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2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 11

EDITORIAL

The Computer and Design

Charlie Breindahl, University of Copenhagen and IT University of Copenhagen,


Ida Engholm, Center for Design Research, Royal Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, Copenhagen,
Judith Gregory, Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology,
Erik Stolterman, Indiana University, School of Informatics
When we first discussed creating the journal that
became Artifact, we simply could not believe that
it had not been created already by somebody,
somewhere. In little more than a quarter of a
century, the computer had changed every aspect
of design. The design process had changed with
the introduction of AutoCAD and PageMaker, the
manufacturing process had been automated, the form
of the resulting products had changed, the computer
software itself had become a design object, and the
functions of physical designed objects increasingly
relied on built-in computer intelligence. We kept
looking for the international, academic journal that
recorded all this in vain.
Moreover, it seemed obvious that the importance
of design was increasing rapidly. In the global
marketplace, the fierce competition on price and
quality continues to drive down the price of consumer
goods. Saturated with material goods, consumers
look for experiences instead. Such experiences must
be designed. Also, the proliferation of computers
and Internet access brings a growing demand for
software architects and game designers to shape the
virtual world beyond the screen. In our professional
lives, we sensed a global trend towards incorporating
the education of designers and architects into
academe, and a growing pressure on lecturers
to publish in academic form. Design research is
increasingly becoming an academic field and no
academic field can exist without journals.

In its content, the journal will embrace experimental


research approaches to design with a basis in
applied design practice. It will capture and utilize
the knowledge that is produced in the varied
transitional zones that characterize design practice
today. The journal will feature articles based on
historical, cultural, and philosophical studies that do
not spring directly from applied design practice, but
which make qualified contributions to the field in the
shape of insights, concepts, and ideas. Assuming
an attitude of openness, we shall strive to promote
transdisciplinary design research and prepare the
ground for cross-fertilization, interconnections,
and crossbreeding among different scientific and
practice- oriented disciplines.
When we began to ask the best people we knew
whether they would join us in our efforts, we were
surprised again by the warm reception given our
fledgling venture. We are deeply grateful to our
Advisory Board who individually and collectively
represent what we wish Artifact to stand for and to
our publisher, Routledge/Danish Centre for Design
Research Group.
Gradually, we have come to understand who an
academic journal belongs to. Like the many virtual
communities on the Internet, it belongs to no
single person or entity, but to those who decide to
contribute their time and efforts. With gratitude, we
welcome yours: Our readers and, it is hoped, future
contributors.

Finally we saw a need to create closer contact


between research and industry by providing
researchers, practitioners, and people from industry
with the possibility to publish their results and
exchange ideas on specific areas and issues.
Creating a journal to record and analyze the
fascinating combination of computer and design just
seemed to be the right thing to do.

Published online 2006-04-21


ISSN 1749-3463 print/ ISSN 1749-3471
DOI: 10.1080/17493460600658342
2007 Danish Centre for Design Research

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2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 25

Object Artifacts, Image Artifacts and Conceptual Artifacts:


Beyond the Object Into the Event
by Owen F. Smith, University of Maine

Keywords: Art, Anthropology, Cognitive Science, Creativity,


Fluxus, HCI, Language, Mediation, New media, Perfomance

When asked to respond to the question what is an


artifact? I initially had several divergent responses.
Because of my varied background and current
position, I responded to thisquestion in three related
but different ways: as an anthropologist (the area of
my initial graduate training), as an art historian (the
area of my Ph.D.), and as a professor of new media
(my current position).
To an anthropologist,what comes to mind
is a general category of things that certain
anthropologists study, specifically, any object that
was created, modified, or used by a human being.
Anthropologists also refer to artifacts as material
remains, and generally they are portable objects
rather than structures or buildings.
To an art historian, artifacts are foundational on two
contradictory levels. As George Dickey states, the
status of artifactuality can be seen as a defining
characteristic of all works of art. Nevertheless,
artifactuality is not sufficient as a condition in and of
itself to trigger art status. Put another way, artifacts
are objects that are not works of art, and they are
not the primary focus of art historical investigation.
This is particularly the case when aesthetics is a
primary concern.
To a new media professor, the word artifact has
two primary associations. The first is at the core
of a developing field of study centered on humancomputer interaction (HCI). In this field, discussions
of artifacts center on both the computer and the
application, and their use in relation to concerns
drawn from cognitive science. The second is much
more common and seemingly mundane. An artifact
is the result of a computational error. The most

common of these is an image artifact, which is any


feature that appears in an image that is not present
in the original imaged object. An image artifact,
such as a compression artifact, is a particular
class of data error that is usually the consequence
of quantization in loss-heavy data compression.
Through the lens of my own background, then, we
can see the glimmer of four definitions of the nature
and/or function of an artifact:
1. An object produced or modified by human
agency, especially a tool or ornament.
2. A creation of human conception or agency
rather than an inherent element.
3. An erroneous effect, observation, or result,
especially one generated from the technology
used or from experimental error.
4. A structure or feature not normally present but
visible because of an external agent or action.
More significant than any one of these definitional
aspects of the term artifact are the oddly
interconnected uses of this term as a means of
demarcating a particular quality or presence.
Artifactuality, in all forms, is central to determining
the nature and significance of a given element,
especially in relation to human cognition or agency.
An artifact is both a residue of making, an object
such as a dish, and the process by which humans
make the world. Our artifacts and tools are more
than just those objects that we use to perform
certain tasks. In the end, theyare change agents.
The interrelationship between the generating task
and the resulting artifact or tool is one of cyclical
change, rather than a simple need-response
relationship. In the essay The TaskArtifact Cycle
Carroll, Kellogg, and Rosson (1991) argue that:

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. . . a task implicitly sets requirements for


the development of artifacts to support it; an
artifact suggests possibilities and introduces
constraints that often radically redefine
the task for which theartifact was originally
developed. (p. 79)
As the artifact suggests new possibilities and
manifests its limitations, these relations generate
new possibilities. Our artifacts in this way make us
as much as we use them to make other things. This
characteristic leads some to suggest that artifacts
are objectified, humanknowledge and practice.
Artifacts are more than things. In essence,they form
a cognitive frame through which wegive meaning
and functionality to what we experience or perceive.
Anthropologists and historians have long held that
we can tell much about a given culture and people
by considering their artifacts. This is not simply
becausethese materials are part of the historical
record. More importantly, they form thephysical
trace of a peoples mindset, beliefs,attitudes, cultural
structures, and values. Thisis in part possible
because the physical properties of any given artifact
are references to the people who made and used it.
Others have suggested, I believe rightly, that an
artifact is a theory that can in turn be abstracted
from the artifact itself. (Or possibly, they state
theories through their physical being.) For this
reason, although many definitions give primacy
to the physicality of an artifact, the nature of
artifact as an idea is the most rich and of the
greatest interest to me.
In developing our understanding of HCI, cognitive
psychology has been one of the most significant
influences. This role, however, has primarily been
limited to a consideration of the storage and
processing of symbolic information, drawing an
analogy between general human functions and how
computers might perform similar functions. Under
the influence of such assumptions, their users have
largely construed HCI as the science of designing
systems to support problem-solving activities. This
is often referred to as cognitive ergonomics. The
resulting systems are termed cognitive artifacts, and
they supposedly improve the quality and function of
human thinking.Although there has been a recent

move away from this focus on cognitive artifacts,


this view is still dominant.What all of this misses,
however, is creativity.
Traditional views of cognitive artifacts cannot
account for creativity. Neither can they address
the role and function of the most human aspects of
experience: emotion, imagination, and creativity.
What I propose, however, is that the other form of
digital artifactuality, the result of a computation error,
accounts for aspects of creativity. Moreover, this is
the process most closely aligned with creativity. How
can this be?
What I propose is that creativity, defined simply as
divergent thought for imagining what might be, is an
artifact. In relation to the normal cause-and-effect
operation of computational systems as reasoned
thought, creative associations are flaws. The
unexpected associations, relations, and possibilities
that are at the heart of much creative output are
neither logical nor predetermined. When we think
outside the box, we generate artifacts things that
are not to be found in the simple additive result of
information input.
The invitation to consider the nature of artifactuality
has led me to an interesting insight into my own field
of inquiry: contemporary instructional-based art
works, sometimes referred to as scores. If we look
at the particular form of instruction works known
as event scores, historically associated with the
group Fluxus, we find an interesting contradiction.
They are at the same time specific and generalizing.
They tell the reader or performer what to do, and
they simultaneously escape the limitations of those
same instructions. Let us consider a few examples of
classic Fluxus event scores to get a general sense of
their form and the broader possibilities they imply:
Eric Andersen
Opus 9
Let a person talk about his/her idea(s).
1961
George Brecht
Three Window Events
opening a closed window
closing an open window
1961

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 253

Ken Friedman
Websters Dictionary
A series of dictionary definitions inscribed on
sidewalks and walls in public places.
1965
Alison Knowles
Variation #1 on Proposition
Make a soup.
1964
Sometimes described as neo-haiku theater these
forms of performance scores are minimal in their
physical presence, but they possess a quality that
enables them to break from both these minimal
instructions as well as from our expectations.
They do this much as the major grammatical break
in traditional haiku (kire) events act to shift our
understanding of both life and art.
But to return to our subject, that of the nature of
an artifact, what I realized in thinking about the
question what is an artifact? is that events are
a form of artifact. I mean this not in their physical
state as marks on paper or even as language, but as
a conceptual frame, a tool and most importantly, as
a mediating force. More directly, what I realized is
that all instructional works, and events in particular,
are artifacts. They are structures that act to control
or make an action (or thing) into a cognitive
frame. They change what we do from what might be
described as an action (life), whether it is simple or
complex, into a mediated act (art). Within the context
of the human-with-artifact system, such instructional
works expand the functional and cognitive capacity
of both the performer and the audience. Soup is no
longer just soup, or an idea just an idea, but they
are all part of the view we hold and what we see
and feel about the lives we are living. The simple act/
instruction as an artifact acts to replace the original
task (making art) with a different one (performing an
action), one that has the potential to have a radically
different cognitive frame and uses radically different
cognitive capacities from the initiating instruction. In
this way, instructional works change the way we think
and act, much like those suggested by D. A. Norman in
his essay Cognitive Artifacts (Norman 1991).

Normans description of the manner in which


artifacts change the ways tasks get done can be
simplified as follows:
Distribute actions across time
(precomputation)
Distribute actions across people (distributed
cognition)
Change the actions required of the individuals
doing the activity.
Scores or instructions allow the text to contain
action, or at least the potential for action, thus
distributing it across time and people. Scores do
not so much change the action required as they
change more significantly our thinking about
the action. They alter our perception.We see things
in a new way and scores help us to question such
distinctions as the dichotomies of significant and
insignificant or valuable and worthless.
Artifacts are the result of forces brought to bear on
the mediated boundary between given reality and
the imposition of human cognition on the material
existence that the given reality establishes. (There
is, of course, a debate concerning the nature of
reality and whether reality exists. For now I will
propose that reality does exist.)
Artifacts, in this case scores and instructions, are
human thought made physical. They are mediating
factors between actions and the resulting changes
to the world. In execution and perception, the
artifactuality of event works is brought to a head
by the seemingly contradictory possibilities of the
physical world and the score itself as awork of art or
creative expression.
Some suggest that artifacts are like language.
Humans create them, but they act independently
nonetheless to mediate relations between humans
and the world. Human beings mediate their
activities by artifacts. When we are introduced
to a certain activity, we come to know it through
artifacts.

