Assigned Reading
Readings for this week are tentative.
- Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992 [29]
- "Introduction, Why study Being and Time", 1-9
- NOT REQUIRED: "Chapter 1, Heidegger's Substantive Introduction", 10-29
- NEW: The structure of the world, from Chapter 3: Worldiness, 91-107
- Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology
Aditional Resources and Readings
In-class Discussion: Being-in-the-World
- Dreyfus talks about "breaking the flow": how in Heidegger, Dasein can use equipment naturally without thought until it does not work in the expected way. Then the Dasein thinks analytically, aware of itself as subject and the equipment as object. Is it ever useful to intentionally trigger this phenomena? To shift a user from an automatic into an analytic mode? (p. 67)
- Can you design with a particular, essential purpose for something, or can you only design for one use among many? (p. 63) Is it beneficial for unintended uses to be adopted? If so, how can you design equipment so that it is more likely to be used in novel ways?
- What design considerations can make an object more like an extension of a person's body? Simple objects like a blind-man's cane seem to naturally produce this relationship with Dasein, but what about complex software systems? How can we build things that are more ready-to-hand and less "conspicuous"?
Post-class Discussion: Being-in-the-World
Priscilla Pham
Although I have a hard time imagining a network instead of a stack to describe the levels of involvment in an activity, we all agree the stack itself is not a sufficient description. I can see what David was trying to say when he mentioned the possibility of cycles in the network. We'd end up with a chicken and egg situation. But maybe we should look at those cycles and accept them for what they are instead of insisting that there is some absolute hierarchy.
In terms of design, we really cannot design the perfect product. Everyone thinks differently, so no matter how much we try to appeal to everybody (which is a mistake in itself) or try to design for a specific persona, there will always be someone who will use the product in a way that the designer did not intend. I wonder if there have been studies where the design intent to actual usage activity ratio is evaluated empirically, however, and what a local maximum is.
David Black
Priscilla brings up an interesting point regarding the cycles I mentioned. A tree structure, while being logically sound, requires a root, or topmost, node. Barring any religious beliefs, it's hard to think of any reason that could serve as such a thing to ground human action as being somehow "fundamentally" justified or unjustified. Accepting cycles in the graph highlights their arbitrary nature, but in reality it was perfectly arbitrary in the first place. With cycles, at least it is a self-contained, self-justifying arbitrariness.
And anyway, as designers we have no need to traverse the stack / tree / graph far up enough to run into odd degenerate situations. If we're designing something for a car, it does us no good to come to the conclusion that cars are fundamentally counterproductive to humanity's desire for self-actualization or anything along those lines.
Tyler Schnoebelen
In class I mentioned Bruno Latour (sociologist of science) but didn't know quite what to do with him. I still don't. Latour started out doing social constructionism, which looks at how individuals and groups create the reality they perceive, that's obviously relevant to our class, but I'll mention a few other things he's still working on. (This post takes the form of little tidbits.)
I think (judging by his talk at Berkeley last year), that he's no fan of oversimplifying and likes to grapple with complexity (this is attested by the Wikipedia entry for him, too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour). We have definitely dealt with complexity before (Brady, for example, and all the difficulty of Heidegger), but it's interesting to think about how often the aesthetic of science/design is "simplify simplify simplify".
If I'm reading things correctly, part of the deal with his conception of networks is that they are very fragile--they disappear quickly if actions aren't taken constantly (Stanford will fail if everyone just stops going to class).
His work on "parliaments of nature" has some applicability to design: the formation of collectives that don't get bogged-down in the unnatural separation of fact and values. Given how often design seems to be constrained by business needs (facts) and yet developed by user perceptions (values), this may be worth some further developing.
Aman Naimat
One of the key concepts I took away from class, which I was aware of before but didnt quite picture it in the same manner is that of the so-called "stack". The design of anything can take a viewpoint of any level at the stack. An example of the bottom of the stack would be something like:
- You need to reply to a bunch of emails, so lets just design something that sends emails faster or automates it completely
- An item above that stack would be "Why are you sending emails? To which we can discover that the person is in sales and they need to generate sales leads Maybe we can design something that can generate leads without even sending emails by lets saw crawling the web
- Yes another level above would be to ask whats your purpose for generating leads? To which the sales person says that they want to sell more stuff. Maybe then one can write a system that doesn't even generate leads but provides analysis on existing customers to whom salesperson can upsell new products
- and so on...
The problem is that we cannot focus on any given level. It will be less than optimum to focus the design on the most bottom and dangerous to just design for something at the top level, say at the level of the CEO of the company. That would alienate the userbase who cannot send emails anymore, which has some cost associated with it. Perhaps some formalism (some sort of equation) can be found which identifies the level which has the most utility. Utility in the business case would just be money (we like it or not). Perhaps each level has a "cost" and "profit" associated with it and we find the level which maximizes the overall profit. It's just a thought instead of basing this whole thing on the intuition of the designer.
The ideal system however would not have a designer or a programmer, which is the root of most problems in systems today. It will be something like Excel where the user is the programmer.
