing Heidegger.)

According to Peter-Paul Verbeek, the author, Heidegger believed that what a thing does can only be understood by examining the thing itself, as a physical object that plays a role in the world. For Heidegger and unlike Karl Jaspers, technology is not a means to an end, nor is it a human activity. Instead, it is a “way of revealing” the world. “Revealing” is how all reality presents itself to human beings, in a specific way and always related to human beings. What gets revealed is what is available to be controlled by humans. Technology reveals the “standing-reserve” of reality: the “storehouse of available raw materials.”

I have to note at this point that there is much about this philosophy that makes my skin crawl. Heidegger is the kind of guy who looks at a tree and sees firewood. But moving on.

Heidegger on things is much less creepy. For Heidegger, things in the form of tools are how human beings relate to the world. Thus, tools can only be understood in their relationship to human beings. And what makes a tool a tool? It has to be something useful

From the perspective of praxis, a useful thing is “something in order to…”; it is useful, helpful, serviceable…tools and equipment never exist simply in themselves, but always refer to that which is done with them. What makes a tool or piece of equipment what it is, is that it makes possible a practice. But a remarkable feature of the ways tools are present is that they withdraw from, or hide in, as it were, the relation between human beings and their world. Generally, human beings do not focus on the tool or piece of equipment they are using, but on the work in which they are engaged.

Verbeek goes on to say that, “The more attention that a tool or piece of equipment requires, the more difficult it is to do something with it.” How true this is, and we see this all the time in interaction design. The more users fumble around with a lousy piece of software, looking for a hidden feature that shouldn’t be hidden, say, the more their task is disrupted.

When a tool is being used, Heidegger refers to it as “readiness-to-hand.” But when the tool itself becomes apparent and users have to focus on it, Heidegger calls this “present-at-hand.” When a tool becomes present-at-hand, the relationship between its user and the world revealed “through” it is disrupted.

The “in order to…” of tools shapes the world. Tools call for a particular way of working, which discloses the world in a particular way. Thus, tools are decidedly not neutral (as Jaspers claimed), but instead suggest ways of making the raw material of the world useful. Tools refer to not only what is made with them, but also to their future user.

What makes a useful object useful? Heidegger observes that

a useful object is present as such when it withdraws from our attention in favor of the work being accomplished. To this, Heidegger now adds that a useful object can only be useful when it is reliable. When it wears out–when, for instance the sole of a shoe wears away–the useful object loses its reliability, and therefore its usefulness. It changes over time into a mere thing. According to Heidegger, therefore, reliability is the way of being for equipment.

In part 3: Do technologies have an agenda?

This is part one of a review of the book What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. Because this is a book steeped in philosophy, reading it isn’t going to be for everyone. (In truth, parts were tough going for me.) But it contains a lot of juicy insights as to what the relationship of people to objects and people to technology is, and I think it has a lot to offer interaction and industrial designers in particular. So I’ll be reviewing the book and explaining its ideas over a series of blog posts, this being the first.

What Things Do sets out to establish a new way of thinking about the role objects play in human life and activities, and what effect objects have on human existence. To do this, the author Peter-Paul Verbeek, begins by looking at how several philosophers have thought about this issue in the past. He starts with Karl Jaspers‘ existential approach to technology.

Jaspers take on technology can be boiled down to this: technology alienates people from their “authentically human” selves, turning them (us) into accessories of mass culture. As Verbeek describes it: “technology suffocates human existence.” Although technology for Jaspers is seen as neutral (more on this in a second), the byproduct of technology plus population growth, is to turn human beings into cogs in a vast machine. The human race is utterly dependent on technology now to survive, and to maintain that technology is a tremendous burden. Technology creates more needs than it fulfills, and simply the operation and maintenance of the machines that keep us alive requires huge organizations and extensive bureaucracies. “Everything must be planned and coordinated with everything else,” Verbeek writes. “The tightly organized society that results, according to Jaspers, itself has the character of a machine.” Jaspers calls this technological society (that is, the world we live in now) “The Apparatus” and it “increasingly determines how human beings carry out their daily lives.” Human beings stop becoming individuals, but are instead interchangeable parts in The Apparatus.

With this bleak picture of technology, it’s hard to grasp that Jaspers although thinks of technology as essentially neutral.

[Technology] follows no particular direction…only human beings can give it direction; it is in itself neutral, and requires guidance. It is in no position to give itself ends and is only a means for realizing ends provided by human beings.

While Jaspers claims that technology is not an end unto itself, he knows that people often view it as such, allowing it to “function as an independent and menacing power while not being so itself.” Human beings need to reassert control over technology and not make it the goal, lest “everything that can be done technologically, is.”

Another interesting note for designers is that Jaspers says that the only way to really control technology is not think about the problem in a purely intellectual way, because that will only lead to solving technical problems and not the real problem. The only way to solve human problems to turn general situations into personal situations, to make the problem ours and to take on personal responsibility. We need to “recover a sense of responsibility for technology.” When we are responsible for technology, failure to act becomes a choice we make.

Verbeek notes that the idea that technology is neutral is an unusual one in philosophy. Most philosophies of technology claim the opposite, that technology is decidedly not neutral and does much more than simply achieve the goals for which they were designed. Indeed, says Verbeek,

[T]echnologies reshape the very ends that we use them to reach…a technology does much more than realize the goal towards which it has been put; it always helps to shape the context in which it functions, altering the actions of human beings and the relation between them and their environment.

Verbeek goes on to say that a serious flaw in Jaspers’ thinking is the separation of technology from culture. As he gets into later in the book, technology and culture are deeply entwined. “Human beings aren’t sovereign with respect to technology, but are, rather, inextricably interwoven with it.”

In part two: Heidegger answers the question, “What makes a thing useful?”

Jump ahead to parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7