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 254

Artifacts are also a product of our activities.As


such, we constantly change artifacts in the act of
using them. This mediation is essential to the ways
we can and should understand artifacts. We cannot
study artifacts as things. Rather, we must consider
how they mediate use. We must understand or look
at the artifact in use to see properly what it is or
what it suggests.
Artifacts have no significant value in isolation.
They come to possess meaning in cultural terms
and in relation to social praxis. Creatively speaking,
artifacts are those ideas that change our perception
of the world. We see this as creative, not as
something else. By redefining our perspectives,
artifacts enable humans to engage in activities,
develop ideas, and develop cultural practices
previously unknown to them. The results of such
engagements are known through use and they are
known as a kind of relational aesthetic.
Alison Knowles sums up the process of artifactual
mediation in an elegant and disruptive way in her
event score, Performance Piece #8 (1965):

REFERENCES

Carroll, J. M., Kellogg, W. A., & Rosson, M. B. (1991). The TaskArtifact-Cycle. In J. M. Carroll (Ed.), Designing interaction,
psychology at the human-computer interface (pp. 74102).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Norman, D. A. (1991) Cognitive Artifacts. In: J. M. Carroll, (ed.),
Designing interaction, psychology at the human-computer
interface (pp. 1738). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
The Free Dictionary (n.d.).
Available: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/artifact

CORRESPONDENCE:
Dr Owen F. Smith, New Media Program,
404 Chadbourne Hall,
University of Maine,
Orono, ME 04469, USA.
E-mail: Owen_Smith@umit.maine.edu
Published online 2007-04-21
ISSN 1749-3463 print/ ISSN 1749-3471
DOI: 10.1080/17493460600610707
2007 Danish Centre for Design Research

Divide a variety of objects into two groups. Each


group is labeled everything. These groups
may include several people. There is a third
division of the stage, empty of objects, labeled
nothing. Each of the objects is something.
One performer combines and activates the
objects as follows for any desired duration of
time:
1. Something with everything
2. Something with nothing
3. Something with something
4. Everything with everything
5. Everything with nothing
6. Nothing with nothing

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 255

2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 610

Behavioral Artifacts:
What is an Artifact? Or Who Does it?
by Ken Friedman, Swinburne University of Technology

Keywords: Art, Anthropology, Cognitive Science, Creativity,


Fluxus, HCI, Language, Mediation, New media, Perfomance

The word artifact comes from two Latin words. The


first, arte, means by skill, from ars, skill. The
second, factum, is the past participle of facere, to
do or to make.
The word dates back to the early 1800s, meaning
something created by humans usually for a
practical purpose; especially: an object remaining
from a particular period and something
characteristic of or resulting from a particular
human institution, period, trend, or individual
(Merriam-Webster, 1990, p. 105). Most definitions
focus on the quality of artifacts as things,
speaking of objects and remains rather than
process or production. Typical definitions are
anything made by human art and workmanship;
an artificial product. In archeology, applied to
the rude products of aboriginal workmanship as
distinguished from natural remains, a product of
human art or workmanship, any object made by
human beings (Oxford English Dictionary, 2006,
n.p.; Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1993, p.
120; Wordsmyth, 2006, n.p.).
I am as interested in the artifacts of doing as in
the artifacts of making. Many artifacts exist only
in human behavior, individual and social. These are
the focus of this essay.
While the philosopher Mario Bunge (1999,
p. 23) defines an artifact as a man-made
object, he uses the word object in the wide
sense of anything we can create, including
symbols, machines, industrial processes, social
organizations, social movements.

In this sense, an artifact is anything that we can


design in the very large sense of the word design,
defined as [devising] courses of action aimed at
changing existing situations into preferred ones
(Simon, 1982, p. 129).
The interesting challenge we face in the new journal
Artifact involves finding a vocabulary that allows
us to focus on the wide range of artifacts, those
made by doing that never take physical form as well
as those that are made in physical form, including
remains.
One reason for the emphasis on physical artifacts
may simply be their durability. An act or a word
vanishes. An object in the common sense of the
word does not. Historian Arnold Toynbee (1934,
p. 156) captures this nicely where he writes, It is a
mere accident . . . that the material tools which Man
has made for himself should have a greater capacity
to survive . . . than Mans psychic artifacts.
This historians distinction emphasizes a paradox.
Historians study what human beings do and what
they have done. They do so through the remains and
traces of action captured in physical artifacts.
The language that helps us to capture one range
of meanings seems always to withhold or defer
another. As we bring ideas into one focus, we lose
the focus that would help us to capture another set
of ideas.
The words we use for different kinds of artifacts
are also shaped by our history in using them. When
way we speak of interfaces, for example, we think of
human-computer interaction and not shoes or cups.
Despite this fact, shoes and cups are interfaces of a

6

kind a different kind, but interfaces nevertheless.


When we speak of products and process, we
generally do not think of things digital but a
software package is as much a product as a block of
cheese, and we produce the system that allows us
to manage lines of customers at a bank.
It is as though we lack a holistic vocabulary that
allows us to speak of what we wish without
excluding what we also wish to speak of. While
this has always been the case, the advent of new
digital media focuses our attention on the virtual
and immaterial, emphasizing this challenge.
Describing the subtleties we seek requires the
right prepositions and verbs to give voice to the
nouns we choose, compound noun-prepositionverb phrases that do not fit easily into the mental
habits of an English language that took shape
in Shakespeare and the King James Bible. This
problem arises in different ways and shapes in
all languages whether it involves a German
theologian speaking through the language of
Luthers Bible, a Japanese engineer who lives in
the language once shaped by Hakuin Zenji, or an
Indian mathematician thinking through a language
that crafted the Vedas.
The science fiction writer A. A. Attanasio (1989)
collapsed the distinction between beings and
their doings in a science fiction novel that posited
human action as a physical force embedded in and
leaving behind an energy trail, much as a television
broadcast radiates signals outward from a source.
In Attanasios imagined world, everyone who
has ever lived can be reconstructed resurrected
from their traces, much as we could still capture
and watch the original broadcast of I Love Lucy
or Wagon Train if only we could get out ahead of
the signal with a sufficiently sensitive television
antenna.
In thinking about artifacts, I want to capture the
concept and dimensions of behavioral artifacts. The
behavioral dimension of physical artifacts is clear
to most of us. We conceptualize our understanding
of this dimension in such terms as affordance
and interface, and we realize it in the way that
we organize our working habits and living patterns
around the artifacts we use.

It is this sense of the idea that Winston Churchill


evoked in his 1943 speech on whether and how
to rebuild the House of Commons: We shape our
buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.
Nevertheless, there is another behavioral
dimension in the designed world, hidden in plain
sight. It unfolds before us. We walk through it,
embedded in it as we shape it around us. It arrives
with each moment of time and vanishes as time
passes by. This is the enacted world that we
experience and capture partially in memory. We
can document behavior, describe it, plan it, and
represent it, but we only realize it in the living web
of action and interaction. We experience behavior
as we enact it, and then it vanishes. After the fact,
it becomes an account, a memory of some kind, or
perhaps the story of a memory.
As we move through time, we lose the traces of
this world. In some cases, the importance of these
lost worlds is greater than we realize. Consider, for
example, the role of improvisation in Mozarts work.
Through improvisation, Mozart shaped a tangible
experiential world that played out daily through
the duration of his life, vanishing when he died in a
way that must surely influence anyone who thinks
deeply on Mozarts music. Theologian Karl Barth
(2003, p. 40) evokes the sense of this world: the
number of Mozarts preserved works is enormous.
But probably even greater is the number of all those
works of which we are deprived and destined to
remain so. We know that at all periods of his life
he loved to improvise, i.e., to freely create and play
for himself within public concerts or hours on end
to only a small audience. What he did this way was
not written down a whole Mozartean world that
sounded once and then faded away forever. What
we hear is Mozarts legacy, his nachlass, and his
remains. The living Mozart shaped his music in daily
practice. This was not the practice of practicing
scales or the practice of realizing a written
composition. Rather, it is practice as an expert
physician practices medicine or a lawyer argues
law, practice brought to life in behavior.
Amadeus by Peter Shaffer (2001, pp. 3036, 120121;
see also Forman 2002, Scene 7) captures this
experience in the scene where Mozart memorizes

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 6107

Salieris March of Welcome on one listening. In the


motion picture version of Amadeus, Mozart sits at
the piano to work with the music as a potter works
with clay. He transforms the tune effortlessly as
he thinks and talks, shifting it from a somewhat
wooden march into the well-known passage it will
become in The Marriage of Figaro.

Mozart simply by listening to an orchestra play one


of Mozarts scores. Perhaps another orchestra or
Mozart himself might have given a better rendition,
but it is still Mozarts work. Other kinds of works can
be realized in the same way, including theater, rituals,
performed art, and even physical works created to be
realized from a score.

This is a behavioral artifact. It comes and vanishes


in experienced time. We will never experience
this Mozart for ourselves except in imagined
reconstructions.

The issue of musicality has fascinating implications.


The mind and intention of the creator are the key
element in the work. The issue of the hand is only
germane insofar as the skill of rendition affects the
work: in some conceptual works, even this is not an
issue. Musicality is linked to experimentalism and
the scientific method. Experiments must operate
in the same manner. Any scientist must be able to
reproduce the work of any other scientist for an
experiment to remain valid.

Even in this age of excellent recordings, we must


inevitably miss experiences. One cause is the
difficulty of capturing the quality of live presence
in even the best recording. Many reports on music,
theater, and art describe this. The recent death of
soprano Birgit Nilsson offers an example, where
Anthony Tommasini (2006: n.p.) writes, it is almost
impossible to convey what it was like to hear her
in person. Even her recordings, many of them
landmarks in the discography, do not do full justice
to her singing. . . . It was not just the sheer size
of her voice that overwhelmed recording studio
microphones. It was the almost physical presence of
her shimmering sound that made it so distinctive.
For many, the physical presence of Nilssons voice
was unique. The ability to project a powerful sound
through diaphragm control rather than volume
meant that she could sing her words clearly to
every part of a theater, rising over the orchestra
and chorus in a way that listeners perceived as
charismatic in power and subtle in musical mastery.
Another reason, even more common, is the fact that
many experienced moments are not recorded. Peter
Shaffer (2001, pp. xxviiixxix) laments the facts
that the revised Amadeus of 1998 was not filmed at
Lincoln Center, as the first Broadway production of
Amadeus had been two decades earlier.
The idea of musicality embodies the tension
between the behavioral artifacts of live
performance and the objects that instruct, record,
or document performance.
The concept of musicality refers to works designed
as scores for any medium, works that can be realized
by artists other than the creator (see Friedman 1991,
1998-b). In this sense, any listener can experience

Nevertheless, the radical interpretation of musicality


that emerged in the instruction work and intermedia
ethos of the 1960s raises interesting problems. The
generous opening to the world that scored work
made possible engages the action and behavior of the
performer who realizes the work while dislocating
the work from the productive behavior of its creator.
(For a deeper discussion of these issues, see
Friedman 1991, 1998-b, 2002; see also Owen Smiths
contribution to this issue of Artifact.)
Musicality suggests that the same work may be
realized several times, and in each state it may
be the same work, even though it is a different
realization of the same work. At the same time, the
particularity, the unique quality of each realization
depends on human context. It emerges once, in a
radical sense, never to exist again.
Consider, for example, conductors who have
given us great interpretations of past work, say a
complete Beethoven cycle or a series of Brahms
concertos, then, a decade or two later, gave a
dramatically different, yet equally rich interpretation
of the same work.
Oddly, the quality of difference that arises over
time is linked to a specific contemporary definition
of the term artifact. This definition involves the
unplanned results of human agency as well as
the planned ones. This even includes unplanned
results in the form of spurious scientific results or

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 6108

unintended effects. The Oxford English Dictionary


(2006, n.p.) defines this kind of artifact as a product
or effect that is not present in the natural state
of an organism, etc. but occurs during or as a
result of investigation or is brought about by some
extraneous agency. In scientific investigation,
according to Wordsmyth (2006, n.p.), this involves a
spurious result or effect caused by the introduction
of unintended substances or structures.
One contemporary composer has come to embody
the radical opposition between these two poles. La
Monte Young, a composer involved with the early
Fluxus community, created some of the simplest and
most radical music scores of the twentieth century.
Youngs well-known score for Composition #10 to
Bob Morris is simplicity itself. It is a one-sentence
instruction to draw a straight line and follow it
(Young, 1990, p. 198; see also Young, 1963).
On the one hand, one can imagine a hundred ways
to realize this score. The most famous of these is
the widely known rendition in which composer Nam
June Paik dipped his head in a bucket of ink, using
his hair as a brush to draw a line down a prepared
piece of paper. On the other hand, Young prohibits
the score from being reproduced without his consent
or performed without his permission. Young has
apparently come to believe that the artifactual quality
of doing influences the quality of the work to the
degree that there is no making outside the doing
of the composer. This is certainly the case for the
amazing series of lengthy piano performances Young
realized in New York in the 1980s. Many of these were
recorded. One, a 1987 performance of The Well-Tuned
Piano in The Magenta Lights, lasted six hours and
twenty-five minutes. Young has now created his own
record company to publish this piece as a CD.
Some of Youngs concerns involve control of the
copyright to his work, and controversial claims for
credit by other composers in Youngs compositions.
The larger issue, the artifactual issue, remains
more significant to me. To hear a six-hour-long live
performance by La Monte Young in a room prepared
for the concert with lighting by Marian Zazeela is an
experience no recording can document. At the same
time, we have recordings of these contemporary
concerts by the composer in a way that we do not
have of Mozarts improvisational performances.

