Pieter E. Vermaas • Peter Kroes Andrew Light • Steven A. Moore
Philosophy and Design
From Engineering to Architecture
Pieter E. Vermaas
Delft University of Technology
Delft
the Netherlands
Andrew Light University of Washington Seattle USA
Peter Kroes
Delft University of Technology Delft
the Netherlands
Steven A. Moore University of Texas Austin USA
ISBN 978-1-4020-6590-3 e-ISBN 978-1-4020-6591-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007937486 © 2008 Springer Science + Business Media B.V.
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Contents
Patrick Feng and Andrew Feenberg
Kathryn A. Neeley and Heinz C. Luegenbiehl
Design and Responsibility: The Interdependence of Natural, Artifactual, and Human Systems . . .
S. D. Noam Cook
Part III Architectural Design
Form and Process in the Transformation of the Architect’s
List of Contributors
Philip Brey is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Twente and director of its Centre for Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Science. He is also a member of the board of the Society for Philosophy and Technology and the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology. His research focuses on philosophy of technology, and particularly on the philosophy and ethics of information technology.
Ted Cavanagh is an architect with a doctorate in the history of technology and is chair of the School of Architecture at Clemson University, South Carolina. His investigations in the culture of technological innovation focus on historical and contemporary wood construction. His work is both written and built.
Daniela Cerqui is a sociocultural anthropologist interested in the relationship between technology and society (and, more fundamentally, humankind). She teaches at the Institute of Sociology and Anthropology of the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) where she is involved in teaching and research on the new information technologies, and on the ‘information society’ they are supposed to create. She recently spent two years conducting research in the Department of Cybernetics of the University of Reading.
Noam Cook is a professor of philosophy at San Jose State University. His publications, research and consulting interests focus on social and technological change, the relationship between knowledge and practice, and applied values issues. He was for ten years a consulting researcher at Xerox PARC. Since 1997 he has been a member of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. (B.A., M.A., San Francisco State University, Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
Howard Davis is Professor of Architecture at the University of Oregon and the author of The Culture of Building, concerning the social frameworks of the processes of architectural design and construction. His current research deals with the typology of urban mixed use buildings, and their role in a diverse economy.
Inmaculada de Melo-Martm, Ph.D. Philosophy, M.S. Biology, is a Research Ethicist in the Division of Medical Ethics, Weill Cornell Medical College. She is the author of Making Babies: Biomedical Technologies, Reproductive Ethics, and
Public Policy (Kluwer, 1998), and Taking Biology Seriously: What Biology Can and Cannot Tell Us about Moral and Public Policy Issues (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). Her current work focuses on ethical issues related to genetic research.
Andrew Feenberg is Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, where he directs the Applied Communication and Technology Lab. He has authored or edited over 10 books, including Critical Theory ofTechnology (Oxford University Press, 1991), Alternative Modernity (University of California Press, 1995), Questioning Technology (Routledge, 1999), and Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (Routledge 2005).
Patrick Feng is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Communication and Culture at The University of Calgary. His research focuses on the social implications of new technologies and the politics of international standards-setting. He has studied the design and use of scientific and technical standards in areas such as information technology, health, and food safety.
Maarten Franssen is associate professor at the Section of Philosophy of Delft University of Technology. He has published on the normativity of functions, the modeling of socio-technical systems and decision methods in engineering design. His broad research interests include theories of rationality and action and their application in the design and implementation of technology, and conceptual and foundational issues in technology related to the notions of system and function.
Craig Hanks is Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Stevens Institute of Technology for 2006-2007 while on leave from Texas State University. A recipient of six distinguished teaching awards, his publications include work on ethical issues in architecture, biotechnology ethics, philosophy of biology, philosophy of technology, philosophy of art, and political philosophy. His new book Technological Musings: Reflections on Technology and Value, and a new edited collection Technology and Values will both be published in 2007.
Wybo Houkes is assistant professor at the Subdepartment of History, Philosophy and Technology Studies of Eindhoven University of Technology. He participated in the NWO research program The Dual Nature of Technical Artifacts and published on function theory and the role of intentions in artifact use and design. His current research interests include the nature of technological knowledge, the ontology of artifacts and the application of evolutionary theory to technical artifacts.
Don Ihde is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Technoscience Research Group at Stony Brook University in New York, USA. He is the author of twenty authored and edited books, most recently, Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science (1998); Bodies in Technology (2003); and with Evan Selinger, Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality (2003). His current work includes research on imaging technologies and the application of advanced imaging and analytic technologies to human science disciplines.
Peter Kroes initiated and helped develop at Delft University of Technology an analytically orientated philosophy of technology that focuses on engineering practices. His main interests are the nature of technical artifacts and socio-technical systems, and theories of functional and artifact kinds.
Ulrich Krohs is Privatdozent of philosophy at the University of Hamburg and held a research fellowship at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research in Altenberg, Austria. His publications include work on the structure of biological theories and on the concepts of function and design. Current research topics are the justification of function ascriptions in biology, technology and the social sciences, and the relation between experiment, theory, and models of different kind.