Murad Akhter
Like most people I was intrigued by Terry's, stack-shaped breakdown of an individual's involvement with an activity and the implications it might have for design. However, it seems to me that Heidegger would shy away from talking about involvement in terms of stacks or layers of abstraction by which a specific activity gets described in increasingly general terms because I fear that route naturally leads to symbolic reasoning. Instead, I think Heidegger would have said that when our activities breakdown we introspect and reflect on what we were doing in relation to an interconnected whole. In other words we relate one piece of equipment to its surroundings, one activity to another, an action to the intention behind it, the intention to its motivation and purpose and so on. At no step in this introspection, would it be necessary for the individual to give up specificity while 'discovering' new relationships and facts about what they were trying to accomplish.
As for implications for design, therefore, I feel that far from discussing how specific or general our task breakdowns should be. Heidegger would have us focus on how deep our understanding is of the context within which these tasks emerge. In other words, I think he'd be a strong proponent for ethnographic studies as a basis for design. It would be more relevant for designers to know for instance that people who email each other at a business conduct serious negotiations on the phone or in person. As designers we don't need to know that users need to communicate but by what means, why, when, where and how.
Alan Viverette
In class, someone (Eric?) mentioned intentional breakdown. The example was a warning dialog after clicking File > Save that said "You can only press File > Save five more times, then you have to use Ctrl+S." This is actually a pretty interesting concept, forcing the user to learn to be more efficient. It's like the opposite of Clippy, but it would still probably be incredibly annoying.
Anyway, what Heidegger said about modern physics setting up a framework and then confining itself to that framework reminded me of the Kuhn reading on paradigms from the beginning of the course. Paradigms serve as both a basis for further advancement and a limitation, unless of course there is a breakdown and subsequent paradigm shift. Heidegger seems to ignore the possibility of paradigm shift when he talks of the danger of technology, but perhaps there exists a trend in modern science away from accepting paradigm shifts. Are modern scientists more entrenched than classical scientists? Is there some aspect of technology that has enabled this?
Peter Ciccolo
I found the discussion of intentionally induced breakdowns interesting, especially in combination with the concept of technology as an extension of the body. In some sense, our bodies do incorporate the concept of intentionally induced (to anthropomorphize the process of evolution for a moment) breakdown: as I bend my finger further and further back, the increasing pain and difficulty I experience could be seen as roughly analogous to a "are you sure you want to delete this file (y/n)"-type warning. It's probably a good thing that human-designed breakdowns don't go so far as the body does, even when the consequences would be equivalently devastating ("Take a moment to look at this slideshow of files you'll never see again if you format your drive now...").
A short anecdote on the subject of resolving breakdowns: a very long time ago, I started to use shift-delete instead of delete (in Windows) to delete files. This erases them directly instead of sending them to the recycle bin, with the pleasing effect that if it's the only deletion strategy you use, you never need to empty the bin. In effect, I treated items going to the bin as a breakdown: if I delete something, I want it gone. In reality, the relevant key combination became shift-delete + enter, to clear the resulting warning box without even looking at it. The intentionally-induced breakdown of the warning got overcome by training myself to barrel through it without even consciously noticing it. When I recently moved to a Mac, I was appalled at the lack of an option to directly delete files; I was presented with the same breakdown as before, but without the option to bypass it in the same fashion. I've almost resigned myself to just using the 'empty the recycle bin without warning' keys, but it's still something in my conscious mind.
On the topic of trying to get users to approach our designed objects in the same context that we intended, it seems to me that this is one of the main purposes of software tutorials. By going beyond (and often skipping entirely) a straight presentation of the functionality, and grounding the use of the software in a specific task, we can attempt to bring the expectations and conceptions of the user in line with our own.
Georg Köster
The issue of 'hammering with a laptop' didn't leave me. It is obviously a sticking example illustrating to possibility of a misinterpretation and therefore misuse of a design. The issue of adaption to a specific user has of course far-reaching consequences, well beyond the simple issue of misinterpretation of domain of application. I believe that it must finally lead to the abandoning of perfection. Personally this feels quite ok to me. Maybe the world would get better if everybody accepted it as a fact. But what will the philosophic implications be? May there still be (utopic) perfection, for example? Would perfection mean to provide a personalized design for everybody? How much personalization will be necessary in such a case? Mass-personalization?
I wanted to add some more ideas from the state of the art in Design. The much discussed 'hierarchy of needs' is currently being viewed as a forest rather than a tree or even stack. Its levels are:
- Common needs
- topmost we find the basic values of the person that are usually rooted in its being a person. They together with the context needs be compared with the fundamental grounding of meanings in a Heideggerian view.
- Context needs
- Context is here narrowed to a broader context of for example work, same age, dating or studying (this is in fact a narrowing, since it doesn't relate to more specific context!). Also needs present for people related with an industry, culture or religion are classed in this level. Very pervasive and therefore hard to make explicit by people.
- Activity needs
- Needs of people wanting to do a specific thing. They are usually aware of them.
- Qualifier needs
- Need to do a thing in a specific way. Usually properties of an activity or product. Can often be articulated by people.