The philosophical contribution of doing-as-artifact


is a release of the static artifact to a pluralistic life.
Such artifacts are freely available for consideration
and realization in many ways. They can exist or
come into being as idea, as spoken word, as score
or representation, and as realized project (Friedman,
2002, pp. 127128). The quality of lived experience
takes a different shape around behavioral artifacts
than around physical artifacts, and this quality also
highlights the deep new understanding of how it
is that physical artifacts are also embedded in the
behavior and language that bring them into use.
Space, place, and history establish the constraints
that define behavioral artifacts. In one way, these
constraints can be considered information. The
well-known phenomenon of an incomprehensible
bottleneck in a traffic flow is a perfect example.
This often takes place at a site where an accident
occurred or another obstacle recently took shape.
Traffic slows down at the point of the accident or
obstacle. Long after damaged vehicles are pushed
aside and obstacles removed, traffic flow slows
down at the point of the accident or obstacle,
a behavioral constraint imposed by the flow of
information that was once useful.
The behavioral artifact that traces the former
course of information remains in the system long
after its uses are gone, sometimes causing distorted
traffic patterns for hours after the wreckage has
been cleared. This invisible behavior becomes
visible behavior when we find ourselves slowing
down at some point in the road that seems no
different from the points before or after, nothing to
us but a momentary and apparently meaningless
jam in the traffic.
Behavioral artifacts arise commonly in the
unplanned paths that emerge on every college
campus and every major city park. Some of
these patterns existed for millennia where goats
and sheep once forded a long-vanished stream.
Others emerge when impatient students and
faculty establish their own short cut between two
much-traveled points on a campus, breaching
the tidy green of a well-kept lawn. This behavior
irritates gardeners and gives birth to the annual
memoranda on the subject of using sidewalks
that all members of a college cheerfully ignore
(Friedman, 1998-b, p. 89).

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 6109

We see the behavioral artifacts around us in the


everyday life of individual behavior and the structured
social relations that constituted the empirical
foundation of Erving Goffmans micro-sociology (See,
e.g., Goffman, 1959, 1971, 1974). The organizational
memory that gives rise to group behavior and
organizational process is another case. So, for that
matter, are the behaviors that actors use to shape
the reality of theatergoers, or, as theologian Ditte
Mauritzon Friedman (2005, p.: 4) notes, the craft of
a filmmaker in creating and sustaining a symbolic
universe for those who watch a film.
Shakespeares grand vision of the theater rests
upon this understanding, where words and action
summon a reality that spectators embrace to eke
out the performance with each mind.
It is useful to remember, as we celebrate the birth of
a journal on the Artifact, that artifacts constitute the
twin relationship between doing and making found in
the Latin facere.
As the editorial board joined in dialogue to reflect
on what this journal could be and mean a tune ran
through my mind. It is a revised version of the 1945
Disney classic, Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah from the film
Song of the South.
I play the revised role of Uncle Remus, while a couple
of bluebirds and a squirrel give me the eye and sing:
Its the truth, its natural:
Everything is Artifactual.

REFERENCES
Attanasio, A. A. (1989). The last legends of Earth. New York:
Doubleday.
Barth, Karl (2003/1956). Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Eugene, OE:
Wipf & Stock Publishers (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zurich)
Bunge, Mario (1999). The dictionary of philosophy. Amherst,
NY: Prometheus Books.
Forman, Milos (2002/1984). Amadeus. Directors cut. Burbank,
CA: Warner Brothers, Warner Home Video.
Friedman, Ditte Mauritzon (2005). Spiritual symbols in
contemporary film. Unpublished research note. Lund,
Sweden: Centrum fr Teologi och Religionsvetenskap.
Friedman, Ken (1991). The Belgrade Text. Ballade, No. 1 [Oslo:
Universitetsforlaget], pp. 52 57.
Friedman, Ken (1998-a). Building cyberspace: Information,
place, and policy. Built Environironment, 24(2/3), pp. 83103.

Friedman, Ken (1998-b). Fluxus and Company. In Ken Friedman


(Ed.), The Fluxus reader (pp. 237253). London: Academy
Press/Wiley.
Friedman, Ken (2002). Working with event scores: A personal
history. Performance Research, 7(3), pp. 124128.
Goffman, Erving (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life.
Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor.
Goffman, Erving (1971). Relations in public: Microstudies of the
public order. London: Allen Lane/Penguin.
Goffman, Erving (1974). Frame analysis: an essay on the
organization of experience. New York: Harper.
Merriam-Webster (1990). Merriam-Websters Collegiate
Dictionary (9th ed.). Springfield, MA: Author.
Oxford English Dictionary (2006). OED Online. Oxford English
Dictionary (J. A. Simpson, & E. S. C. Weiner, Eds.) [2nd ed.,
1989]. Oxford: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press.
Available: http://dictionary.oed.com/ (accessed 12 January
2006).
Shaffer, Peter (2001). Amadeus. New York: HarperCollins.
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993). The New Shorter
Oxford English Dictionary (Lesley Brown, Ed.). Oxford:
Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press.
Simon, Herbert (1982). The sciences of the artificial.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Tommasini, Anthony (2006). Nilsson in person: The glory of
the power. New York Times. Online. Available: http://www.
nytimes.com/2006/01/14/arts/music/14nils.html (accessed
15 January, 2006.
Toynbee, Arnold (1934). A study of history (Vol. 3). Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Wordsmyth (2006). The Wordsmyth Educational DictionaryThesaurus [wedt] (Robert Parks, Ed.). Chicago: Wordsmyth
Collaboratory. Available: http://www.wordsmyth.net/
Accessed: 2006 January 12.
Young, La Monte (Ed.). (1963). An anthology. New York:
Jackson Mac Low and La Monte Young.
Young, La Monte (Ed.). (1970). An anthology (2nd ed.). New
York: Heiner Friedrich.
Young, La Monte (1990). Lecture 1960. In Ubi Fluxus, Ibi Motus
(pp. 198204) (Achille Bonita Oliva, Gino Di Maggio, & Gianni
Sassi, Eds.). Venice and Milan: La Biennnale di Venezia and
Mazzotta Editore. 11

CORRESPONDENCE:
Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, Dean,
Faculty of Design,
Swinburne University of Technology,
Melbourne, Australia.
E-mail: kenfriedman@groupwise.swin.edu.au
Published online 2006-05-05
ISSN 1749-3463 print/ ISSN 1749-3471
DOI: 10.1080/17493460600610764
2007 Danish Centre for Design Research

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 61010

2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 1116

In Search of a Unit of Analysis for Designing Instruments


by Pascal Bguin, CNAM, Paris

A welcome topic of the new journal Artifact


is to promote as a distinct academic field the
transdisciplinary approaches centered on
design research. One of the conditions for such
a transdisciplinary approach is that the different
actors recognize the specificity of the contributions
of other actors and the complementary nature of
their respective productions. In this essay, I will
argue that the different contributions of experts in
design must be completed by users constructive
activity. More particularly, my focus is to search
for a unit of analysis that helps to build shared
references between users and designers. I will
proceed in two steps. In the first, I will suggest
that an instrument cannot be confused with an
artifact, and that it is the user or the worker who
gives to an artifact the status of an instrument. In a
second step I will describe the design process as
a dialogical process in the Bakhtinien sense. I will
conclude with comments on what is an artifact?
Keywords: Instrument, Instrumental Genesis, dialogism

ARTIFACT AND INSTRUMENT


Work initially developed by L. S. Vygotsky and
others in Soviet psychology supplies a rich and
fertile approach to apprehend activities with
artifacts. As an activity consists in acting through
an instrument (Bdker, 1989), artifacts must not only
be analyzed as things but in the manner in which
they mediate usage. We have Vygotsky to thank for
emphasizing the importance of mediation, which he
considers as the central fact of psychology.
The basic structure of human cognition that results
from mediation is often pictured as a triangle, as
in Figure 1. So artifacts must not only be analyzed
as things, but in the manner in which they mediate
action.

But, in this well-known picture, the terms


computer, tool, artifact are used
interchangeably. And apparently, no particular
ontological or epistemological problems exist. Yet if
the purpose is to make a contribution to the design
of technical devices, we need to be able to describe
more accurately what allows mediation to take place.
I will suggest that we have to make a distinction
between artifacts and instruments.
From artifact to instrument
An instrument cannot be reduced to a physical or
symbolic artifact, nor can it be confused with one.
For example, a hammer is not an instrument in itself.
A hammer is an artifact. To be an instrument, the
subject (the users or the workers) must associate
an organized form of psychological and motor
operations with the artifact. So, we can define an
instrument as a mixed entity (Bguin & Rabardel,
2000; Rabardel & Bguin, 2005), made up of two
types of components. First, a psychological and
motor one that comes from the subject, and which
has individual, social and cultural dimensions.
Second, an artifactual part (an artifact, part of an
artifact, or a set of artifacts), which may be material
or symbolic (Figure 2).
Each side of the instrument is a conceptual
minefield. Rabardel (1995) proposed to
conceptualize the subject side of the instrument
as a scheme, in the sense of Piaget (Piaget &
Beth, 1961), and more accurately as a utilization
scheme. A utilization scheme is an active
structure into which past experiences are
incorporated and organized, in such a way that it
becomes a reference for interpreting new data. As
such, a scheme is a structure with a history, one
that changes as it is adapted to an expanding range
of situations and is contingent upon the meanings

11


Instrument
Instrument
(Subject
(Subjectside+Artefact
side+Artefactside)
side)

Artefact
Artefact

Subject
Subject

Object
Object

Subject
Subject

Object
Object

Figure 1.
The basic structure of human cognition.

Figure 2.
An instrument is a composite entity made up of subject and
artifact components.

granted to the situations by the individual. However,


and because it is not possible to fully discuss
these points, I will use the terms subject side
and artifact side of an instrument (see Figure
2), and I will come back later on the status of the
artifact side. An important consequence of such an
approach is that an artifact is not an instrumental
component in itself (even when it was initially
designed as such). The instrumental position of the
artifact is relative to its status within the action.
More extensively, the artifact part of an instrument
is any stuff one associates with the action in order
to perform a task, to reach a goal, or to realize a
motive. We all have examples in mind such as the
association of the scheme striking with a wrench,
which turns the wrench into an instrument that
has the same function as a hammer. In this small
example it is the subject who gives to the artifact
the status of resource to achieve the goals of his/
her finalized action, who institutes an artifact as an
instrument.

of modern technology. It is not the case. During


preparation for landing for example, we have
observed that aircraft pilots who are not satisfied
with the descent speed proposed by the on-board
computer may enter false information (for instance,
they may specify that there is a tail wind when
no such wind exists) so that the computer will
define a landing speed that fits with their desires.
This example shows that even with automated
technologies, users may attempt to regain control as
long they have an entry point into the system (in our
example, the entry point is the input data the pilot
must supply because the computer cannot acquire it
on its own).

