Technical artifacts: An integrated perspective

Humans are always interested in distinguishing natural and artificial entities although there is no sharp demarcation between the two categories. Surprisingly, things do not improve when the second type of entities is restricted to the arguably more constrained realm of physical technical artifacts. This paper helps to clarify the relationship...

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The coexistence of engineering meanings of function: Four responses and their methodological implications

In this position paper, the ambiguity of functional descriptions in engineering is considered from a methodological point of view. Four responses to this ambiguity are discussed, ranging from defining a single meaning of function and rejecting the different meanings that are currently used in engineering to accepting these meanings as coexisting...

On managing innovation by design: Towards SMART methods

In this paper innovation by design is characterised schematically and methodological with the aim of analysing how projects of innovation by design can be managed. First, I approach innovation by design from an engineering perspective, and show that the incorporation of innovation into design projects has complicated their management by making...

On the formal impossibility of analysing subfunctions as parts of functions in design methodology

In this paper, a proof is given that in design methods, the relation between technical functions and their subfunctions in functional descriptions of technical products cannot be analysed as a formal relation of parthood. This result holds for design methods in which transformations of flows of energy, material and signals are accepted as...

The design stance and its artefacts

In this paper we disambiguate the design stance as proposed by Daniel C. Dennett, focusing on its application to technical artefacts. Analysing Dennett’s work and developing his approach towards interpreting entities, we show that there are two ways of spelling out the design stance, one that presuppose also adopting Dennett’s intentional stance...

Designing for trust: A case of value-sensitive design

In this paper, we consider the meaning, roles, and uses of trust in the economic and public domain, focusing on the task of designing systems for trust in information technology. We analyze this task by means of a survey of what trust means in the economic and public domain, using the model proposed by Lewicki and Bunker, and using the emerging...

A formal ontological perspective on the behaviors and functions of technical artifacts

In this paper we present a formal characterization of the engineering concepts of behavior and function of technical artifacts. We capture the meanings that engineers attach to these concepts by formalizing, within the formal ontology DOLCE, the five meanings of artifact behavior and the two meanings of function that Chandrasekaran and Josephson...

The fine-grained metaphysics of artifactual and biological functional kinds

In this paper we consider the emerging position in metaphysics that artifact functions characterize real kinds of artifacts. We analyze how it can circumvent an objection by David Wiggins (Sameness and substance renewed, 2001, 87) and then argue that this position, in comparison to expert judgments, amounts to an interesting fine-grained...