Contraints and affordances.
Thank you Bill for the Lang paper (which for the benefit of others formed
part of the Eurfat discussion as well). It certainly helps me. I am trying
to find useful tools for my activity as a designer and Lang's models
help... but in practical interpretation the case study providessome
questions.
Clearly the radical engineering solution is to alter Swiss washday habits.
The advertant use of a particular box in the process is not easy for the
designer to see. Humans seem so capable of undertaking what the French
call "bricolage", an ad hoc way of using objects to create something new.
A designer may look at the process and think... "ah it should be made of a
material with some antiseptic qualities" or other some other contingents
rahter than its roots in the perception of a division of time and space
in a laundry. I will need to ponder further on the ways in which the
messages within the paper can influence my behaviour.
Yesterday I developed a sudden interest in paleopsychology. In the course
of constructing a karesansui garden (in the middle of rural Wales... don't
ask!) I had to move an extremely large stone in difficult circumstances,
which certainly brought to mind how the movement of the blue stones from
Preseli to Stonehenge was achieved. My thoughts went further back from
neolithic to paleolithic. Hunter gatherer communities must have had fairly
sophisticated activity systems which hypothesis and models of the
behaviour of "the wild", a sophisticated understanding of eco-system, and
moreover the language to communicate their models to others in the system.
Taking in "wild" affordances has a long history.
Without knowing any high school physics, chemistry and biology, hominids
as tool makers must enter into a dialogue which (sorry Prof. Latour) we
might call nature. It is easier to work with gravity than against it,
higher levels of contrast and luminosity tend to make eyesight more
effective. In a more advanced state of knowledge it remains the same: say
knowing information held in the the form that we model in physics as
photons moving through optical fibre requires less energy and can provide
more bandwidth than that which we model as electrons moving through
copper. Possessing access to such knowledge clearly changes the division
of labour and may also influence the acceptence of participation of a
subject within a community of practice within an activity system.
Mountaineering is a mind game. Sherpas tend to undertand what mountaineers
laughingly call "objective dangers" (they are of course only dangerous
because you the subject has chosen to encounter them). They have more high
altitude experience than most western climbers, and will have undoubtedly
undetaken more high altitude traverses that most western climbers. The
sherpa may well have known the technical feasibility of the traverse, but
may have needed to be certain of the mental preperation required under the
given circumstances. Making peace with the mountain god would be part of
the process... as in the old freak saying "don't move until your head is
in the right place". Systems design clearly needs to take this sort of
issue into account.
How does the division of labour operate in the example? Who makes
decisions? On what basis are those decisions taken?
The hegemony of community values seem to provide a conflict, how are
conflicts between different communities of practice in the same activity
system resolved?
How are theses issue in turn embodied in a rule system?
Knowledge of physics and metreology may well be important in resolving
some of the questions above. The prevailing gravitiational and
metreological conditions, and the actors perceptions and undertanding of
them clearly apply no matter who the actor is. What actions are
undertaken, and who decides what actions are taken are clearly in the
cultural historic domain and not in the domain of physics or metreology.
Which brings us back to the original issues we had in the Eurfat debate:
If you are a systems designer, what frameworks are available for
addressing the design of systems where the transformation is understood to
be more significant than the mediation tool?
Martin O
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Feb 01 2000 - 01:02:54 PST