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Quality

philosophy

December 28, 2003, 01:57 AM

And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good—
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

I finally completed reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", an amazing novel both for its compelling story and its intriguing philosophy. It is also a difficult work, at least if you take the intellectual framework Pirsig proposes seriously. I'm still puzzling out his concept of "Quality".

Quality lies at the very heart of the philosophy described in ZAMM, yet Pirsig refuses to define it. He suggests that it is similar to the Tao (the Way) of the Chinese, the areté (excellence) of the ancient Greeks, and the dharma (duty to oneself) of the Hindu. He further insists that Quality is the source of all that is; that it sits at the top of The Ontology and thus comes before any notions of form or structure, before the subject/object dualism that has formed the basis of modern thought ever since Plato, before even the concept of truth itself. But what is it?

Pirsig claims that Quality needs no definition because we know it when we see it. That anyone can tell a good piece of work from a bad piece of work simply through intuition. Yet this is at odds with my understanding of the Good, developed through theory and experience. When designing and building software, for instance, the question often comes up as to whether a particular software product is any good, but to the wise developer this is a meaningless question. The proper followup question is "good to whom and for what purpose?"

That branch of philosophy known as esthetics contains theories that support the claim that the purpose, or use, to which a product is put defines its quality. A bread knife is good for cutting bread but bad at opening jars (at least when compared to certain alternatives). Human-centered design philosophies take this one step further and ask who the user of the product is and what his goals are. Only then can the proper purposes be determined.

But if we must rely on the user, the human who applies the object whose quality is in question, then whose idea of the good is authoritative? Despite Pirsig's assertions, there is obviously a great deal of variation in opinion about Quality in pretty much every field. People's opinions very widely on whether Word is a good piece of software or not, even for the same tasks.

The usual question to ask at this point would be: is the perception of Quality relative to the perceiver or is it an absolute fact about the universe about which individuals can be right or wrong, but that their beliefs cannot change. In other words, is Quality subjective or objective? But Pirsig calls this a false dilemma. Remember, to him the subject-object dualism is illusory. Quality precedes it, and therefore cannot lie in either subject or object. Instead, he claims Quality is in the relationship of the subject to the object. But what does this mean?

I begin to think that the question of "good for what purpose" (dare I say "good for what interaction?") runs deeper than I originally thought. Is this getting at the elusive "relationship"? To use something is, after all, in the broadest sense, to form a relationship with it. But purposes, uses, themselves have Quality. This is the entire concern of the field of philosophy known as ethics. If use is related to Quality, then that relatedness is not clear.

I have a sense that these concepts of Quality and use are connected somehow, and that the entire structure is much more connected to my own field of human-centered design than it initially appeared. But I cannot see the connection. Not clearly. Not now. For now I wait for more information or insights, whenever that may come.

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Infinitely Screwy Math

philosophy

December 05, 2003, 01:02 PM

Mark Pilgrim has an interesting post on doing math with infinity over on his weblog (and I usually don't go in for math articles). It illustrates the mind-bending stuff that can happen when you apply the mathematical model to extreme edge cases that are far removed from our reality. Of course, despite their apparent impractical nature, sometimes these edge cases turn out to be highly applicable to important domains. The field of Quantum Mechanics, after all, grew out of looking at extreme edge cases (quantum events) in which classical mechanics breaks down as a model of reality. And though it makes no more sense to us intuitively, it turns out to be the only accurate way to model reality.

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A Foundation for HCI?

philosophy, usability

November 22, 2003, 12:10 PM

I've written before about Graduate Design Seminar, a class I'm not actually in but which I'm experiencing vicariously through Dan. A couple days ago, I was talking to Dave Holstius, an HCI PhD student who's also taking the class. He feels that the HCII needs a similar class that provides a firm philosophical foundation for the discipline and an overview of its intellectual history. Sadly, there isn't really anyone in our institute who is qualified to teach such a course. We need a Dick Buchanan of our own.

