Furthermore, I have indicated that the analysis provides a framework for evaluating artifact use and design. As presented here, this framework rests upon three evaluative notions: rationality, properness, and expertise. The central element is practical rationality. Plans can be evaluated in terms of their rationality, and because use and design can be analyzed in terms of plans, the standards of rationality also apply to those actions. The value of rationality is hardly comprehensive, since designing and using are not evaluated just in terms of effectiveness and efficiency; other values, such as safety and durability, have not been addressed in this paper. A value that was covered earlier is the notion of (im)proper use. This value cannot be derived from that of rationality: on the use-plan analysis, any use plan that answers to the standards of practical rationality is ‘acceptable’ in the important sense of being effective and efficient. One can, however, add to the evaluative framework a distinction between professional and non-professional (re-)designing. As described in section 3.1, this distinction reflects a division of labour that exists in most contemporary societies. Thus, use plans constructed by professional designers are socially and legally privileged over those constructed by non-professional designers although, again, improper use, based on “non-professional” plans, may be highly effective. By adding a third element, one may go beyond treating the division of labour as a brute social fact: one may take professional designers as experts. Yet on the use-plan analysis, their expertise does not primarily concern products, but rather ways of effectively realizing goals. That professional designers are often taken as experts is shown by reliance on their testimony: when asked why they believe that a new car can be used effectively for personal transportation, most people would probably reply that it has been designed for this purpose. Typically, this expertise becomes superfluous after a while: when someone is asked why she believes that her five-year old car can be used effectively for personal transportation, she would probably refer to her own experience in using it rather than to its being designed for transportation purposes. This change in evidence indicates that the relation between designers and users is not merely social, but social-epistemic (Houkes, 2006), and therefore an appropriate topic for further evaluative inquiry.
The evaluative framework presented above is far from complete, but it does contain several notions that are practically relevant and that cannot be found in other philosophical analyses of designing. Therefore, I conclude that the use-plan analysis provides a phenomenologically viable and evaluatively useful account of artifact use and design, in which intentions play a vital role.
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The Designer Fallacy and Technological Imagination
Don Ihde
Abstract Most literary critics have abandoned the notion that the meaning of a text lies in the intention of the author and have called this the “intentional fallacy.” I hold that there is a parallel found in many interpretations of technology design and call it the “designer fallacy.” This chapter, through examining a wide series of historical technology designs, deconstructs the utility of a simple designer-plastic material-ultimate use model and suggests that one must take into account unintended uses and consequences, the constraints and potentials of materiality, and cultural contexts, which often are complex and multistable. I outline a complex, interactive account of design interpretation.
Earlier in the 20th century, literary theorists developed the notion of an “intentional fallacy.” This was the notion that the meaning of a text lay with the author’s intentions - if these could be uncovered, then the meaning of the text was established. One can easily see how, if this is the only true way to establish meaning, there could be difficulties. What if the author was long dead? Or, even if living, how could one tell that the author was himself or herself telling the truth? What of unintended meanings, or meanings which fit but were not thought of in advance? Thus, the intentional fallacy recognizes such difficulties and cannot be considered an adequate account of interpretation.
I hold that there is a parallel ‘fallacy’ which is at least implicit in the history of technology design. In simple form, the “designer fallacy,” as I shall call it, is the notion that a designer can design into a technology, its purposes and uses. In turn, this fallacy implies some degree of material neutrality or plasticity in the object, over which the designer has control. In short, the designer fallacy is ‘deistic’ in its 18th century sense, that the designer-god, working with plastic material, creates a machine or artifact which seems ‘intelligent’ by design - and performs in its designed way. Instead, I hold, the design process operates in very different ways, ways which imply a much more complex set of inter-relations between any designer, the materials which make the technology possible, and the uses to which