As one can see this hierarchy is somewhat different. Its approach is centered on discovery of needs and its structure is aiding in finding the way to the top, the most fundamental needs. Because a new solution to a higher-level need would have the biggest impact and would most likely make needs on the activity and qualifier-level obsolete. The slogan is: Make things better instead of make better things.
Eric Schkufza
Admittedly, this might be pushing the whole 'how do you design for breakdowns' conversation to its limit, but perhaps its worth mentioning anyway: Is it possible to design an artifact thats purpose is to induce a user breakdown, and then while that user is in an analytical mode, condition him to from time to time break out of a purely responsive mode, back into an analytical mode for no observable reason? That is, by way of a breakdown, could the artifact train a user to trigger his own breakdowns?
We could imagine that there might be some value to experiencing breakdowns on a regular, unprovoked, basis, if only because there may exist certain situations with no breakdown-inducing properties of their own that might benefit from an analytical interpretation. Similarly though, the completely uncontrolled descent into analytical thought could just as soon be disasterous - imagine for example, becoming analytical in the middle of a golf swing.
I can't think of any good examples of practical applications in which such a technique has actually been applied, beyond maybe teaching kindergardeners to 'think before they act,' though that really isn't quite the same thing.
In-class Discussion: Heidegger on Technology
Morgan Ames and Ben Newman
- A meta-meta-question: perhaps the whole trouble with Heidegger's prose is that it was translated from another language (German), where the invention of lengthy compound words is a time-honored literary technique. But one might argue that the test of a good idea is whether it survives translation (as a good idea must have more content than a clever turn of phrase). Reddy reminds us how difficult the transferral of ideas in one's native language can be; what expectations should we place on the translated word?
- "The merely correct is not yet the true" (289). Which do you prefer: the "merely correct" (which perhaps falls short of the truth), or Heidegger's unfalsifiable bombast?
- Heidegger remains vague about the substantive consequences of his terminological circus, but I found at least one suggestion of why it matters whether we consider technology as a means-to-an-end or as a "revealing": what we decide about the nature of technology will dictate whether or how we draw a distinction between modern and pre-modern technology. If we construe the essence of technology in a sufficiently generic way, perhaps we will be able to characterize both stages of technological development in a single stroke. Is this a worthwhile goal? What other purpose might Heidegger have?
- Is Heidegger implying the independent (Platonic) existence of ideas with these words? "But man does not have control over unconcealment itself, in which at any given time the real shows itself or withdraws" (299). He seems at other times to suggest that essence is nothing other than its interpretation (viz. the Rhine example). Are these two claims compatible? Am I misrepresenting one of them?
- "[Newspapers and magazines], in their turn, set public opinion to swallowing what is printed, so that a set configuration of opinion becomes available on demand" (300); in other words, as a standing-reserve. Do you consider this an apt characterization? Do you find anything problematic in the way Heidegger attributes agency? (This characterization of human agency, or the lack thereof, also appears elsewhere in the essay, e.g. the example of the lumberjack as a "standing-reserve" for energy since it's through this person's actions that trees are felled; or his mention of "human resource" departments.)
- "It seems as though causality is shrinking into a reporting---a reporting challenged forth---of standing-reserves that must be guaranteed either simultaneously or in sequence. To this shrinking would correspond the process of growing resignation that [Heisenberg]... depicts in so impressive a manner" (304). Other philosophers, most notably Hume and Wittgenstein, have taken pains to demonstrate the unreality of causation. How does Heidegger's discussion of causation escape this criticism (if you think it does)?
- "The essence of technology is in a lofty sense ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing, i.e., of truth" (314). Why then should we hope to identify the essence of technology? And where does the ambiguity lie? In the concept itself, or simply in our manner of talking about it? Cf. "Thus enframing, as a destining of revealing, is indeed the essence of technology, but never in the sense of genus and essentia" (311).
- What do you think Heidegger gains or was trying to gain from his focus on verbiage, both his own and others' (e.g. Plato)? Why did he use this approach?
- Heidegger warns us that being complacent about technology is being "utterly blind to the essence of technology" (p 288) and makes us slaves to it, or "transfixed in the will to master it" (p 314). He says that "The essence of technology is in a lofty sense ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing, i.e., of truth." He concludes that we can begin to confront the essence of technology through art. He also uses many loaded terms in referring to technology, e.g. "entraps," "slavery," "monstrous," etc. Georg further points out:<blockquote>Heidegger derives in the course of his questioning an understanding of technology as endangering the deeper sense of the world. This danger is put forward as being rooted in a self-reinforced tendency to research, classify and exploit the world via the means of modern technology and science. </blockquote>Between the views put forth in this essay and the time and place in which Heidegger lived (namely, Nazi Germany, where technological advances enabled the scale and efficiency of the Holocaust; and the post-WWII nuclear era, pre-environmentalism), do you think Heidegger views technology as positive or negative?
- Heidegger posits that "modern" technology differs from previous technology in that it "puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such," while non-modern technology like a windmill "does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it." Moreover, modern technology is closely related to the physical sciences. Why does he make these distinctions between modern and non-modern technology? How does it add to his argument?