I have no idea where I'd even begin to uncover such a foundation on my own. Do any courses or texts even exist in the world that would trace the history of ideas behind HCI?

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Competing Definitions of Design

design, language, philosophy

November 18, 2003, 07:54 PM

Dan has a post up about Dick Buchanan's definition of design:

"Design is the human power to conceive, plan, and realize products that serve human beings in the accomplishment of any individual or collective purpose."

Just for fun, let's compare and contrast this with my own stab at defining design:

"a deliberate action prompted by an understanding of the state of the world intended to transform the world into an improved state."

First off, Dick's definition explicitly mentions humans, whereas mine leaves the actors undefined. I think for all practical intents and purposes this is an unimportant distinction.

Secondly, Dick's incorporates a three-stage process into the definition; to design you must "conceive, plan, and realize". Mine doesn't discuss any of the activities that make up design. Perhaps it should.

Next, his specifically mentions products as the output of design. I prefer leaving this undefined, for some design processes have as their output a refined policy or organizational structure, or perhaps a new process for performing some task. These things aren't products unless you define "product" much more broadly than most people do.

Next, my definition calls out "understanding the world" as an essential component of design, whereas Dick's does not. Perhaps this is too prescriptive, since lots of design gets done without any formal attempt to understand the context in which it must fit. I'd argue that designers still require some (possibly incorrect) understanding to move forward with, which often may be based solely on their own assumptions.

Finally, my definition specifies that design attempts to improve the world (in the mind of the designers, anyway), whereas Dick's gives as the aim of design "accomplishment of any individual or collective purpose".

Dick is certainly correct that definitions cannot provide closure on all the important philosophical issues in the field. But it's still interesting to hear what words people choose to define the terms they use everyday. It often unveils subtle, but important, differences in people's understanding of the meaning behind those terms.

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A Deep Foundation of Disciplines

design, philosophy, teaching & learning

November 02, 2003, 01:56 PM

Last week, Dan posted about his Graduate Design Seminar class (as is his wont on peaceful a fall evening), specifically covering the nature of arts and the nature of products. I recommend reading them if you haven't already.

While reflecting on the profound ideas plainly put in Dan's point-by-point, notebook-ish style, I started to consider the role of philosophy in education. Dick Buchanan, who by all accounts is a man of amazing intellect and profundity of thought, seems to have crafted this class to give the design graduate students a solid foundation in how their discipline fits into the intellectual frameworks of society.

This got me thinking again about the role of higher education and what distinguishes a university education from a trade school education. Perhaps part of the preparation for becoming a skilled professional involves understanding the philosophical underpinnings of your discipline and how it fits in with the rest of society, both intellectually, historically and culturally; it's not enough to just learn the skills to get by. And if these underpinnings are still poorly understood, perhaps because your discipline is young, then you should at least be aware of the open issues and what the current level of understanding is. Many programs ignore this aspect of education; I was never taught the foundations of computing in this fashion, for instance. Yet perhaps learning these truths before practicing your trade is premature anyway, since you won't have the experience to connect them up with to make them meaningful to you. More thinking is necessary, obviously.

I've been half-trying to avoid reading Dan's posts about Design Seminar recently, although not because they aren't good. Every time I do, I feel like a penniless, hungry child looking in a bakery window; I can see the wondrous pastries and smell their delectable smells, but I'm helplessly tormented by the knowledge that I'll never get a taste. Kerry says I should stay here at CMU an extra semester next fall just to take Design Seminar. I'm tempted, sorely tempted...

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The Case Against Dualism

philosophy, psychology

August 30, 2003, 11:21 PM

I've decided that I've been posting about technology too much recently, so in this entry I'm going to talk about some good, old-fashioned philosophy of consciousness.