From instrument to instrumental genesis


To continue the previous example, using a wrench
as part of a hammer is a catachresis. The term
catachresis is borrowed from linguistics. It
refers to the use of a word in place of another. For
example, using the word arm for speaking about
the arm of a chair is a catachresis. This term
can be extended to the field of instrumentation.
Catachresis is a way to name things without an
available word, or to do something without technical
resources at hand. In this sense, it is testimony to
the inventiveness of users or workers who seek
to exploit their environment and enroll it in the
service of action, in order to increase the capacity
to act in the environment. One must not think that
catachresis would be in decline in the presence

Catachresis results from a process that may be


relatively elementary (as in using the artifact
wrench as a hammer), or from largescale
processes that develop over a longer period on the
floor or in fieldwork. In order to grasp this process,
we speak of instrumental genesis. Because the
instrument is a mixed entity, instrumental genesis
is a process that encompasses the evolution of
both the artifact and subject sides. Let us call
these two processes instrumentation and
instrumentalization.
Instrumentalization is the attribution of a function
to an artifact, which extends the artifacts initial
design and enriches the properties of the artifact.
It is based on the artifacts initial attributes
and properties, and confers on them a status in
accordance with the current action and situation
(in the example of the wrench that replaces the
hammer, the initial properties are its heaviness,
hardness, and graspable-ness). At the lowest level,
instrumentalization is local; it is related to a single
action and to the specific circumstances under

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 111612

Subjec
Subject

Object

which that action occurred.


At the highest level,
Instrument
(Subject
side+Artefact
the artifact is modified
physically.
The side)
constituted
functions become an integral part of the artifact
itself, by way of a modification in how it works or is
structured.
Instrumentation concerns the genesis of the
human
side of the instrument. At the lower levelObject
it
Subject
concerns the utilization scheme. When a person
uses a wrench as part of a hammer, there is a
direct assimilation of the artifact in the constituted
scheme. But more often there is an adaptation
of the scheme (for an example of such a process
with an automatic truck gearbox see Rabardel &
Bguin, 2005). In the larger case, the development
of the human side leads to a deeper reorganization
of the human side of the instrument. For example,
introducing CAD in a new setting leads to the
development of new utilization schemes, but also to
a new conceptualization and new forms of collective
action.
Instrumentation and instrumentalization help to
analyze a particular instrumental genesis. But they
are intertwined in the same constructive process.
Indeed, instrumental genesis may have sources
that are external to the subject. For example, an
insufficiently elaborated design that does not
sufficiently consider the users requirement or
practice causes a gap (Thomas & Kellogg, 1989)
for which the user must compensate. But even if
the artifact is well designed, an instrument is not
finished when an artifact is specified. The argument
there is that the development of an instrument
requires the users or workers to develop their own
resources for action. Therefore both designers and
users contribute to the design of an instrument,
based on their diversity.
Designing an instrument
One way to resume what was previously said is
that an instrument is a coupling between the
subject and the artifact. But this coupling is far from
what is described by the concept of affordance,
where it is argued that anyone immediately and
directly perceives the signification and function of
an object. These concepts create difficulty when
used to clarify relations between the given and
the created (Bguin & Clot, 2004). During design
this coupling is not tuneful. And behind the artifact
there is a designer. The term catachresis I evoked

Designers

Instrument
Subject

Object

Figure 3.
The instrumental proposal and the instrumental genesisin
dialogue.

previously is traditionally regarded as using a word


to denote something radically different from its
normal meaning, and by extension the deviant
uses of an object. Such a meaning takes for granted
the functions intended or imagined by the designers,
and institutes them as the norm or the reference.
But, an interpretation in terms of deviation is
not the only one, and not even a desirable one.
Instrumental genesis is the users contribution to
the development of an instrument.
However, we have to take into account the fact
that in designing an artifact the designers imagine
a function, with the objective of orienting the
workers activity (see for example Vicente, 1999,
for a theoretical argumentation on this position).
But this is at best an instrumental proposal made
by the designers. There will be a response during
instrumental genesis. Consequently, the unit of
analysis must be extended in order to give greater
importance to the collective.
If we agree with the idea that the aim of the design
process is to design an instrument (and not only an
artifact), and if we consider instrumental genesis
as a contribution made by the user to the design
of an instrument, then we can define the design
process as a dialogical process in the Bakhtinian
sense. By dialogicality, Bakhtin refers to a process
where someone takes something that belongs to
others, and makes it his/her own. Because words
are half-ours and half-someone elses . . . one is
invited to take the internal word as a thinking
device, or as a starting point for a response that
may incorporate and change the form or meaning
of what was originally said (Wertsch, 1998, p. 67).
In the design process, the someone elses half
(the artifact for the user) is associated with ones

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 111613

own-half to bring about instrumental genesis,


producing a response that changes the form and
meaning of what was originally said. Typically,
instrumental genesis is a response that changes the
form and meaning of the artifact initially proposed
by the designers. But note that the reverse is also
true: instrumentalization made by users can lead to
a response by the designers. So, the challenge is to
organize a cyclical and dialogical process (Figure 3),
where the result of one persons activity, designer
and worker, constitutes a source and a resource for
the activity of others (Bguin, 2003).
In speaking of a dialogical process, my goal is not
to argue that there is no difference between design
and communication, or between sign and artifact. I
do not think that artifacts are like books we have to
read (Tilley, 1990). My argument is that language is
simply one of the possible dialogical forms, but not
the only one. Design is another: we have to grasp in
its specificity. Let me give some brief arguments.
One feature of a dialogical design process is that it
must articulate a cyclical process, between nomos
and praxis. On one hand the design is initially a
concept, an intention, a will relative to the future,
or an order to happen. On the other hand, these
orders and intentions have to be concretely realized
to occur in action. But action will meet resistances,
setting the initial ideas in motion. We have to
inscribe instrumental genesis in this cycle, in order
to bring back into play the result of the designers
activity after having confronted it with the workers
or users activity or practices.
To design is to use media (technical or digital
drawing, scale models, mock-ups, etc.) for
projecting a representation and reflecting on it. But
these media play a role in the context of exchange
between actors (Vinck, 2001). In a dialogical
process, the media must support these individual
and collective dimensions. And due to the necessity
to articulate the relationship between theoretical
concepts and practice, a prototype is probably
the best medium. However, it is only at the end of
the design process that designers can produce a
prototype, after numerous decisions have been
made. So, it is often too late: changes can appear
much too expensive. What are the projective
methods that can be used, and the benefit and risks
of using one medum or another?

In using the medium as vehicle for dialogue, divergence


surfaces legitimately. These disagreements are
the real source and the engine of dialogicality. But
during the design process they can be solved in
two extreme ways. The first is design: modifying
the characteristics of the object currently being
designed, changing the criteria for attaining the goal,
etc. The second is conflict, for example authority
or the exclusion of certain actors whose goals
appear too contradictory. What is specific to design
is that the disagreements are solved at the level of
the object of the design process, the intention or
the solution. During conflict, on the other hand, the
purpose of the design process loses its centrality,
leaving the actors in a situation of face-to-face
contention where the difficulties are ascribed
to others. So, it is of the utmost importance to
verbalize and to legitimize the rationales and possible
consequences in regard to the users or workers
perspectives. Otherwise, exchange between users
and designers would easily become conflict-ridden,
with the risk of leading to poorer and lower quality
outcomes.
Users and designers have their own points of view,
their own criteria, their own concepts, and finally
different ways of grasping the same situation.
But, simultaneously, the actors are engaged in an
interdependent process. So what is specific to one
actor, and what needs to be shared? Instrumental
genesis can appear as nonsense for the designers.
But, as outlined by Leontev (1978), that which does
not have meaning may still have a signification.
Something may be a non-sense, but it is not
without signification. During dialogical design, an
important amount of time must be spent on building
the signification of the events: we have observed
something. What lessons can be drawn from it;
what decisions should we make accordingly?
What is an artifact?
In this essay, I argue that the aim of the design
process is to design an instrument, and not only
an artifact. But asking what is an artifact? is a
useful question. In defining the design process as
a dialogical process, I argue that an artifact could
be defined as a sort of bridge laid down between
heterogeneous actors, with different points of view
and perspectives. But based on what has been said
previously, I would suggest two additional criteria
that go over a dialogical design process.

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 111614

First, an artifact can be defined by its structural


properties (and not its materiality a symbolic
artifact can also be defined by its structural
constraints), which are also constraints. In
Rabardel & Bguin (2005) we distinguish three
types of constraints. One can use a wrench as
part of a hammer due to its graspable-ness and
heaviness. It is the existence modality constraint .
The artifact also carries constraints concerning
the nature of the objects of activity (in the sense
of activity theory). A metal lathe, for instance, can
only perform transformations of matter through
the removal of turnings. We call these constraints
finalization constraints. Finally, the artifact
carries more or less explicit action pre-structuring
constraints. De Terssac (1992) stressed for
example that expert systems involve a positioning
of the operator and a more or less explicit form of
regulation of his actions and activity, which tend to
reduce his own regulating possibilities. Probably
other constraints could appear, for example at
the collective level. The general idea is that an
instrumental proposal made by the designers
crystallizes in the artifact a representation of
the activity of the user, and conveys it in a setting.
But when this crystallization is of bad quality, it is
a source of problem for users or workers. This is
why the designer must be able to apprehend the
subjects (or subjects) construction that is already
available in a situation.
Second, an artifact can be defined by its plasticity. I
have argued previously that instrumental genesis is
testimony to the inventiveness of users or workers
who seek to exploit their environment and enroll
it in the service of action, in order to increase
the capacity to act in the environment. From my
point of view, it is particularly important to give
a status to instrumental genesis during design.
But instrumental genesis is a living movement,
which goes beyond the fixed chronology of one
design process. Plasticity consists in designing
artifacts that allow or facilitate the constructive
and developmental process of instrumental genesis.
It can be, for example, that the artifact can be
modifiable (Henderson & Kyng, 1991). But identifying
the properties that allow plasticity remains a
requirement of future research attention.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
An earlier version of this article was presented in
September 2005 at a symposium organized by L.
Norros at the first ISCAR Congress (Sevilla). The
author would like to thank L. Norros and B. Nardi,
and special thanks are offered to C. Owen, who
made helpful comments on the latter version.

REFERENCES

Bguin, P., & Clot, Y. (2004). Situated action in the development


of activity. @ctivits, (1)2: 2749.
Available: http://www.activites.org/ v1n2/beguin.fr.pdf
(accessed 15 January 2006).
Bguin, P. (2003). Design as a mutual learning process
between users and designers. Interacting with Computers,
15, 709730.
Bguin, P., & Rabardel, P. (2000). Designing for instrument
mediated activity. Scandinavian Journal of information
Systems, 12, 173190.
Bdker, S. (1989). A human activity approach to user
interfaces. Human Computer Interaction, 4, 171195.
Henderson, A., & Kyng, M. (1991). There is no place like home:
Continuing design in use. In J. Greenbaum, & M Kyng. (Eds.),
Design at work: cooperative design of computer systems (pp.
145167). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Leontev, A. (1978). Activity, consciousness, and personality.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Piaget, J., & Beth, E. (1961). Epistmologie mathmatique et
phychologie. Essai sur les relations entre la logique formelle
et la pense relles. PUF, Paris: Etudes dpistmologie
gntique N8 14.
Rabardel, P. (1995). Les hommes et les technologies, une
approche cognitive des instruments contemporains [People
and technology, a cognitive approach to contemporary
instruments]. Paris: Armand Colin.
Rabardel, P., & Bguin, P. (2005). Instrument mediated activity:
from subject development to anthropocentric design.
Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Sciences, 6, 429461.
Terssac, G. de, (1992). Autonomie dans le travail [Autonomy at
work]. Paris: PUF (Collection sociologie).
Tilley, C. (Ed.) (1990). Reading material culture: Structuralism,
hermeneutics and post-structuralism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Thomas, J., & Kellogg, W. (1989). Minimizing ecological gaps in
user interface design. IEEE Software, 6, 7886.
Vinck, D. (Ed.). (2001). Engineers in day-to-day life: Ethnography
of design and innovation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Vincente, K. J. (1999). Cognitive work analysis: toward safe,
productive, and healthy computerbased works. London:
Lawrence Eralbum Associates Publishers.
Wertsch, J. V. (1998). Mind as action. New York: Oxford
University Press.

