Design as conversation with digital materials

This paper explores Donald Schön's concept of design as a conversation with materials, in the context of designing digital systems. It proposes material utterance as a central event in designing. A material utterance is a situated communication act that depends on the particularities of speaker, audience, material and genre. The paper argues that, if digital designing differs from other forms of designing, then accounts for such differences must be sought by understanding the material properties of digital systems and the genres of practice that surround their use. Perspectives from human-computer interaction (HCI) and the psychology of programming are used to examine how such an understanding might be constructed.</p

Learning in a Landscape: Simulation-building as Reflexive Intervention

This article makes a dual contribution to scholarship in science and technology studies (STS) on simulation-building. It both documents a specific simulation-building project, and demonstrates a concrete contribution to interdisciplinary work of STS insights. The article analyses the struggles that arise in the course of determining what counts as theory, as model and even as a simulation. Such debates are especially decisive when working across disciplinary boundaries, and their resolution is an important part of the work involved in building simulations. In particular, we show how ontological arguments about the value of simulations tend to determine the direction of simulation-building. This dynamic makes it difficult to maintain an interest in the heterogeneity of simulations and a view of simulations as unfolding scientific objects. As an outcome of our analysis of the process and reflections about interdisciplinary work around simulations, we propose a chart, as a tool to facilitate discussions about simulations. This chart can be a means to create common ground among actors in a simulation-building project, and a support for discussions that address other features of simulations besides their ontological status. Rather than foregrounding the chart's classificatory potential, we stress its (past and potential) role in discussing and reflecting on simulation-building as interdisciplinary endeavor. This chart is a concrete instance of the kinds of contributions that STS can make to better, more reflexive practice of simulation-building.Comment: 37 page

Information and Design: Book Symposium on Luciano Floridi’s The Logic of Information

Purpose – To review and discuss Luciano Floridi’s 2019 book The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design, the latest instalment in his philosophy of information (PI) tetralogy, particularly with respect to its implications for library and information studies (LIS). Design/methodology/approach – Nine scholars with research interests in philosophy and LIS read and responded to the book, raising critical and heuristic questions in the spirit of scholarly dialogue. Floridi responded to these questions. Findings – Floridi’s PI, including this latest publication, is of interest to LIS scholars, and much insight can be gained by exploring this connection. It seems also that LIS has the potential to contribute to PI’s further development in some respects. Research implications – Floridi’s PI work is technical philosophy for which many LIS scholars do not have the training or patience to engage with, yet doing so is rewarding. This suggests a role for translational work between philosophy and LIS. Originality/value – The book symposium format, not yet seen in LIS, provides forum for sustained, multifaceted and generative dialogue around ideas

“Beyond the immediacy”: Axiological experiences of engineering students during the “new normal”

Writing Centre Intervention (WCI) in the faculty is a pedagogical resource to facilitate the students’ academic literacy development. In our universities, literacy development focuses mainly on enhancing students’ cognitive, linguistic and epistemological experiences – with little attention given to the psycho-social and ontological dimensions of learning, especially in the science related fields such as electrical engineering. This paper draws on Academic Literacies, Systemic Functional Linguistics and Legitimation Code Theory to study the axiological experiences of first year electrical engineering students at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT). The participants for the study were drawn from the students who participated in the WCI, a collaborative, interdisciplinary project designed to help electrical engineering first year students to develop “soft skills” alongside technical-scientific knowledge. Since the workshops were facilitated under Covid-19 lock down restrictions, blended learning was employed. Interviews were conducted via MS Teams. The participants’ utterances demonstrated a mixed bag of emotions, an ideological shift, albeit at different degrees, and strong attitudes toward the learning of the engineering “soft skills”. Therefore, the study calls for a pedagogy of wholeness wherein the epistemological, spiritual, axiological and ontological dimensions of learning are attended to and activated in order to move students’ perceptions “beyond the immediacy” of the current experience

Humanitarian “Reversing” in the Education Development in the Russian Federation Education under the Conditions of Transhumanistic Challenges in the Era of Globalisation

The effectiveness of the development of individual countries within the conditions of accelerating scientific and technological progress, expanding the influence of globalisation and integration processes in the global socio-cultural space are very important during the exchange of international students. The purpose of the paper is to research the methodological foundations of the humanities education for international students as an alternative to transhumanist ideology. In the framework of general scientific research methods, a paradigmatic approach is used as a factor analysis of students' educational processes. Particular attention is paid to the substantiation of the methodological foundations of the education humanisation on the basis of modern ontologically anthropological and religious-anthropological achievements of the philosophical field of knowledge. In this regard, the thesis is accepted that the artificially imposed transhumanist ideology performs a key integrating function when considering the practice of education of international students. The novelty of the study is due to a discussion of the contradictions caused by all-round technocratisation and informatisation, the fall of moral standards, and the degradation of human behavior. The practical significance of the study is determined by the need to develop a different pedagogy and model of education for modern students

An ontological approach to the study of European popular culture

Like any other field of contemporary scholarly research, the Humanities in general, and Cultural Studies in particular are today confronted with the challenges of complexity at an unprecedented scale. What has been described as the \u201castonishing growth\u201d of academic publications worldwide is paralleled by a similar proliferation of browsable online databases, like digital archives, collections and catalogues, which offer access to an immense and continuously increasing volume of virtually interesting research material, stored in the form of information bytes. As we discussed in Deliverable 2.1, \u201cSorting out the archive for the study of European popular culture\u201d, the problem of how to cope with such an unseizable of virtually relevant sources of evidence is all the more sensible in the case of a project like DETECt, which deals with one of the most prolific narrative genres of contemporary media production, that is, the European crime narrative genre. Not only an exhaustive catalogue of this production could easily count\u2014especially when considered in all of its transnational scope\u2014in thousands of thousands, and even\u2014in historical perspective\u2014millions of items, but the transdisciplinary scope of the studies it has inspired has produced a wealth of research in many domains of knowledge. These difficult challenges make DETECt an ideal laboratory for experimenting new methods to manage complexity in a transnational/transcultural research environment. This methodological experimentation aims to respond to the problem of how to generate effective syntheses of portions and/or aspects of a given knowledge domain in a context of information overload. To this purpose, the ontological approach chosen by DETECt focuses on the application of knowledge mapping techniques to encourage the formulation of partial knowledge syntheses within a \u201crealist\u201d, and even \u201cpragmatic\u201d theoretical framework

Robot Consciousness: Physics and Metaphysics Here and Abroad

Interest has been renewed in the study of consciousness, both theoretical and applied, following developments in 20th and early 21st-century logic, metamathematics, computer science, and the brain sciences. In this evolving narrative, I explore several theoretical questions about the types of artificial intelligence and offer several conjectures about how they affect possible future developments in this exceptionally transformative field of research. I also address the practical significance of the advances in artificial intelligence in view of the cautions issued by prominent scientists, politicians, and ethicists about the possible dangers of such sufficiently advanced general intelligence, including by implication the search for extraterrestrial intelligence