- I noticed, as did Georg, that Heidegger seems to be referring primarily to technologies for energy extraction, e.g. civil engineering efforts, in his examples of modern technology. What would he say about information technologies? How would he feel about the degree to which they have become pervasive, that we rely on them, and that we even express "art" (which he said could be a way of gaining a critical understanding of technology) through them?
- Heidegger finishes his essay by stating that through art, we can effectively confront the essence of technology and break our "preoccupation" with it. What kinds of art do you think he means by this? Looking at the art in the last century or so, are there examples of art that you feel confronts technology in the critical way Heidegger describes? What about other critical analyses of technology that we wouldn't necessarily consider as "art," such as the environmental movement, that also encouraged a "questioning" of our blind faith in technology?
- A question from Erica:
The importance of understanding ourselves to be in free relationship to these technologies has to do with the ultimate purpose of any technology, or way of knowing, as a means to have and recognize an essential experience of relationship to Being. ... For Heidegger, can we experience and recognize this experience at the same time, or does the recognition again involve us in enframings that conceal the experience of relationship to Being?
- Erica says, <blockquote>On one hand, [designers] are caught, destining forth, under the spell of technology, and so they too may see the world only in terms of instruments and ordering of nature. Most junk that we make as humans certainly feels this way. If design itself if questioning concerning technology, a way to think about objects as potential elements of poesis, sites for essencing forth, then the way we might approach design would differ because rather than a function on the features of these designs, it would be a means to surface the tensions between means and use, and ideally to, through enframing, present the possibility that people might experience Being. Can you even do that for other people? What about the designer themselves? In the act of engaging the process of making, are they, precluding their own experience of Being or is design, as an inquiry, where the Being-ness, lies? If so, then in some sense the artifact produced is of unclear worth, unless there is some relationship between the moment of questioning, the relationship to Being, and the representations lefts behind for others. Unlike most users, or broad humankind, they are caught, as individual social actors, at the crossroads of interpretation of the enframing, technology, able both to engage it, be trapped into its contemporary use, order the world, extend that ordering to others, or experience Being themselves.</blockquote>Many often distinguish between artists and designers. In light of Heidegger's essay, would the primary distinction between these two be that "designers" are not taking a critical stance concerning technology, while "artists" are? How can we address the other questions about designers that Erica raises in this passage?
Post-class discussion: Heidegger on Technology
Morgan Ames
We actually didn't get to touch on this in class, but it's something that interests me anyway, so I'll comment on it. I'm always fascinated about arguments regarding "modern" and "pre-modern" technologies or culture, and how people distinguish between those and either wax nostalgic or caricature what came before that which we recognize now. I wonder if the difference between modern and non-modern technology really just a matter of degree -- modern technologies just change nature *more* and take advantage of (as well as aid) *more complex* scientific discoveries (with the amount increasing over time). Certainly even non-modern technology, such as Heidegger's exemplar the windmill, is very advanced in its own way (think of what it would take to understand what was going on if you had, say, grown up in a hunter-gatherer group that used stone tools), is embedded in a whole constellation of other technologies, and is a long procession of "technological" advances. Maybe Heidegger is taking a nostalgic view of these non-modern technologies, while taking the cultural-technological framework in which they have come to exist for granted.
Reading Responses
Alan Viverette
Dreyfus's elaboration of Heidegger's account of everyday dealings separates the realms of seemingly mindless comportment and mechanical behavior in five ways. What is the basis of the differences between mindless human behavior and mindless mechanical behavior? Human behavior is never truly mindless because it is underlaid by human intelligence. As such, Dreyfus's five points may serve as a starting point for defining human intelligence in such a way that it can be distinguished from machine (or insect) intelligence. They may also serve as a basic design guide for mechanical systems exhibiting human intelligence.
The first point Dreyfus makes is that nonmental actions are part of a "mode of awareness" that Heidegger defines as a form of "experience" and Dreyfus defines as "openness." As I take it, this means that a system's awareness of the environment and action is simply taken into account without subjective interpretation. This does not seem to conflict with machine or insect intelligence.
Dreyfus's second point is that human action "is adaptable and copes with the situation in a variety of ways." The explanation for this point seems to parallel information theory - reactions to present situations rely on the "basis of a vast past experience," or history of transactions, that lead to a practical correction of the situation. Machines with any sort of transactional memory should be able to make such an adaptation given the ability to recognize information breakdown. See points four and five.
The third point, as I see it, states that human action is focused and can therefore view objects in different aspects - a single entity can have different meanings depending on the "towards-which" with which the actor approaches the entity. This assumes that either machines have no sense of purpose or that they cannot perceive entities as serving more than one purpose. So, it would seem that the solution to this is a mechanical "towards-which" to select an aspect of an entity.
His fourth point is that "if something goes wrong, people and animals are startled" because human perception is always forward-looking, "even when they are not pursuing conscious goals." Prediction is, in my opinion, the most important aspect of human intelligence. It relies on both pattern recognition and transactional memory (which are interrelated) to create reasonable and dynamic expectations that can then be crushed when they do not match reality. This is also related to the existence of a "towards-which" expectation that defines a high-level forward-looking perception.