First, a few concepts. Philosophy of consciousness is that branch of the field that considers questions like "What does it mean to be self-aware?" and "What is 'the mind'?". The theory of substance dualism (also called "Cartesian dualism" since Rene Descartes was the main originator of the theory) claims that humans are divided into two distinct types of substances: "physical substances" which are directly observable and obey the well-known laws of physics, and "mental substances" that are not directly observable using any known measurement technique. Any theory that asserts the existence of a "soul" or a "spirit" that is separate from the body is probably a form of substance dualism.

Substance dualism is a very popular theory, which tends to irritate philosophers since its actually pretty easy to disprove. I believe that more people would doubt the theory if they were aware of the strength of the argument against it, so I'm going to take a shot at explaining it here. It's called "the argument from causal interaction".

This is a proof by contradiction, so assume for a moment that substance dualism is true. In essence, I am a "ghost in a machine": a noncorporeal spirit that controls a material body as my sole link to the physical world. It's important to note, then, that my body and my soul must engage in two-way causal interaction in order for this theory to make sense. In other words, my mind must be able to affect changes in my body (at a thought, I can move my arm up and down, for instance) and my body must be able to affect changes to my mind (when my finger is pricked with a needle, my mind experiences pain, for example). So far so good.

But in order to interact causally, these two entities have to obey certain physical laws. One of these laws is the First Law of Thermodynamics (Conservation): energy cannot be created or destroyed. Granted, the mind is a different type of substance (a mental substance, to be precise) and need not obey the laws of physics, but the body, at least, is a physical object and thus it is beholden to Conservation and everything else we know about the material world. So in order for the mind to causally interact with the body, it must expend energy to alter the body's state (probably in the region of the brain, since that's where all the neural impulses that control most of the body's processes originate from). Since we cannot observe the mind itself (it is a mental substance and indetectable by our instruments), this should create the illusion that energy is appearing and disappearing in our brains. Neural processes are being altered by an energy source that is invisible to us.

Problem is, no such phenomena has been observed. All the energy in our neural system is accounted for.

Thus we must conclude that either dualism is false, or physics is wrong. You can choose the latter if you'd like, but the consequences of that proposition's truth are far-reaching. Most of the consumer products we have in our homes shouldn't work if these fundamental laws of physics aren't universally true. The very way in which we interact with reality would become radically different if energy was not conserved. That's a lot to throw away for an unobservable ghost in a machine.

Here's the argument in brief:

1. If substance dualism is true, then the mind and the body must engage in two-way causal interaction.
2. But such an interaction violates the laws of physics, so if the mind and the body engage in two-way causal interaction, physics is wrong.
3. Physics is not wrong.
4. The mind and the body cannot engage in two-way causal interaction.
5. Therefore, substance dualism is false.

There. Now that we've got that out of the way, perhaps we can move on to some of the more interesting and less one-sided questions in philosophy of consciousness...

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But Is It Art?

aesthetics, philosophy

July 07, 2003, 09:29 PM

This week in Communication Design Fundamentals we got a new instructor, Charlee Brodsky, who is going to give us a crash course in photography (which I feel very lucky for getting; apparently last year CDF was almost entirely focused on typography and the students didn't work with images hardly at all). In class, Charlee brought in several photography books as an introduction to the medium; one of these, a book called Shopping, sparked some controversy as well as an interesting philosophical discussion on the definition of art.

Shopping is a series of photos taken from inside a number of department stores in a shopping mall, including several of partially or fully nude women in dressing rooms. The controversial bit is that the photographer took these pictures from a hidden camera in her purse. As far as we could discern, she did not get anyone's permission to take these pictures or to publish them. The faces of the subjects are not hidden in any fashion.

Charlee's position was that, although this was objectionable, it was less of an invasion of privacy than the "reality tv" shows that are so popular nowadays. Kerry took issue with this statement (being a fan of reality tv herself), and pressed Charlee's claim that Shopping was "high art" intended for an elite group of social critics whereas reality tv was "low entertainment" intended for popular consumption (my paraphrase, not her exact words).