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 111615

CORRESPONDENCE
Pascal Bguin,
Laboratoire dErgonomie du CNAM,
Paris, France.
E-mail: beguin@cnam.fr
Published online 2006-04-21
ISSN 1749-3463 print/ ISSN 1749-3471
DOI: 10.1080/17493460600610830
2007 Danish Centre for Design Research

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 111616

2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 1722

An Exploration of Artificiality

by Klaus Krippendorff, University of Pennsylvania

Keywords: Design, meaning, virtual, transitional, interface,


narrative

INTRODUCTION
The following explores the artificiality of human
artifacts. To talk of artifacts, we must avoid
ontologizing. Ontology ignores human participation
in its construction and describing artifacts as if their
descriptions had nothing to do with it contradicts
the idea of their artificiality. Instead, I will explore
the nature of artifacts from the perspective of
human-centered design and with culture-sensitive
conceptions in mind. Exploring artifacts from this
perspective offers scholars and practitioners a
fascinating field of inquiry. To follow are six closely
connected mini essays on artifacts, starting with
the use of the word artifact and ending with the
virtual worlds that artifacts can bring forth.
WE DEFINE ARTIFACTS IN
THE STORIES OF THEIR MAKING
By dictionary definitions, art-i-fact is a noun,
composed of art=Latin for skill +factum=made; a
product of skillful human activity. Thus, when we
call something an artifact, we are not concerned
with its materiality or how it works but with its
human origin and we search for stories to tell
how, by whom, and why something was made. It
is the presumption of such stories that renders
something as an artifact. The natural sciences are
not concerned with stories, of course, and therefore
cannot possibly say anything about artificiality.
Natural scientists are concerned with products
of nature, with explaining observed phenomena
in terms of physical causes, chemical reactions,
or biological processes, which are not at issue as
far as artificiality goes. By contrast, archeology,
a discipline that searches for artifacts of past
cultures in order to understand what life was like
in these cultures, is fundamentally concerned with

the validity of the stories of their makers. To decide


whether such stories are warranted, archeologists
employ well-established decision criteria. They
start by testing for the natural origin of their finds.
Only when natural explanations fail do they consider
themselves justified to search for narratives of their
human origin. Their criterion has it right. Artificiality
begins where physics stops. Explanations of the
human origin of artifacts are cultural. The definition
of the word artifact, and only that, leaves us to
conclude that artifacts cannot exist outside a story
of their making, however simple this story may be.
Since stories rely on their tellers use of language,
the artificiality of artifacts cannot be separated
from the language used to describe it.
WE EXPERIENCE PRESENT
ARTIFACTS AS INTERFACES
Clearly, artifacts have always been and still are
designed for use. However, designing, inventing,
and producing artifacts is one thing, using them
is quite another. The two activities involve very
different kinds of understandings. The makers of
artifacts know how to shape them, assemble them
from available parts, and bring them to where they
are needed. The users of artifacts may have a sense
of their origin and knowing their makers intentions
may well inform users of what to do with them in
ways natural objects cannot but, to be able to use
an artifact, there is no compelling reason for users
to understand its history, material composition, and
inner workings save for trivial artifacts, such as
drinking glasses or scissors, whose mechanisms
are trivial. The make-up of non-trivial machines like
computers, electronic artifacts like browsers in the
Internet, and large social artifacts like governments
typically escapes their users understanding,
without, however, impeding their use. In use, the
distinction between artifacts and objects of nature
is not relevant.

17


In use, artifacts become interfaces. Interfaces


arise when users enact their conception and
what they are facing tolerates these conceptions.
Interfaces should not be confused with the
components of artifacts that support them: handles,
computer screens, or keyboards, for example. Such
components participate in an interface, but so do
their users. Interfaces reside between artifacts and
their users. They consist of interactions and they
play out dynamic relationships.
Interfaces are artifacts in their own right, viable
where human participants understanding is
interactively sustained, and non-viable where
their understanding does not work out and the
interface breaks down. From a user-centered
perspective, designers cannot limit themselves to
considerations of the materiality, functionality, and
form of artifacts. They must assure that interfaces
are possible, effective, and fun. From the design
of human computer interfaces, we have learned
that users conceptions of what they are interacting
with may have little to do with the mechanism that
supports these interactions. There is no need to
force users to know what designers know about an
artifact, but there are good reasons for designers to
know the conceptions that users have available to
approach the artifact they are asked to design.

THE ARTIFACTS WE DESIGN


INCREASINGLY BECOME LANGUAGE LIKE
The history of design started with the design of
industrial products for mass production, distribution,
use, consumption, or entertainment. Advances in
technology digitalization changes in the way
artifacts are dispersed by market mechanisms
and the growing confidence in design thinking
our prevailing belief in being able to shape
virtually all aspects of our world have encouraged
designers to broaden the range of artifacts from that
conceived during the industrial era. To make these
challenges transparent, I proposed a trajectory
of artificiality (Krippendorff, 1997) that leads us
into new empirical domains and the adoption of
appropriate design criteria.
I am suggesting that the original preoccupation of
designers with functional, utilitarian, and universally
attractive products describes only a fraction of
what designers must face today and that the design
criteria of the industrial era prevent us from moving
on to more challenging design tasks. Let me briefly
follow this trajectory:
By definition, products are the end products
of processes of production, and equating
artifacts with products limits product design to
industrially manufactured artifacts.

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 172218

Goods, services, and corporate or individual


identities, by contrast, are artifacts that are
designed for sales, to have social significance,
or to create consumption. Such artifacts are
not entirely physical. They constitutively
involve individual minds in ways products do
not: memories or attitudes favoring particular
service providers, for example, or brands.
The advent of styling and marketing made the
creation of exchange values a priority and a
universalist aesthetics had to be abandoned
in favor of statistically distributed local
preferences.
As suggested above, interfaces are artifacts
that reside between humans and machines
including objects of nature. They consist of
interactions, rudimentarily resembling human
dialogue, not dead matter. Designing interfaces
involves criteria that relate users interactive
understanding to what artifacts can afford.
The artifacts residing in multiuser systems
tend to be even more dematerialized: books,
e-mails, electronic files, web pages, Internet
discussion groups, computer simulations, and
electronic money. Typically, such artifacts
must survive in a medium that many people
can access, and their reality depends on the
coordinated practices of their users: creating,
sharing, storing, modifying, or discarding
them, often in view of other users. Trusting
and authenticity are the major issues in the
use of multiuser systems, which shows their
embeddedness in cultural contingencies.
Projects are primarily social artifacts. They
involve people as stakeholders who cooperate
in bringing something of joint interest to
fruition. To the extent that projects are selforganizing, they are not entirely controllable
from their outside. Designers may influence
a project by participation. They may enroll
stakeholders in their vision. But they may not
be able to control how projects proceed and
determine their outcome.
Evidentially, the artifacts in this trajectory
can be seen to become progressively more
virtual, more fluid, more dependent on humans

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 1722

to keep them alive, more interactive, and


more language like. Naturally, the final kind of
artifact in the trajectory is:
Discourse, institutionalized communication, a
constrained way of languaging. In discourse,
particular ways of languaging dominate reality
constructions and direct the practices of
the members of a discourse community. We
can distinguish public discourse, scientific
discourse, legal discourse, and design
discourse, among many, by the distinct
vocabularies they employ in accounting for the
realities they respectively construct. Inventing
productive metaphors, introducing new
vocabularies, and starting to talk differently
are ways to direct the social construction of
alternative worlds and the artifacts therein.
These are fascinating artifacts.
ALL ARTIFACTS GROW
IN A WEB OF PRIOR ARTIFACTS
When designers speak of what they are designing,
they tend to give the impression of being the sole
source of a product. Such accounts are unfortunate
as they fail to give credit to the stakeholders
in a design who will have to bring it to fruition.
Designers rarely ever produce what they say
they are designing. They produce designs, i.e.
drawings, models, computer representations, slide
presentations, and arguments, all of which are to
convince others of the virtues of their ideas. These
intermediate forms unquestionably are artifacts
in that they are made, not found, and can be seen,
touched, played with, and discussed without,
however, being confused with what designers
hope ultimately to achieve. Designs are rhetorical
devices, proposals, that, ideally, compel interested
stakeholders to act in ways called for by the design.
As a proposal, a design must be understood,
actionable, realizable in concrete stages, have
virtue, and enroll stakeholders to proceed. So
conceived, a design is but one albeit intermediate
form of what a proposed artifact could become.
In our current culture, all, even rather simple
artifacts, must be able to turn up in diverse
intermediate forms. A meal ordered in a restaurant,
for example, may need to appear on a menu, in the

form of a chefs recipe, on the order written by


the waiter, in the practices of the cooks, served
on the table appetizing/tasty/palatable and
result in a monetary transaction. Each of these
forms is handled differently, by different kinds of
stakeholders. Jointly, they account for what is being
realized not only the meal. What is a final product
to one stakeholder may be an intermediate artifact
for another. Intermediacy and finality are relative to
where one stands.
Virtually all artifacts emerge in transitions from
one form to another. A designers computer model
may be followed by a clients feasibility study, an
engineers production drawings, a manufacturers
assembly line setup, a sales persons promotional
material, a shipping companys boxes on a delivery
truck, a buyers conversation piece, a users
interface, a repair persons headache, a recyclers
opportunity for scavenging valuable components,
and perhaps, finally, a post-design report of how the
design traveled through all of its intermediate forms.
Cultures organize the production of their artifacts
in different ways. In our own culture the customary
web of artifacts has become institutionalized. It
involves a system of professional differentiations
the design profession being part of it with
conventions, codes, and laws governing the
transitions from one form to another. What
designers may have targeted as the final artifact
typically re-enters the web of intermediate artifacts
and changes it. Digitalization, for example, has
speeded up the transitions from one artifact to the
next and radically changed how these artifacts hang
together. This web of artifacts is constructed by
what we call technology; an always-growing logic
of coordinated techniques for creating artifacts that
operates in this web and expands it.
The point of these observations is that artifacts
cannot emerge in isolation from each other. They
appear distributed over variously connected forms
and are supported by a network of specialized
stakeholders. One may liken the transitions through
such a web to the travels of chain letters. Receivers
contribute what they know, erase what is irrelevant,
replace what can be improved upon, rearticulate
it in terms that successors can understand, and
pass it on to those believed to have the ability and
interest to keep something of it in circulation. The

artifacts that designers tend to propose are at


the tip of an iceberg, the result of the illusion that
the artifacts they say they are conceptualizing as
final are all that matter, while it is that web of prior
artifacts that designers must set in motion, change
with each new design.
BY CONCEIVING ARTIFACTS IN STABLE
CATEGORIES, WE BLIND OURSELVES
TO THEIR DYNAMICS
Contrary to the above observation that artifacts are
always in processes of being rearticulated from one
form to another, we tend to conceptualize artifacts,
once realized, as tangible objects, enduring entities,
of stable materiality, composition, and function, and
as indisputable members of linguistic categories.
The artifacts that archeologists dig up seem to
encourage the conception of their durability and
in everyday life we expect our tools to remain
workable for an indefinite length of time. But what
survives in time is only the above-mentioned tip of
the iceberg, the more durable products of a culture.
Archeologists typically scramble to create plausible
stories concerning the origins and uses of their
finds, largely because the intermediate artifacts that
can be assumed to have supported them have not
endured.
One can say that all artifacts, from the moment they
are created, are always en route to their retirement,
changing their category along the way. At least five
processes may account for this:
The statistical version of the second law of
thermodynamics has it that all matter decays
in time when unattended. Paper disintegrates,
causing old newsprint to crumble and books
to fall apart. Noise enters a communication
channel, corrupting the signal. Cities decay
and their houses become first empty shells,
then ruins, heaps of rubble, and ultimately sand
and dirt made indistinguishable by vegetation
growing over it think of what happened to the
ancient Mayan cities.
Wear, tear, and accidental breakage while
in use can render artifacts increasingly
dysfunctional. Cars have accidents or are
driven to the point at which they are no longer
repairable whereupon they end up in junkyards
or in a shredded form ready for recycling.