The fifth point Dreyfus makes is that in the event of a breakdown, mechanical behavior transitions to cognitive behavior. As far as I am concerned, cognitive behavior is all human behavior and seemingly mindless behavior is simply a less dynamic forward-looking perception. See above.
Aman Naimat
On cursory look it looked like a dense philosophical paper with extreme emphasis on etymology is exemplified by his usage of word
techne or
gestell. I do agree that technology as means to an end is just one limited perspective. Technology today with social networks, virtual games, and animation have gone beyond that. It is no longer a mere instrument. What technology brings forth or its creation is not technological. For example, the outcome of a computer generated movie, is not technological. The processors, software, and even people involved in making that movie are technology.
However, Heidegger’s thesis on art seems appropriate and almost exacting in the last two pages of his essay on technology. Perhaps because he provided more insight into art in his other essays than he did on technology. His description that art is act of revealing of truth and beyond just the material used or the artist can be easily justified by the cubist or post-impressionist art which focus on creating new truths. It is also common place in art to consider the artist just an instrument to art instead of the other way around, a statement that he makes for technology instead. The process of art is also
enframing given that it brings out the true ignoring the object, the subject, or the materials used.
To summarize, I think Heidegger has much more insight into art than technology. His fixation that both art and technology are alike due to the fact that ancient greeks used the same word techne for both has led him into his confusion. There is a parallel between the two but one can draw a relationship between anything. At some point, I and Mars are made up of the same quantum fluctuations and obey the same quantum mechanics, so now lets reason about how my essence is the same as Mars. I cannot provide more concrete evidence to his confusion but to quote Heidegger himself “The essence of technology is in a lofty sense ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing, ie, of truth”.
David Black
Heidegger. Wikipedia has an excellent quote regarding him: "some regard [Heidegger] as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, while others view his works as bombastic nonsense." Certainly while reading
The Question Concerning Technology my own view varied wildly and often between the two extremes, correlating quite well with the density of his jargon in the passages I was reading at the time. Certainly, this course has highlighted the importance of language, and indeed I willingly grant that creating new words and vocabulary can aid greatly in thinking about new topics. However, I think that no matter how you look at it the unceasing rapid fire of new terminology found in this paper was far overdoing it. After reading various notes and summaries of the paper I think I have a have a grasp on what he was trying to say, and fundamentally it doesn't seem to be a particularly new idea. The dichotomy of art and science, with science being portrayed as dehumanizing and unnatural and art being the source of what it truly means to be human, is hardly a novel concept.
The conceptualization of science as existing to create "standing reserves" of energy waiting to be harnessed by humans is interesting. Indeed, it is quite plausible that the advance of science tends to make us think "how can I make use of this resource" rather than "hey, what a nice river," but claiming that that's all that science does seems unfounded. Science doesn't exist solely to power human endeavor - it can also create entirely new types of human endeavor and in doing so change what it fundamentally means to be human. Heidegger writes like there is some sort of Platonic ideal of what it means to be "properly" human, which seems like quite a silly concept to me.
Additionally, I am always highly skeptical of people who take the stance that "nature" is an absolute good without attempting to define nature or put forth an ethical system that supports this view. Indeed, at times Heidegger uses rhetorical techniques to cast science as evil and nature as a victim of it:
"Modern science’s way of representing pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces."
The use of the loaded words "pursues" and "entraps" and the personification here stood out to me quite strongly, and similar things can be found throughout the paper. It seems like bad form for a philosopher to use this kind of language, and I wonder if it's an artifact of the translation.
Georg Köster
Commentary on Martin Heidegger: The Question concerning Technology by Georg Köster
Heidegger derives in the course of his questioning an understanding of technology as endangering the deeper sense of the world. This danger is put forward as being rooted in a self-reinforced tendency to research, classify and exploit the world via the means of modern technology and science. The danger is apparent in the consequence of an unreflected "giving in" to this tendency. Heidegger claims that in doing so man looses the possibility to engender new works of art, poetry and even technology. He proposes a recourse to art and generally the fine arts to root a critical understanding of the turn of man to technology in its current breadth.
He voices a concern that in his wider interpretation is widespread: the concern about the pervasiveness of technology. It virtually is everywhere, from industry to free time. He deduces a sort of vicious circle, a self-reinforced momentum towards technology in that every person is born into the technology-impregnated world and adapts technology as the universal hammer. Mixed into that comes the concern of overexploitation of the world's resources and the world itself.
The deduction is marked by his mastery of language, the classic philosophers and language-directed (in that it advances by investigating language) analysis. He calls his analysis a "questioning"; he himself puts the emphasis on the way rather than the result. And though the result, although coherent with widespread belief, is itself questionable, he raises interesting issues.
The result (and there is a result, although he himself is directing the reader's attention to the "way", as he poses it) is itself questionable in its truthfulness. This stems from the sometimes problematic arguments and sources thereof, and of the free (in methodically unclear) way in which he proceeds. For example he refers to poets (Goethe and Hölderlin) as inspiration for arguments of his, he misses out the Unschärferelation of Heisenberg which poses a natural bond to the claim of totalness of the notion of enframing.
But the focus here shall be on the interesting points that he raises. Reviving the classical understanding of means is certainly most enlightening.
