T. Cavanagh, Clemson and Dalhousie Universities more precise. Expansion of these definitions into other design fields adds variability, but allows the philosophical terms to have wider application. Rather than adapting the definitions to things like artist-created artifacts, this chapter takes a more modest approach and expands the concepts to include artifacts with affinities to engineering design, particularly architecture.
Building technology and construction has an imprecise understanding of function, use, and intention, partly because the artifact is complex and the designer is faced with a loose problem that is not easily quantified (Kira, 1976; Rykwert, 1982). There is a wide range of possible technological solutions to building a shelter; decisions about lightness, speed, efficiency, climate, and materials create a complex set of criteria, some even conflict. In our culture, houses have a low threshold of improved function. Try to evaluate “home improvement;” figure out which house performs better than another. What do you measure, how is a newer house “new and improved.” Can houses produce an improved sense of personal and social well-being, and if they do, then how do changes in construction techniques affect the spaces around us. While the scale of a house allows easy comprehension, the artifact is socially and technologically complex and analyzing design intent, building function and end use is usually quite difficult. In the twentieth century, engineers, and architects, designed new house construction systems to manufacture “engineered” houses with innovations in production, however they accounted for very little of total housing construction (Wachsmann, 1961). Consistently the parameters and methods of engineering design fall short of resolving this seemingly simple task. Building a house, or engineering the method of building a house, does not fit easily within the more constrained parameters of engineering design, since the outcome must afford a wide range of equivalent solutions, qualitative concepts, and design intentions (Hansson, 2002b). As such, the path of its design development has many possible directions with a wide range of possible solutions. However, this variability, once accounted for in the philosophical concepts of function, use, and intention, might allow discussion of fields of design close to engineering. It also holds the promise of a twenty-first century version of design that includes both the technical and the techno-social aspects of artifacts glossed by engineering.
In this chapter the concept of functionality is added to that of function, usability to that of use, and intentioned to that of intention. Engineers and most twentieth-century technologies have demonstrated that problematizing function is an effective way of operating. They do so by reducing the definition of function efficiently to solve the problem at hand. Broader consequences are unintentional and left unimagined. Rather than expanding the definition of function, this chapter argues for a discussion of functionality. Functionality opens function to a social context. It intends diverse use and appropriation. It designs specifically, but is open-ended. It not only designs function, it designs for functionality promoting the idea that one artifact can respond to a number of different technical and social situations. And it is happening anyway; design is changing in a post-industrial world.
Kroes (2001) describes the “dual nature of technological artifacts” as being both physical and intentional. They extend philosophical inquiry of the engineering artifact into its techno-social aspects. In line with their stated intention of investigating function, Kroes and Meijers (2002b) explicitly reject investigating a “thin notion of function,” one that has reliable association between input and output. In their view, a thick notion of function would include some of the deeper issues of intention important to engineering design; as would moving their concepts into proximate design fields, such as architecture and building science. This chapter outlines some of the deeper implications of intention that can be analyzed by moving outside of engineering design. In other words, in this chapter I argue for an even thicker notion of function.
From this designer’s point of view, describing artifacts as both technical and techno-social is an important step in the assignment of function to human creations.124 While it is true that designers, especially engineers, imbue function into artifacts; designers can also intend functionality for their artifacts. In architectural jargon, one is called a “tight fit” solution and the other a “loose fit” solution. Simple engineering, such as the design of the first jet engine, is an exemplar of “tight fit.” The house construction system in the case study is an example of a “loose fit” technology. This distinction differentiates engineering from other design fields, and the engineering emphasis in the philosophy of technology leads to the conflation of function with functionality. Showing my bias, I think that any emphasis on engineering in philosophy of technology tends toward instrumental and essential argumentation. This would put engineering design on the weak side of functionality and on the strong side of function.
As an architect-designer, I find it easier to imagine ambiguous artifacts as intentionally ambiguous, rather than simply assume unforeseen appropriations by others, note, this is not the multiple realizability of functions, these are intended designs resulting in the multi-functionality of objects rather than accidental functions such as a hammer being used as a doorstop. Andrew Feenberg (1999) discusses the historical discovery of function during technological development. Instead, architects are historically conscious designers that intend ambiguous function. The wood frame construction system is a nineteenth century version of a technology that surrounds us, as are computers. Both combine homogenizing tendencies with new opportunities for appropriation, as in Borgmann’s (1992) case for computers as homogenizing technological artifacts and Feenberg’s (2002) optimistic critique for democratic computer design for such things as distance learning. In addition, part of the post-modern condition of contemporary design anticipates multiple appropriations, in other words many contemporary artifacts are designed for functionality.
Tom Moran (2002) argues for usability as design intent. Software demonstrates the distinction between the use of an artifact and its usability. It is created with different design intent than the technical artifacts of engineering, more open to manipulation, redesign, and sub-design. In other words, there is a middle design realm between production and consumption where successful design is measured as much by resilience and ease of appropriation, where economics are more complex than simple technological production. Perhaps, use and usability are the consumption side of function and functionality (Cowan, 1985).
Now that I have questioned a distinction made in philosophical studies by introducing a double aspect of design intent, namely function and functionality and have suggested that even users are to some degree designers; I would like to suggest that the term intentioned could capture the contemporary post-modern attitude that designs for functionality and usability. This suggests a thick notion of intention. Of course, this does not assume that a design can anticipate all unintended consequences, but it can expedite a realm of secondary design to engage these consequences. As usability and functionality imply a more graduated differentiation between design and use, suggesting that intermediaries can be designers and users at the same time, so can design intent be subjectively plural with origins in another design.
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However, function is still assigned an instrumental, and perhaps essentialist (Feenberg, 1999), importance in Kroes’ arguments and in his critique of Searle (Kroes, 2003).