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 172220

The context in which artifacts were designed


to function no longer exists, has changed,
perhaps surreptitiously, forcing that artifact
to become something of a different kind. The
mask that an African dancer wore during a
ritual now becomes a decoration in the home
of a traveler, or the armor of a medieval knight,
used in tournaments, sequentially becomes
an heirloom, a trophy, an antique, and a
museum piece that is admired (i.e. used) for its
typicality by visitors (Krippendorrf, in press).
Consumption amounts to an intended
decomposition of one kind of artifact into
another, burning coal to ashes, converting food
into waste products, taking medication that
is absorbed, and on a larger scale, using our
natural oil reserves to construct a desirable
but not sustainable world, not addressing
the unintended consequences of such
decompositions.
Artifacts may also go out of fashion and be
superseded by better ones.
The first of these processes demonstrates how
nature undermines human categorizations.
Physics theorizes the direction of decay, from a
more organized to a less organized state, but it
cannot determine when and how the category
of an artifact changes, say, from a useful tool to
one that can no longer serve that function. While
the increase of entropy proceeds separately from
human involvement, the human use of artifacts can
speed up the process.Wear, tear, and breakage are
unintended as well, but can change the category of
artifacts faster than by natural decay. Only antientropic (neg-entropic) human efforts can prevent
artifacts from leaving a desirable category. Some
such efforts are simple, like sharpening a knife;
others are enormous, like maintaining a citys
constantly decaying infrastructure. The third kind
of change may well be deliberate, taking an artifact
from where it was into a perhaps more appealing
context. Whether deliberately or by default,
recontextualizations tend to go against designers
intentions. What ends up in museums was not made
to be there. A knights armor was not manufactured
to become a trophy. When artifacts are consumed/
transformed, we take advantage of their change
in category, for example, of the energy generated

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 1722

by transforming fuel into waste. Their unintended


side effects, by definition not addressed by design,
hound us later as new categories of problems to
be solved by new kinds of artifacts. The fifth and
final process listed above, individually sensible and
deliberate, accounts for the collective advances in
technology, including the growth and refinement of
technological complexes, like that of the automobile
with its system of roads, refineries, and gas
stations, institutions for licensing drivers. Replacing
artifacts by better ones creates an ecology of
cooperating or competing species of artifacts that a
user culture keeps in motion.
The point is that artifacts are far from stable, as
popular conceptions of tangible objects have it.
Artifacts change, sometimes within the conceptual
categories of their users, often and ultimately into
other categories, mostly useless or problematic
ones. The underlying dynamics inevitable
destiny, problematic breakdowns, or unintended
consequences are not addressed when designers
focus their attention on designing final artifacts of a
certain kind or category. We see artifacts in virtual
worlds
Artifacts are tied to their past through stories of
their human origins but their present meanings link
them to not yet existing futures. This is because
artifacts are always designed to enable their users
to bring forth something otherwise unobtainable
and make a difference in their lives. This is not to
deny that artifacts can provide room for play and
sheer enjoyment but, for artifacts to be purposefully
employed, the differences they can make in the
lives of their users need to be anticipated by their
users. Designing artifacts that users can read for
what they enable and that guide them through
enjoyable interfaces is the aim of design semantics
(Krippendorff, 2006). Semantics is the study of
meaning and design semantics aids the design of
artifacts that are meaningful to their users.
What do artifacts mean when in use? Market
researchers take meanings to be what their users
value (Karamasin, 1997) in the artifacts they face
what it is they are willing to pay for. Intermediate
artifacts, such as designs, might be valued for their
ideas, the information they provide, or the permission
they grant to producers. Artifacts conceived of
as final might be valued for what their users can

accomplish with them (extrinsic motivation), or the


pleasures they generate (intrinsic motivation). James
J. Gibson writes of meanings in terms of affordances
(Gibson, 1979), the totality of human actions that
the artifact can support, what it enables the user
to do. Ludwig Wittgenstein, speaking of words,
equates meaning with use (Wittgenstein, 1953), the
role they play in their users lives. I have argued for
equating the meanings of artifacts with the set of
their possible uses, both imaginable by someone and
afforded by the artifacts (Krippendorff, 2006). So,
what we call a chair affords sitting, obviously, but it
also affords storing objects on its surface, stepping
up on it to reach for something otherwise beyond
reach, being stacked to save space, preventing
the casual use of a door, not to enumerate the very
imaginative uses that children tend to engage chairs
in, together with blankets and toys. In language,
artifacts mean everything that their users can tell us
about them, about their past as well as about their
futures. In practice, artifacts mean everything one
can imagine doing with them, or fears could happen.
For observers, artifacts mean the set of all contexts
in which they are seen to work.
To be sure, artifacts are real only in the present, as
concrete experiences, and at any one moment of
interfacing with them. But what we respond to is the
meanings they have for us, what they permit us to do
with them, the paths they lay out in front of us, and
the possibilities they offer us. Artifacts are of human
origin, reside in the present, but, most importantly,
they let us control a not yet existing future. So, what
matters most in the design and use of artifacts is
their virtuality virtual in the dual sense of not yet
real, pregnant with a future, and having virtues.
The meaning of the word virtual originally
pretending something to be real when it is not
is shifting due to the popularity of socalled
virtual reality technologies. These are computer
simulations of artifacts (airplanes to be piloted,
surgery to be performed, or architectural spaces
to be visited) that respond to human actions with
digitally generated multisensory stimuli that
closely resemble real environments. Virtual reality
technologies have revolutionized training where
errors can have expensive consequences. They
also enable explorations of proposed artifacts in
dimensions that are not readily observable, and, when
used in design, before they are realized. However,

digital imagery is not the only source of virtuality. I


am suggesting that all artifacts tangible, digital,
interactive, informative, and aesthetic to the extent
they allow us to anticipate their or our own futures,
entail virtuality, a future that has not yet arrived but
can be expected to be brought forth.
Designers are always entangled in a double
virtuality: Creating inspiring proposals for artifacts
they envision as mere possibility, and finding
ways to assure the users of these artifacts that
the realities they could bring forth with them are
desirable, have unquestionable virtues for them.
Design can succeed only if these two conditions are
satisfied. A design that is not inspiring is not a viable
proposal, and an artifact whose possibilities cannot
be recognized has no meaning. The virtual worlds
we come to see in artifacts should not be pretended
but realizable and virtuous.

REFERENCES

Gibson, James, J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual


perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Karamasin, Helene (1997). Cultural theory. Vienna, Austria:
Linde.
Krippendorff, Klaus (1997). A trajectory of artificiality and
new principles of design for the information age. In K.
Krippendorff (Ed.), Design in the age of information: A
report to the National Science Foundation (NSF) (pp.
9196). Raleigh, NC: School of Design, North Carolina State
University.
Krippendorff, Klaus (2006). The semantic turn: A new
foundation for design. Boca Raton, FL: Danish Centre for
Design Research.
Krippendorff, Klaus (in press) The dialogical reality of meaning.
American Journal of SEMIOTICS, 18(4).
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953). Philosophical investigations.
Oxford: Blackwell.

CORRESPONDENCE
Klaus Krippendorff,
Gregory Bateson Term Professor for Cybernetics,
Language, and Culture,
The Annenberg School for Communication,
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia,PA, USA.Email: kkrippendorff@asc.upenn.edu
Published online 2006-04-21
ISSN 1749-3463 print/ ISSN 1749-3471
DOI: 10.1080/17493460600610848
2007 Danish Centre for Design Research

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 172222

2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 2629

Left to Our Own Devices

by Johan Redstrm, Center for Design Research, Copenhagen, and Interactive Institute, Gteborg

Keywords: Design philosophy, Interaction design, Aesthetics,


Artificial-Biological

At times it appears as if artifacts are best described


as not nature but, even at that, the boundary begins
to blur as we consider developments in areas such as
genetics and biotechnology where biology and design
begin to merge. The realm of artifacts has grown,
and so have notions of what they are and could be.
Our world is becoming ever more an artificial one,
understood as made by rather than given to us.
Research is no longer if ever about describing what
is, but increasingly about exploring what could be
and in many cases therefore also what will be. And
so, the subject of design, that of the initiation of
change in man-made things as J. C. Jones (1992), p.
6) put it, has expanded how could it not?
Seen from inside, the design space of manmade
things has grown beyond our scale in all directions.
We create things in laboratories, such as molecules,
that exist for such short time spans that they are
on the very threshold of existence. We create stuff
that will be around for longer than we will exist,
perhaps even as a species. And with miniaturization
of technology, we create things at a scale far
smaller than we can relate to with our own senses.
No wonder this expansion of the subject of design
causes difficulties. In what follows, I will speculate
a bit about the made part of the notion of manmade things, as this development seems to imply
some changes also to how we may think of acts of
design and use.
NOT NATURE
Whatever our ideas about the relation between
the living and the artificial as such, it seems that
our understanding of nature plays a certain role
in the development of the artificial. In relation to
design research, Herbert Simon considered biology
as a role model for his envisioned sciences of the

artificial, which among other things could be seen


in his ideas concerning methods for scientific
enquiry through optimization, how nature can be
considered as evolving towards the purposeful and
advantageous (Simon, 1996).
In everyday practice, we might talk about the
evolution of a concept or a design, or about
structuring the design process in a way that
includes several generations of suggestions and
sketches, where we select from each generation the
ones most interesting to develop further. Another
example is how the central role of functions in our
understanding of technical objects has a certain
resemblance to our way of understanding the living
organism as composed of parts, e.g. organs, with
certain functions (cf. Cummins, 1975; Kroes, 2001).
The roots of this comparison go rather deep in our
history, as in the works of one our early biologists:
. . . if some tool, say an axe, were a natural body,
its substance would be being an axe, and this
would be its soul. And if this was separated
from it, it would not continue to be an axe . . . if
the eye was an animal, then sight would be its
soul. . . . And the eye is the matter of sight, so
that when sight leaves it it is no longer an eye
except homonymously, in the way of a stone or
painted eye. (Aristotle, 1986, pp. 158f)
LIFE FORM
Considering this migration of ideas from biology or
rather, from our understanding of living things to our
understanding of man-made things (and back), there is
one aspect of the living not explored to any significant
extent in design: that of growth and becoming.
Of course, design to some extent deals
with development over time, but our basic
understanding seems typically centred on what is,

26


what it is that designers create. Now, if the reason


for thinking this way is because our materials used
to be rather static in nature, it seems that digital
technologies will challenge this view as the things
we design no longer necessarily stay the way we
left them.
Consider a typical personal computer as an
example: though the device was made and set
up by the manufacturer, over time the user fills it
with new software, documents and other files,
effectively making it into something of a personal
device. Does this mean that the act of designing
the computer has been stretched out, and that to
use it now also means to design it, as it is the user
who, so to speak, is the creator of its current form?
That there are layers of design and use is in itself
not new: a craftsperson uses our material to
build, say, a bowl, that someone then uses to
make food, etc. But in this case the form of the
made thing, the bowl, remains and whereas the
user interprets and perhaps redefines the use of
the bowl, we would hardly think that he/she alters
its form. The personal computer, however, seems a
bit different in this respect.
Perhaps one could object and point out that a
user typically assembles already given pieces,
e.g. readymade software, and that this is not
really the same as designing the thing. But then
again, a significant part of designing a computer is
assembly in the first place: hardware components
are put together, code is being reused as new
applications are developed, etc. Just think of how
object-oriented programming languages, like Java
with all its libraries, work.
It seems hard to make a proper distinction
between design and use on the basis of vague
notions of originally created by X, and if we try
the assumption that designer here means the
one(s) responsible for a particular structure of
parts, it seems that to use will be rather similar
to to design. Yet, intuitively, there seems to be
a certain difference between using information
technology and designing it, just as there seems
to be a difference between designing a house and
living in it, even though the latter includes furnishing
it, modifying the interior, repainting the exterior,
etc. Does such a distinction between design and

use start to break down as we try to understand


what happens to the form of an artifact capable of
significant change during its life-span?
Perhaps we can think of use as a kind of cultivation.
To use a computer is a bit like farming: one does
not create the plants but grows them; one does not
create the earth but takes care of it.
Digging deeper in the dirt, we might find something
in the works of our early biologist, Aristotle. As it
happens, form is a central notion not only in design
but in Aristotles philosophy as well. His distinction
between form and matter may appear rather
straightforward, explaining the difference between
the way something has been made and with what,
e.g. how two bowls can both be made of copper but
differ in form, or how two bowls may have the same
form though be made out of different materials.
While this works well for static objects, it does not
account for why certain things change something
rather central to the living thing. For instance, why
do acorns turn into oaks, and indeed why do acorns
turn into oaks and not into hens for that matter?
Trying to explain change and growth, Aristotle
somehow had to introduce causes, or mechanisms,
for change. What is interesting, at least from our
present point of view, is that he did so by expanding
upon his conceptions of form and matter: Thus
matter and form regarded as factors in a process
of change become potentiality and actuality (or
potency and act) (OConnor, 1964, p. 51). To (over-)
simplify we may then say that, through its matter
and form, a given thing carries with it not only its
current state but also a set of potential other states.
Obviously, it is not the current explanatory powers
of these ideas in biology that interests us, but the
notion of form and matter as not only static features
but factors for change.
BUT LET US CULTIVATE OUR GARDEN
According to notions of design as the initiation of
change in man-made things (Jones, 1992), design
in general seems to be a lot about changing things.
While that might be true of the objectives of design
practice, typical notions of form and matter are
in many ways similar to Aristotles account of the
static object. Consider the term man-made what
does made refer to here? That it was once made and
then remains that way (cf. Jones, 1988)?

