I think this track of thought is interestingly directed. The main
artifact that I've seen expand in the last few years are institutions
and organizations. Following that, The second set of artifacts that
have expanded are those that are the result of technique. The two
sets are related in too many ways to make explicit, but I think the
evidence from the journals that Chris and Carl cite indicate the
operations of pluralization and differentiation happening in design
discourses.
Do artifacts have thinginess though? are they 'things'? or are they
the result of something sustained and contextualized, so that
artifacts can be the techniques themselves? thus if that were the
case then discourse itself, usually ephemeral, is a significant
artifact of design.
Jeremy Hunsinger
Information Ethics Fellow, Center for Information Policy Research,
School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (www.cipr.uwm.edu
)
Words are things; and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a
thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
--Byron
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