I find very interesting stuff on this subject; there are several topics to think
about. I guess I don’t have the truth on any of them, I’m just wondering…
What about the notion of intentional systems proposed by Daniel Dennet?
In regard of the complexity of some systems (or entities) the best (if not the
only) way to understand its behavior is to suppose it is intentional. It doesn’t
matter if the system in fact is intentional or not. The example used by Dennet
was chess playing computers: it is impossible to explain the movements made by
the system on the physical level (millions of signals flashing and moving every
second in the electronic circuitry) or on the software level (several thousands
sets of instructions overlapping every second). The only explanation left is the
intentional, e.g.: ‘the white’s player (the computer) is developing a trap to
capture opponent’s knight’.
At the present time definitively design software qualifies as intentional in
Dennet’s sense: If the system corrects the spelling of a word and then changes
the hyphenation and then adjusts the space between characters to fit the column
width, this is certainly an intentional behavior (I remember doing this by hand,
but seems to me it was centuries ago).
Actually, the actions of the system go far beyond it’s designers: almost
certainly there are different programmer teams for each function and probably
nobody in the team knows the right spelling or hyphenation for some particular
word, specially if the software has several sets of rules for different
languages (I also remember that on those days some members of my team didn’t
make the fixes; not because a lack of technical skill, but because a lack of
knowledge about the right spelling: they didn’t notice the mistakes).
Now let’s see the chess match between the beetle in the box and the ghost in the
machine.
MDI Gustavo Victor Casillas Lavin
Centro de Investigaciones de Diseño Industrial
UNAM
(5255) 5622 0835
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interphasedesign.wordpress.com
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