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 262927

Certainly, notions of design processes are very


important, but typically such ideas relate to the
practice of design and not so much to the actual
form of the objects created. There is, of course,
also the design of actual processes, but these
are often accompanied by ideas such as that the
what we are designing is something like the user
experience or a communication process. In such
cases, design seems to be turning away from the
things themselves and, when it comes to the actual
artifacts designed to support these processes,
notions of form are still rather static.
Still, this has some possibly interesting implications
for how we think about formgiving. Though it may
initially be tempting to think of this expanded notion
of form as a way of simulating the workings of
the living, e.g. as done within studies of learning
processes in artificial intelligence, we need not
think of it in such terms. Perhaps we can simply
think of it as expansion of our current notions of
form, so as to include not only giving form to the
existing but also the shaping of the possible, of what
might become.
It seems rather strange to say that we give form to
the possible, not necessarily knowing now precisely
what it might be yet, as the example of the personal
computer above illustrates, we already deal with
it in practice. Here, it seems we have created
something that not only has a certain current form,
but also a set of possible future forms. And as with
acorns and eggs, a computer cannot become any
thing, though it certainly can be become very many
different things.
Looking towards more established areas of design,
we can perhaps recognize this issue in the way one
talks about using materials in design, although here
it would be the material itself that defines the space
of possible future forms through its characteristic
properties. One can certainly do very many things
with wood or ceramics, but one cannot do any
thing. Is this the way one should try to understand
artefacts like the personal computer: is this like
creating material that someone else will use to
design his/her own thing?
A notion of form-giving as not only including the
actual but also the potential is in many ways both
trivial and rather intriguing as is Aristotles original

distinction. Perhaps it can help us discuss why


there seems to be a difference between designing
and using an artifact, as this, then, can be seen as
setting up a space of possible future states on one
hand, and then realizing such states on the other.
Such notions of form and form-giving could
therefore perhaps also be helpful in relation to our
other concern, that of understanding how design
and use seemingly are layers of acts relative to
each other. For instance, we may think we design
a computational device that they will be using,
but the people over here think we are using
their hardware components to build it. From one
perspective what is being done is design, from
another perspective it seems to be a matter of
using something.
It seems that it is not only the design space that
has been stretched in all directions as a result of
technology development in general and of digital
technologies in particular: so too have acts of
design and use. And so, in the end, we will all be left
to our own devices.

REFERENCES

Aristotle (1986). De Anima (On the soul) (H. Lawson-Tancred,


Trans.). London: Penguin Books.
Cummins, R. (1975). Functional analysis. Journal of Philosophy,
72, 741764. (Reprinted in Sober, E. (Ed.) (1994). Conceptual
issues in evolutionary biology (2nd ed.) (pp. 4969).
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jones, J. C. (1988). Softecnica. In J. Thackara (Ed.), Design
after modernism: beyond the object (pp. 216226). London:
Thames & Hudson.
Jones, J. C. (1992). Design methods (2nd ed). New York: Wiley.
Kroes, P. (2001). Technical functions as dispositions: a critical
assessment. Techn (Electronic Journal of the Society for
Philosophy and Technology), 5(3), 116.
OConnor, D. J. (1964). Aristotle. In A critical history of western
philosophy (pp. 3661) (OConnor, D. J., Ed.). New York: Free
Press.
Simon, H. A. (1996). The sciences of the artificial (3rd ed.).
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

CORRESPONDENCE
Johan Redstrm,
Visiting Associate Professor,
Center for Design Research,

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 262928

Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture,


Philip de Langes All,
1435 Copenhagen, Denmark.
E-mail: Johan.Redstrom@karch.dk
Published online 2006-04-21
ISSN 1749-3463 print/ ISSN 1749-3471
DOI: 10.1080/17493460600610863
2007 Danish Centre for Design Research

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 262929

2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 2325

The Imagined And The Concrete: What is an Artifact?


by Susan M. Hagan, Carnegie Mellon University

Keywords: Design, communication, culture, argument, rhetoric

A few years ago, in conversation with a friend in


engineering, I mentioned that I had been collecting
and analyzing artifacts conference covers,
magazine layouts, art history texts anything that
might help me understand how words, typography,
and images collaborate on the page to make
messages that could not be produced by text or
image alone. But our discussion did not get past
my use of the term artifact. My colleague simply
could not wrap his mind around the idea that an
artifacts third dimension could be so narrow,
its material so contemporary, and its value so
seemingly insignificant. He cautioned me against
the use of that term. I conceded the point. Were I to
encounter that friend today, I would not only apply
the term artifact to my data, I would take that claim
further. An artifact is more than the object that
stubs our toes or the ancient document that tears
at the edges; it goes beyond the virtual bits we see
but cannot touch. An artifact is, in part, a product
of the collective memory (Middleton & Edwards,
1990), or as Alan Radley (1990) conveys, an object
that has been transformed for special purposes
within the culture. However, I would argue that an
artifact is first and foremost the fragile residue of
memory crafted into a mental representation by an
individual. Artifacts of the mind live only as long as
individuals can hold them, and like the objects found
on a dig, can be left untouched, until one day they
become a persuasive act, one which might or might
not reach further than that single mind. To those of
you already complaining that I am about to make a
word mean nothing by making it mean everything,
stay with me a bit longer.
That an artifact is something made by a human
being, a thing with archaeological or cultural
interest, is not in question. But how does it come to

be that thing? For example, how might I transform a


1985 blue Pontiac Bonneville from an old wrecked
car into an artifact of intrest? Part of that persuasive
effect depends on the reach of this particular
journal (Kaufer & Carley, 1993), but part will lie
with my ability to convince you to remake steel and
glass, paint and canvas, and these bits you see on
your computer screen into a mental artifact of my
design. The Pontiac Bonneville in question was just
a car until the night another car crossed over the
centerline of a four-lane highway and crashed headon into it. In that moment the Bonneville, my fathers
car, took on special purposes. What was once an
object, which my father loved for its comfortable
relationship with his bad back, had now become a
vehicle of thought, a vehicle through which I would
try to understand what had happened. I drove it
daily.
One day, not too long after the accident, I drove
my fragile residue of memory to the Andy Warhol
Museum thinking that the soup cans and silver
balloons might distract me. I had never had much
patience with or interest in Warhols work. Id
always thought of it as a somewhat self-indulgent,
one-note oeuvre. But because I live in Pittsburgh
Pennsylvania, the home of the Andy Warhol
Museum, I find myself there from time to time.
The distraction worked until my blue Bonneville
appeared again in the form of a 32-canvas series
that also includes an automobile, which I used as
my implicit focal point. The series is called Jackie. It
documents the moments before and after the death
of President John Kennedy on 22 November 1963
as he rode in the back seat of a 1961 blue Lincoln
Continental. This series does not match the timeline
of events that took place on that day, but it did match
my mental state. For that reason, I transformed
it from an object with historical importance to an
object used for my special purposes. While you,

23


my reader, might never see or touch the Bonneville


or the painting, touching and seeing those objects
might undermine the construction of the mental
artifact I want you to possess. Seeing an actual
Bonneville would not produce what I hope you
will construct. While seeing is often critical to
understanding, as it was when my blue Pontiac
merged with Warhols painting, now I must reform
both as a persuasive act. They must live as the
residue of sight, constructed from a few verbal
clues that focus on my interests.
Notice as you read these words that nowhere do
you see a reproduction of Warhols Jackie. Similarly,
nowhere do you see a picture of the blue Bonneville.
My decision might seem odd because visual/verbal
communication often has compelling persuasive
value. But again, I do not want your artifact of
mind to focus on the specifics of Jackies face or
hair, or on the 1961 Lincoln, or on the less grand
Bonneville. I will only succeed in my persuasive
act of artifact construction if the Lincoln and the
Bonneville are transformed into a tool for the
special purpose of understanding the time chaos
felt by those who have experienced sudden loss. In
fact, my Bonneville blended with Warhols series
of canvases, because that mental collaboration so
achingly mirrored the time chaos I felt for days after
the accident.
Warhol used 32 square canvases to place and repeat
a small group of photographs of the presidents wife
taken just before and just after the shooting. These
images are not placed and repeated in the order
in which they occurred, moving from happiness
to sorrow, but instead they are put into a kind of
flashback filmstrip that allows the viewer to see
images that first show sorrow, later joy, then sorrow,
only to see the beaming smile again in the next
canvas. It is the remembrance of the joy that was
there just a split second ago, only to be replaced by
the sorrow, which made it difficult for me to look at
that series directly. They had just been there, in that
blue Bonneville, healthy, whole. Then they were not.
It was an instant that could have been prevented
had my mother dropped her wallet and stopped to
retrieve it I saw all of that when I merged my fragile
memory with a blue 1961 Lincoln Continental and the
woman who survive. More than any other object I
have encountered, those 32 canvases have allowed

my artifact of mind, my wrecked blue Bonneville in


the form of a 1961 Lincoln, to become my true vehicle
for understanding.
While Warhol might have wished to build a
different artifact, one that echoed an obsession
with sensationalism and celebrity, that is the thing
about artifacts and individuals. Im drawn to what
he made, not as the thing he might wish me to see,
but as the thing I construct; an artifact that echoes
the culture of tragedy rather than the culture of
celebrity. As a persuasive tool, I hope the words I
have used to construct this artifact will direct your
eye to my areas of interest (Yarbus, 1967) while
making it harder for you to imagine this image in
your own way for your own purposes.
Warhols series has no words except for the title
Jackie, which allows many shades of meaning to
emerge (Solso, 1994) even as it makes its spatial
relationships heartbreakingly explicit. My artifact,
on the other hand, is made of typography and
words that ask that you build a world from a few
verbal cues. I do this in the hope of diminishing the
concrete in favor of the imagined allowing you in
this small case, for my small purposes, to choose the
inspiration rather than the encounter.
I frankly dont care about Warhols intentions.
Whether or not he meant to show the gravity of
a public death, echo a womans suffering, or just
play celebrity watcher is beyond my concerns. The
artifact Ive constructed leaves me in awe that
such a small amount of visual information could
produce the feeling that someone is gone, while still
conveying the sense that it should be easy to move
just an instant into the past in order to recapture
the Bonneville that was lost to the future. While
we cannot rearrange life as he rearranged his
canvases, my imagined sequence has always left
me feeling the need for a time machine, another
artifact of the mind, which could move away from
the accident and hold forever to earlier images, the
ones where nothing bad had happened yet. These
new juxtapositions make a visceral comment on the
time chaos of tragedy, one that might never reach a
larger culture. Even so, your experience within this
mental artifact might change your focus on Jackie
from the residue of a national tragedy to the residue
of a personal tragedy a vehicle for time chaos.