Regarding design related subjects it is striking that in this discussion of machines and their relation to technology he separates the kinds of use of machines and their creation/conception. He says that a specific kind of use is nothing technological in such. This is the use of machines as daily helpers and alleviators in man's life. It puts this use apart from the one he presents as traditional, namely the use of technology as revealing power. He explains that machines to a user that uses them in this other, non-technological context, disappear as objects and are only related to the use. In a way this reminds of readiness-at-hand, but he seems to have envisioned some broader sense of it, since of course a tool-machine may be ready-at-hand for a craftsman that is technologically active with it. That is an interesting refinement of the broader term technology, albeit incomplete. He also misses the occasion to coin a phrase for this. Based on this he could have ventured on a more thoroughly laid out approach of situating technology in our daily lives and especially the advent of machines.
I personally would like to explore the transformation of western economies to knowledge economies from a Heideggerian viewpoint. His view of modern technology is too much centered on the energy-providing side, especially with the notion of "Herausfordern" in a the sense of demanding/exacting with the connection to energy and the discoveries in the natural sciences.
Michael Morgan
First off, I want to say that I found these readings difficult as I have not had any exposure to Heidegger or the context in which he is writing prior to this. So, I feel that some of the comments I am making may be a bit off from the intention of the papers.
What I am initially reminded of, especially with the line of "one cannot have a theory about what makes theory possible", are the ideas of incompleteness such as those of Gödel. Both seem to emphasize recursiveness, and the problems of making statements of oneself. Heidegger puts the focus on the fact that we theorize about everything from our position as a being. There is also the similarity in removing the system, a being or formal one, from a privileged position. Gödel stated that no formal systems cannot be the complete end all of knowledge about itself and Heidegger seems to say that people cannot by consciousness explain all of human activity.
I wrote about cognitive architectures for my proposal yesterday and that was on my mind when I read the bit about Heidegger views of mental representations. Such an approach is the very epitome of an informational-processing model of the mind that Heidegger opposes. By Heidegger, then, a cognitive architecture can never have the experience of being, of consciousness that we have. It seems that Heidegger thinks that notions of goals, methods, skills, etc that architectures take as the core mental processes are not, in fact, central. They might even be a sort of after the fact understanding. Intuitively, this is very strange to me as I understand the actions of others and of myself thinking of them as formal types of operations. This is the appeal of architectures after all, they mimic how we justify our actions.
Later, in the other part of the Dreyfus paper, it is covered how an action can be purposeful without the actor having in mind a purpose. This made sense to me as an answer to my problem of why there would not always be this formal understanding. There are habits such as driving where I can act without consciously attending to it. In such a habit there is something at work that is very different from calculations of goals, desires, possible actions or whatever and it seems to bring up a distinction not possible in cognitive architectures. This makes me wonder how such a thing could be represented in a computer system and perhaps unlike Heidegger I believe it could be. I want to say that this is not anything that mysterious, that it is a type of chaining. We are in some familiar situation and we have an established set of actions to accomplish a goal. We are then able to run this chain of actions without having to do calculations, calculations here being mental states. This, though, seems overly simplistic and is not very satisfying to me.
Priscilla Pham
Daesin is having the ability to self-interpret and the “mindless” movement that we carry out and take for granted. If we were to design and build artificial extensions of the body that are in tune with the daesin, which is the thing that allows us to ride bikes without thinking too hard about it, we must make some considerations.
If we want this extension to flow with the daesin, it will have to complement the motion it's used in instead of being in the way of the physical body. For example, in the design of prosthetic limbs, the mind and body must be able to learn how to use it up to the point where the user feels like riding a bike; there is some conscious effort but the muscles can learn automatic motions to move them. Likewise, if we were to build a computer vision solution for the blind they must be able to interpret the sounds in a natural way, as if it were a part of the background and yet still giving pertinent information that they would get from vision otherwise. With regards to complex software systems, we can ensure that there are not too many layers of abstraction to get to what the user would like to do. For example, if a user is looking for a sleep button he should not have to scroll through several pull-down menus but rather be able to just close the lid of the laptop, as this requires little effort and is intuitive enough.
We can make these things less conspicuous by molding them as close to what the user is already accustomed to and with as little intermediary steps as possible to do what he wishes. In that way it incorporates more quickly with the daesin and relies less on conscious attention which can be distracting and result in an “unnatural” feel to the use of the product.
Peter Ciccolo
Heidegger’s
The Question Concerning Technology raises fundamental questions of our relationship to technology and the nature thereof. Aside from the immediate issue of technology, the paradigm within which Heidegger examines his topic is an intriguing contrast to the objectivist viewpoint he criticizes.
To begin with, from such an ‘objective’ stance, it is easy to dismiss Heidegger’s claim that modern technology and modern attitudes toward the natural world are somehow intrinsically different from their counterparts in previous times. The difference is one primarily of scale and capability: the attitude that the natural world is a storehouse of resources for human consumption, while surely encouraged by the technological advances he describes, was more than evident in European expeditions to the new world, and can be argued to have a biblical precedent.