This lead to an interesting digression into what makes art "art". Here's a few of the points my fellow classmates made:

• Shopping was created as a piece of social criticism; the photographer was depicting her disgust with the crass commercialism of modern shopping malls (or something similar; I don't want to get hung up on the subtleties of art criticism). Reality tv only exists to get ratings. But Matt pointed out that many reality tv show producers claim they are "examining the beast" and that their shows are a form of popularized social criticism. Hard to believe, I know, but it raises the interesting point that it isn't always easy to make distinctions based purely on intention; different people will see the same work different ways. Maybe there are people who gain some sort of deeper social understanding through watching reality television...
• Katie proposed that the distinguishing feature is that reality television is "staged". The producers deliberately seek out participants who will put on a good show, whereas Shopping's author recorded the world as it really was. But others pointed out that much of fine art photography is similarly "staged" since the participants pose for the pictures, but this makes it no less a form of art.
• There is no significant difference between reality tv and Shopping, except that one is more high-falutin' than the other. In fact, Shopping is more objectionable on a moral level because the subjects did not consent to participate; at least with reality tv the participants go into the show willingly (if not always fully informed, perhaps...).

All this reminded me of the course in philosophical aesthetics I took back at Virginia Tech. In that class, we examined questions such as "What makes an artwork an artwork?". The most plausable theory we examined in my not-so-humble opinion was George Dickie's institutional theory of art, or the "Art World" theory. Dickie argues that art is defined purely socially, and an object becomes an artwork when a member of the "Art World" calls it an artwork. I was never entirely clear on the qualifications for membership in this Art World, but as near as I could tell pretty much anyone interested in art could qualify as a member of the Art World. Thus, although my left shoe is just a shoe right now and not a work of art, if I were to call it a work of art and got it into the Museum of Modern Art with a nice little placard and everything, then suddenly it would become an artwork, and not just a shoe.

If you buy Dickie's theory, then in essence Charlee's original argument is correct, although she couched it in unnecessarily biased language: Shopping is art because a certain group of people who consider themselves to be in the business of creating and criticizing art have decided to call it art and treat it the same as all the other art they create and criticize. Reality TV is not art because no one has treated it in this manner. But this is the primary relevant difference; no intrinsic characteristics of either work directly matter in determining its artistic or non-artistic nature.

On a side note, after the discussion ended Charlee asked us to give a "thumbs up or thumbs down" for Shopping (intermediate angles of thumbage were also acceptable). I gave it an in-the-middle-thumb, up from the thumbs down I would have given it purely because it served to launch an interesting philosophical discussion. It's been awhile since I've come across any work of art I could say that about :).

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The Joy of Programming

personal, philosophy, software development

June 13, 2003, 01:05 AM

I've been thinking recently about the craft of programming, and why it is that some people derive a strong and fulfilling enjoyment from this activity that many others do not. I'm certainly among those who enjoy programming, but I was at a loss to clearly explain what it is I see in sitting in front of a computer monitor typing in cryptic codes, testing them, getting angry and frustrated when they inevitably don't work, etc. This lead me back to Fred Brooks's The Mythical Man-Month.

In the first essay of this wonderful collection, Brooks articulates the joys and woes of the programmer's craft better than anyone I've read since. At the end of "The Tar Pit", he writes:

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures....

Yet the program construct, like the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.

Programming is, above all, a creation act. In this sense, writing a good program is not so very different from designing a usable interface, or producing an aesthetic work of art, or writing a clearly articulated essay, or any of the other myriad creation acts humans delight in. And yet, in a sense, programming is more "pure" than these others, with the possible exception of poetry, as Brooks implies. For the programmer essentially works with concepts alone, he builds abstractions that have no real basis in reality. Our interlocking pieces, our classes and modules and functions, have no true existence within the machine; we simply pretend that they do because it is much easier to grok than the billions of electrical signals flying around that constitute what's really happening. Castles in the air.