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 232524

For that reason, my words do not feature aspects


of the artifact you might find most obvious in the
presence of the painting: the deep blue, turquoise
blue, and gold on which all of the images of Jackie,
whose own image is in black, are screened. Color
is not a part of my mental artifact. But the fact that
his screenprinting technique is machine-like might
have diminished painterly undercurrents, and in that
way made a better machine for time chaos. There
is no painterly undertone that would interfere with
my involvement with the construction of my artifact.
Technique doesnt take my attention from joy or
sorrow. While much of Warhols work seems to put
style first, this woman seems utterly real, which
helped me to construct myself as a real person
beside her in my own vehicle.
In wanting you to see this reality, I have tried to
construct an artifact in your mind; one that has
aspects of steel and glass, canvas, and paint, word
and image, culture and individual. That artifact
exists in the slippery contexts that inform the way
we think of things, allowing multiple objects to
morph from ordinary purposes to my purposes.
Those purposes began long ago because I missed
my mother. I consumed and reconstructed anything
I saw, and in doing so, eventually made some sense
of time chaos by building a persuasive act that
would help me share that turmoil. After all, isnt that
really what an artifact is a way to share the act of
making sense.

REFERENCES

Kaufer, D. S., & Carley, K. M. (1993). Communication at a


distance: The influence of print on sociocultural organization
and change. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Middleton, D., & Edwards, D. (1990). Collective remembering.
London: Sage Publications.
Radley, A. (1990). Artefacts, memory and a sense of the past.
In D. Middleton & D. Edwards (Eds.), Collective remembering:
Inquiries in social construction (pp. 4659). Newbury Park,
CA: Sage Publications.
Solso, R. L. (1994). Cognition and the visual arts. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Yarbus, A. L. (1967). Eye movements and vision (B. Haigh,
Trans.). New York: Plenum Press.

CORRESPONDENCE
Susan Hagan, Ph.D. MDes,
Carnegie Mellon University,
245Baker Hall, 5000 Forbes Avenue,
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890, USA.
E-mail:susan.hagan@alumni.cmu.edu
Published online 2006-08-18
ISSN 1749-3463 print/ ISSN 1749-3471
DOI: 10.1080/17493460600610855
2007 Danish Centre for Design Research

ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Susan Hagan received her Masters of Design
and her Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon
University where she studied the meaning effects
and persuasive possibilites in visual/verbal design.
She continues this work as a postdoctoral fellow
at Carnegie Mellon. She is also a member of the
Advisory Board of Artifact, and a consultant who
writes, presents, and teaches on the topic of
visual/verbal and multi-modal collaboration, and is
now editing her dissertation for journal and book
publication.

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 232525

2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 3032

Friendly Alien: Object and Interface

by Lev Manovich, The Visual Arts Department, University of California, San Diego

Since 1996, artist Miltos Manetas has done


paintings that systematically portray the new
essential objects of contemporary life: joysticks,
computers, computer game consoles, and computer
cables (lots of them). Manetas also paints people
who are usually intensely engaged in the activities
made possible by consumer electronics devices,
such as playing a computer game. But he never
shows what games they are playing or what
images they are looking at. Instead, he focuses on
the humancomputer interface: hands clutching a
joystick, a body stretched across the floor in the
intense concentration or, alternatively, relaxing
besides a laptop, a computer console, or a TV.
Manetass paintings of the 1990s reflected the then
popular views of the computer as an unfamiliar and
foreign presence, even an alien; computer work
as immersion and withdrawal from the physical
surroundings; the laptop or the game console
sucking in the user away from the immediate
space (similar to the vision of TV in Cronenbergs
1982 Videodrome). The orgy of electronic cables in
these paintings, which seem to grow and multiply,
bring references to the cyborg and science fiction
movies such as Alien and Matrix.
In contrast, his latest paintings, such as Nikescape
(2005), represent technology as being completely
integrated and fused with the lived environment:
items of fashionable clothing and computer
cables become complementary; the atmosphere
is decorative and festive. Technology is neither
threatening nor some outside force that has been
domesticated. Rather, it is playful and playable: it
brings a party into the everyday. The sound that
accompanies our interaction with the icons, the
icons that playfully unfold into windows in MAC OS
X, colorful desktop backgrounds, shiny reflective

surfaces, and anthropomorphic shapes all this


makes computers and consumer electronics devices
stand out from the everyday grayness. Technology
is a pet that surprises us, sometimes disobeying
and even annoying us but it is always animated,
always entertaining, always fun and almost
fashionable.
My visit to the famous Collette store in Paris the
same day in October 2005 that I saw Nikescape in
Manetass studio only confirmed this new identity of
consumer technology today. Collette is a legendary
store which in the middle of the 1990s introduced
a new concept that today has become an accepted
genre: store as collection of the most interesting
design objects currently being created around the
world, with an obligatory cool cafe and changing
art exhibitions.
Situated across from the entrance was the new
display positioned right in the center of the store. It
housed the latest cell phones, PDAs and a portable
Sony Playstation. These techno-jewels came to
dominate the store, taking the space away from
albums, perfumes, clothes, and various design
objects that were all now occupying the perimeter.
But, just as in Manetass new paintings, the
techno-objects in the case did not look dominating,
threatening, or alien. They seemed to acquire
the same status as perfume, photography books,
clothes, and other items in the store. Put differently,
they were no longer technology. Instead, they
became simply objects and as such they now had
the same right as other objects that we use daily to
be beautiful and elegant, to have interesting shapes
and textures, to reflect who we use and at the same
time allow us to reinvent ourselves. In short, they
now belonged to the world of design and fashion
rather than engineering.

30


Figure 1.
NIKESCAPE (2005). 200/300 cm.
Collection DAKIS JOANNOU, PARIS.

Yet, as another display in Collette made clear, the


integration was far from complete. Sony had just
commissioned 10 top fashion designers to design
cases for the PSP (Portable Sony Playstation)
and they were presented in the store. The cases
were disappointing: although they used avariety of
materials, patterns, colors, and designs, none of them
seemed integrated with PSP design the refinement
and minimal logic of PSP menu screens, the way they
slide horizontally, etc. What I saw in each case was
two completely different design logics not talking to
each other at all.
I feel similar unease at some of the recent attempts
to make cell phones more fashionable by adding
easily recognizable signs of fashion: encrustation,
silver textures, art deco patterns. The problem
is that technoobjects are not ordinary objects.
This applies equally to cell phones, PDAs, portable
game players, portable music players, portable
video players, etc. They all contain interfaces
most often a screen for output and input and a few
buttons, and sometimes also a trackwheel, or a
small built-in keyboard. And behind the screen lives
a whole separate world with its logic, aesthetics,
and dynamics. And when this electronic screen and
the world it presents to us ends (I am talking about
the physical boundary of the screen), this creates
a visual and psychological feeling of discontinuity.
Suddenly we are in a different world that of
non-interactive, dead surfaces that enclose the
screen. And typically the design of these surfaces
does not have much to do with the design of the
screen interface. The fashion cases for PSP

exemplify this situation. All the cases were nice in


themselves but the associative worlds they invoked
had nothing to do with the world inside a PSP
screen.
Let me put these experiences in more general terms.
Today the design of forms is becoming intricately
linked with the question of interface. First of all, we
need to give some visual form to what will appear on
the screens of computers, mobile phones, PDAs, car
navigation systems, and other devices as well as
to buttons, trackwheels, microphones, and various
other input tools. Therefore, human computer
interfaces that involve a set of visual conventions
such as folders, icons, and menus (i.e. a graphical
user interface), audio conventions (as in the voice
recognition interface), and particular material
articulations (such as the shape, color, material, and
texture of a mobile phone) represent the whole new
category of forms that need to be designed today.
Even more importantly, as computation becomes
incorporated in our lived environment (the trend
that is described by such terms as ubiquitous
computing, pervasive computing, ambient
intelligence, context-aware environments, smart
objects) the interfaces slowly leave the realm in
which they lived safely for a few decades that is,
stand-alone computers and electronics devices
and start appearing in all kinds of objects and on
all kinds of surfaces, be it interior walls, furniture,
benches, bags, clothing, and so on. Consequently,
the forms of all these objects that previously lived
outside information now have to address the likely
presence of interfaces somewhere on them.

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 303231

This does not mean that from now on form follows


interface. Rather, a physical form and an interface
have to learn how to accommodate each other.
Beyond the traditional requirements that the material
forms have to satisfy a chair has to be comfortable
for sitting on, for example their design is now being
shaped by new requirements. For instance, at least
so far,we are used to interacting with text that is
presented on a flat and rectangular surface, and
therefore if a screen is to be incorporated somewhere
in the object, part of it needs to be reasonably flat.
This is easy to do if an object is a table but not as easy
if it is a piece of clothing or Gerrys Disney Hall in Los
Angeles that is specifically designed not to have a
single flat area. (Of course, as new technologies such
as Rapid Manufacturing may soon enable the easy
printing of an electronic display on any surface of any
object while it is being produced, it is possible that we
shall be able to quickly adjust our perceptual habits,
so that moving and change-shaping display surfaces
will be accepted much more easily than I can imagine.
In fact, the computercontrolled graphic projections
on the body of dancers, as in Apparition by Klaus
Obermair or in Interactive Opera Stage system by
Art+Com, already show the aesthetic potential of
displaying information over a changing, nonflat, nonrectangular form, i.e. a human body.)
In short, today the interface and the material object
that supports it still seem to come from different
worlds. The interface is a friendly alien but it is
still the alien. The task of rethinking both interface
and objects together so that they can be fused into a
new unity is not an easy one and it will require much
work and imagination before aesthetically satisfying
solutions can be found.
In conclusion, let me describe my visit to a show of
student projects from the Department of Industrial
Design at Eindhoven Technical University in the
Netherlands, which I saw during Dutch Design Week
in the fall of 2005. The department is only three
years old, so instead of designing traditional objects
students are working on smart objects. Every
project in the show starts with an everyday familiar
object and adds some magical functions to it via
electronics and computers. This means that I see
more examples of solid objects and media/interface
surfaces coming together. In one project, a canopy
placed diagonally over a childs bed in a hospital
becomes an electronic canvas. By tracking the

position of a special pen that does not need to touch


the drawing surface, the canvas allows the child to
draw on it without having to move from the bed. In
another project, a special mirror allows one person
to leave a message for somebody else for instance,
a different member of a household. A rectangular
block containing a camera is built into a mirror frame.
You take the block out, record a video message and
place the block back into the frame. After you do this,
the video is automatically loaded into the magical
mirror, and a small picture appears somewhere on
the mirrors surface. When you click on the picture
it plays a video message. Yet another project adds
magical interactivity to a vertical plastic column.
The lights inside the column turn it into an ambient
light source. The column is covered with a special
interface: a net. Depending on how you touch the
net, the position, quality, and tint of the light changes.
How exactly the light will change is not directly
predictable, and this is what makes the interaction
with the light column fun. There is real magic in all
these smart objects: we see familiar, normally
passive objects literally coming to life and responding
to our interactions with them.
Together, these three projects show us different
ways in which an object, an interface, and a display
can be put together. The first two projects rely on
already familiar behaviors drawing with a pen or
making a recording with a video camera. The last
one calls for the user to develop a new vocabulary
of movements and gestures to which the light will
respond. And the ways in which a smart object
talks back to us are also different: a canvas canopy
shows a drawing, a mirror plays a video, and a light
glows in different ways. In short, the surface of an
object can become both an output and input medium,
bringing together the physical and the screen-like
form and information in surprising ways.
CORRESPONDENCE
Lev Manovich,
The Visual Arts Department,
University of California, San Diego,
9500 Gilman Dr.
La Jolla CA, 92093-0327
Published online 2006-11-15
ISSN 1749-3463 print/ ISSN 1749-3471
DOI: 10.1080/17493460600612307
2007 Danish Centre for Design Research

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 303232

2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 3335

This is my reply to your question what is an artifact? My answer begins as an entry


in my digital diary, called from a garden:
http://www.softoia.demon.co.uk/2.2/digital_diary/06.01.04.html

33


Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 333534

Published online 2006-05-27


ISSN 1749-3463 print/ ISSN 1749-3471
DOI: 10.1080/17493460600644904
2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006
John Chris Jones

Artifact | 2007 | Volume I, Issue 1 | Pages 333535

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