Machines as Extensions of Man

Computers as extension of man Tecné - extension of the body Hacking as creative reconfiguration compütär, it was like hallucination panopticon as beginning of cybernetics - from designing space to using technology to radically change the view Machines as extension of the cognition, as well as the body

symbiosis (or parasitism) of computer-human-symbiosis

“seems entirely possible that, in due course, electronic or chemical “machines” will outdo the human brain” p2

Design as ‘authoritarian’ or ‘political’ action. Design influences the behaviour of the people using the products.

Responsibility: Architect is not responsible when the building collapses, as software designers are not responsible when the software crashes.

Second session

We can not predict the future > engineers and designers sometimes forget When we design systems, where all possible actions are planned, without margins for interpretation, then it is a static system. It cannot adapt to the environment and new input.

Suchman: Interviewed and observed people when they go to the photocopier. Just a little part of people go to the copier to do copies. Most of the people are distracted, not focused and don’t know why they are there. She as an anthropologist had to ‘tell’ the designers, that the users are people. Paper shows how you navigate and steer through a project.

What does it mean to design for people and to design for computers that are for humans Agency: Capacity of an act, being able to act in that world Artifacts that can explain themselves > through interacting with them, a coupling of interaciton and perception, the meaning is constituted in the interaction. Meaning is co-constructed in this interaction, instead of only in your head. As opposed to intellegibility

Value the capacity and abilities of the machines, rather than trying to replicate the human.

Assignment

• 1 page max, two or three red line topics. Articulate these red lines from these texts