Reconstructing Design, Explaining Artifacts

Download or read book Reconstructing Design, Explaining Artifacts written by Jeroen de Ridder and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technical artifacts are both plain physical objects and objects that have been purposefully made for a purpose; they have a physical structure and a technical function. As a result, they belong equally in a purely physical conceptualization of the world, in which human intentions and goals seem to have no place, and in an intentional conceptualization, which is used to describe and understand people and their mental lives. This book explores how this observation plays out in the contexts of artifact design and explanation of how artifacts fulfill their function. It addresses the following questions: How do designing engineers get from a functional description of desired behavior to the concrete object that is the result of a design process? What do explanations of how an artifact fulfills its function look like and do they differ from explanations of natural systems?