While all of the above is true, it nonetheless does not invalidate Heidegger’s point. Whether modern technology is substantively different from premodern technology is in an important sense not a factor of the technologies themselves, but rather our subjective experiences of them. If we find modern and premodern technologies to be different phenomenologically, then they are indeed different. This focus on experience over more objective measures is an important one for understanding both HCI and human experience in general. Take the example of running the same software on two sets of hardware that differ only in their speed/efficiency. Not only can the experience be significantly different in a qualitative way (not merely a quantitative one), but the two systems may end up being used in entirely different ways.
Of course, Heidegger’s viewpoint is incompatible with a straightforward rationalism in too many ways to mention; this is hardly surprising, as it is in part this viewpoint itself that he is warning against. One of the more intriguing incompatibilities, however, is the attitude he takes towards ‘revealing.’ While the sense in which he uses it is somewhat complicated, his assertion that man is effectively trapped by a cycle of revealing is striking, both because of the challenge it presents to the rationalistic assumption that more explicit knowledge is an objective good, and because of the plausibility of his later warning that reliance on technology can stifle our ability to truly understand ourselves or our world.
Murad Akhter
The structure of the world
While explaining Heidegger's notion of
involvement, Dreyfus says that hammers make sense by referring to nails and the activity of hammering makes sense in reference to a "where-in", "with-which", "towards-which" and a "for-the-sake-of-which" -- characteristics of the world within which the activity occurs. This explanation of
involvement is mainly meant to show its recursive nature and contextual underpinnings: "an involvement is itself discovered only on the basis of the prior discovery of an involvement-whole". However, this description also suggests ways in which contextual information can be categorized and captured in symbolic terms. While the identifiable "meaning" contained in these symbols may vary from person to person, this does suggest to me that symbolic formulations and phenomenology do not stand as contrapositives to one another.
In fact, it seems to me that work in some higher forms of logic -- such as modal or temporal logic -- could help formulate "for-the-sake-of-whichs" as roles or goals and put to rest some of the objections Heidegger puts forth against them. Dreyfus for instance states that "role predicates cannot capture what one simply knows how to do and be and when one is socialized into some of the for-the-sake-of-whichs available in one's culture." This assumes that we are limited to defining a role in a strictly limited fashion such as a function that returns a boolean true or false value as an answer. I'm not sure why this has to be the case. If we are socialized into knowing what to do and being a certain way then we're not only coping and responding to events, or acting on equipment in the world, we are also learning certain normative rules and expectations through language in the form of stories, tales, idioms and sayings. It should be possible to encode these rules and behaviors in a formal way and to use them to determine if our behaviors fit what is expected of a certain role.
I would even go so far as to say that if we were simply coping when acting in the world and dealing with it on the basis of a non-symbolic understanding of past behaviors and experiences, then computers could easily replicate and exceed human-level-intelligence in restricted domains. Take the case of chess games. According to Dreyfus, "a chess grandmaster can simply by responding to the patterns on the chess board, play master level chess ... Such play, based as it is on previous attention to thousands of actual and book games, incorporates a tradition that determines the appropriate response to each situation." In other words, if a computer can recognize patterns and arrangements of players on a chess board and has access to thousands of chess games to mine data from, it should be able to beat any chess grandmaster at chess. How then are some grandmasters still able to beat supercomputers at chess? The answer must like in mental faculties other than recognizing patterns and picking an appropriate response in some deterministic fashion. I would guess that creativity and ingenuity are far more important here. I would even wager that both of these mental activities require conscious thought, though it might be harder to introspect and express these thoughts in symbolic form. It's possible that Dreyfus' main point here is really that grandmasters aren't consciously thinking of end goals and formulating complicated strategies; rather they are responding to real-world phenomenon and their opponent's actual, short-term moves. However, it's fairly difficult for me to buy into the argument that imaginative and creative thinking is materially bound to a person's phenomenological experience. It seems far more likely to me that abstract and representational reasoning is involved here.
Tyler Schnoebelen
Heidegger’s Haus of Design
I’m curious about the history of design relative Heidegger’s notions of being. Every profession/research programme is interested in principles, but it’s hard for people to avoid turning principles into rules. Design may have a leg up on some professions because of its focus on creativity, but pedagogues who teach design and organizations who hire designers both require repeatable results. There may be an inherent contradiction in valuing both “repeatability” and “creativity”; there certainly seems to be a conflict between repeatability and context—every context truly is different, repeatability requires similarity. How do you successfully judge when something is similar enough to something else to work? Are such judgments even possible (are we just fooling ourselves when we answer, “Yes”)?
Dreyfus has a couple of small digressions about learning and about rules. He points out that “The rule ‘always keep your promise’ applies ‘everything else being equal,’ and we do not, and could not, spell out what everything else is nor what counts as equal” (75). It’s clear that designers have to understand the background practices they share with their users, but what do you do with this?
Dreyfus’s presentation here suggests you can’t spell out practices in a definite or context-free way (4), and I’m guessing most designers recognize something like that. You can teach someone to know their hermeneutic circle, and presumably give designers the tools to understand what that means.