My father is a cabinetmaker. He builds fine furniture and other functional art from wood, nails, and glue, and he takes pride in being considered a fine craftsman. I too am a craftsman, but I do not work with wood. I work with pure thought, with interlocking concepts, patterns, and algorithms. And where my father creates with his hands, I create through pure force of will. Dream up a vision, then type the words, the correct incantation, and it shall be so. The mantra of the modern magician.

Yet like any craft, programming has its dark moments. Brooks continues to describe the woes of the craft:

First, one must perform perfectly. The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn't work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirements for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.

...

The next woe is that designing grand concepts is fun; finding nitty little bugs is just work. With any creative activity comes dreary hours of tedious, painstaking labor, and programming is no exception.

All creativity has its share of toil and drudgery. It is sometimes easy to get lost among the toil; to get frustrated by the bugs and distracted by syntax and details. Veils. It is easy to miss what lies behind them. Ultimately, it's important is to keep your eyes fixed on the goal: to produce the creation, to perform the act of creating, to be the creator. Little else brings you closer to the divine.

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Defining "Design"

design, language, philosophy

April 29, 2003, 11:53 PM

I was ruminating on the nature of design last night: what design is, what it means to design something, what the place of design in the world is, and so forth. I've especially been pondering the question of to what extent I'm a designer; on the one hand I've always felt that design was a very "artsy" notion that was mysterious to a not-very-artsy person such as myself. On the other hand, I've been called a software designer for awhile, and I've always had a suspicion that "design" ran through much more of what I do than just that; perhaps through almost everything I do. So I dreamed up the following definition that seems to work well for me, and I thought I'd share.

Design is: "a deliberate action prompted by an understanding of the state of the world intended to transform the world into an improved state."

Allow me to now dissect this definition in excruciatingly painful pedantic detail.

"a deliberate action" - This phrase says two things. First off, design to me is a verb, not a noun; it is something we do. Although you can also speak of "a design", this strikes me as a derivative sense of the term. "A design" is just something that has been designed; it has no meaning except in its relation to the verb sense since two arbitrary things that are called "designs" may have nothing in common except that they were both designed. Thus I consider design proper to be an act, not a thing. Secondly, this phrase says design must be intentional; only conscious beings can design and they cannot design by accident.

"prompted by an understanding of the state of the world" - This phrase also says two things. By saying "prompted" I'm implying that design has a source, you don't decide to design "out of the blue". And that source, according to the rest of the phrase, involves some conception of the way the world works. Thus, all design is performed in the context of some kind of framework, the "understanding" you have about the world. This doesn't imply, of course, that your understanding is correct; lots of design gets done based on completely wrong understandings. So in a sense, the main point here is that you will start your design with initial preconceptions, the only question is how accurate these preconceptions are.

"intended to transform the world" - Design is an inherently normative action. By designing you are changing the world, moving it in a direction it otherwise would not have gone. Thus you are going against the current, and, as "intended" implies, you may not succeed in the ways you thought. Whenever you try to transform the world, you're taking a gamble that the world won't outsmart you.

"into an improved state." - Improved state according to whom? Well, the designer of course. This final phrase inserts something tricky into our definition since different people will probably have different notions of what an "improved state of the world" is. Yet rational designers will act to bring about their own conception of "improved", which is worth keeping in mind if you're hiring one to help design something for you. In a sense there is no designing for someone else; the designer ultimately works only for herself and her visions of improving the world.

Currently, I think this definition neatly captures all the factors of the "design" concept that I find critical. But I admit I haven't read much by people who've thought about this at a much deeper level than I have. Comments and suggestions are very welcome as always.

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A World of Patterns

patterns, philosophy

April 06, 2003, 11:30 PM

I recently borrowed A Pattern Language from Micah, which I've mentioned before. I've started reading it, and I'm already excited; Alexander describes patterns in ways I'd never really thought of. To him they are a true language, a personal and shared understanding of how we live in the world. He also makes an excellent point when discussing how the patterns fit together:

In short, no pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world, only to the extent that is supported by other patterns: the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it.

This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, a