Reconstructing Design, Explaining Artifacts

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Reconstructing Design, Explaining Artifacts is written by Jeroen de Ridder and published by . It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 909021903X (ISBN 10) and 9789090219035 (ISBN 13).

Technical artifacts are both plain physical objects and objects that have been purposefully made for a purpose; they have a physical structure and a technical function. As a result, they belong equally in a purely physical conceptualization of the world, in which human intentions and goals seem to have no place, and in an intentional conceptualization, which is used to describe and understand people and their mental lives. This book explores how this observation plays out in the contexts of artifact design and explanation of how artifacts fulfill their function. It addresses the following questions: How do designing engineers get from a functional description of desired behavior to the concrete object that is the result of a design process? What do explanations of how an artifact fulfills its function look like and do they differ from explanations of natural systems?