Certainly designers are going to have to recognize that users are task focused: “That with which we concern ourselves primarily is the task—that which is to be done at the time” (64). It’s easy for beginning designers to get confused and design an interface rather than to keep in mind that the task is what the user wants. The interface, like the world, should be seen as a space for “shared practical activity” (101). It’s not the designer alone who gets define
which practical activities.
On a slightly different topic, every interface has blocking moments, some of them are even built in—you have confirm that you really want to delete something or enter a HIP challenge to prove you’re not a spambot. Designers actually plan temporary breakdowns to force awareness and deliberate coping.
I suspect the other ends of the spectrum may be planned but aren’t intentional—malfunctions where a user “stops and considers what is going on and plans what to do, all in a context of involved activity” (72). You know that at some point the user is going to try to hit a server that won’t be working, you write an error message to deal with that, you design server systems to mitigate or quickly resolve such situations. (I think that there’s something important in the discussion of envisaging and phenomenological reduction (73), but I can’t quite sort it out.) It’s not clear that everything Dreyfus defines as “looking for help” really is (72)—is just saying “Too heavy” or laying the hammer aside really looking for help?
In creating a product, you need to assess the possible breakdown points and come up with a plausible story for how people will behave when they reach them (and how they may have come to them). The designer must not be detached from his object like the scientist—what they do is different than the kind of thematizing and objectifying of nature that a scientist does. A designer is more like a hermeneutic ontologist who “makes his theme precisely the shared background understanding in which he dwells and from which he cannot detach himself” (83). I only dimly understand this myself, but I think that there’s a connection here, particularly in light of “obtrusiveness”.
As a final, fairly unrelated aside, I found the existential/existentiell discussion fairly difficult to parse (20). I hope we’ll have the chance to talk about it in class.
Erica Robles
What might it mean to be a designer of technology?
In
Questioning Concerning Technology (QCT) Heidegger opens up a discussion about the human relationship to technology – both a contemporary instrumental definition, and a broader meaning of technologies as
enframings – in order to discuss how we might be, or come to recognize, free relationship with these technologies. The importance of understanding ourselves to be in free relationship to these technologies has to do with the ultimate purpose of any technology, or way of knowing, as a means to have and recognize an essential experience of relationship to Being. [Question: for Heidegger, can we experience and recognize this experience at the same time, or does the recognition again involve us in enframings that conceal the experience of relationship to Being?]
His essay deals largely in generalizations a.k.a.
humankind when discussing the role of technology. Contemporary people view these technologies largely from an instrumental perspective, a means to an end through which we believe we are able to master or control our own desires to make. He points out that technology, too, as an enframing, sets us forth on a path, determining how we shall come to know, and order the world. We approach our world through this way of knowing, technology, which can create a bit of its own self-fulfilling prophecy. We order to world, converting nature into a standing reserve of that which stands ready for use in an instrumental sense. By not recognizing that technology as a way of knowing, sets us on this path, we miss the possibility of seeing it as a way of revealing, and thus of concealing, which might, in free relationship, restore humankind’s experience of relationship to Being.
It’s a bit of a humdinger…what is a designer to do? On one hand, they are caught, destining forth, under the spell of technology, and so they too may see the world only in terms of instruments and ordering of nature. Most junk that we make as humans certainly feels this way. If design itself if questioning concerning technology, a way to think about objects as potential elements of poesis, sites for essencing forth, then the way we might approach design would differ because rather than a function on the features of these designs, it would be a means to surface the tensions between means and use, and ideally to, through enframing, present the possibility that people might experience Being. Can you even do that for other people? What about the designer themselves? In the act of engaging the process of making, are they, precluding their own experience of Being or is design, as an inquiry, where the Being-ness, lies? If so, then in some sense the artifact produced is of unclear worth, unless there is some relationship between the moment of questioning, the relationship to Being, and the representations lefts behind for others. Unlike most users, or broad humankind, they are caught, as individual social actors, at the crossroads of interpretation of the enframing, technology, able both to engage it, be trapped into its contemporary use, order the world, extend that ordering to others, or experience Being themselves.
Perry Rosenstein
Heidegger’s work was one of the most taxing I’ve read. His argument had very little payoff for me until the end, when he articulated that art should be considered part of techne, the root for technology, for both derive from the same essence: enframing as a destining of revealing. Indeed, such explanation might provide a rationale for why universities study both technology and the arts.
I have found myself confused by all of this terminology largely because I’ve always considered language to be fundamentally instrumental; indeed, language evolves to suit our spoken needs. Finding an essence in everything seems to be a taxing and confusing exercise. As a materialist, I do not understand precisely why and how every word, thing, or term has an essence; and as a phenomenologist, I do not know why whichever essence Heidegger chooses for technology is correct simply because of obscure Greek word derivations.
To the economist, technology is a factor of production which is largely responsible for acceleration of an economy. This definition does not encompass the arts or other intentions of the Greek word techne, but does encompass other things which are not commonly considered part of the instrumental definition of technology. Heidegger would likely rebut the preceding definition by saying that, while perhaps correct, is not real or essential. But to the economist, why is this not the very essence of technology? Perhaps Heidegger’s rationale was lost on me, but after reading it, I still beg the question: who is Heidgegger to say what is essential about our conception of technology, or that anything really has an essence?