Transforming Grounds

I just want to recommend Alan Jacobs new book " How to think --  a survival guide for a world at odds ". It is a wonderful book that is easy to read about an extraordinarily important topic. What resonates with my own thinking is the argument that thinking is work, it leads to trouble, it is slow, and it is far from comforting. Excellent thinking about thinking. Great examples. Useful advice. Read it.

What is interaction and how can we describe it? In our recent book " Things That Keep Us Busy--the elements of interaction " we take on this challenge and we develop, what we call, an anatomy of interaction .  We also develop a detailed account of when it is reasonable to say that interaction actually takes place. We do this by employing the notion of the "window of interaction" (more on that later). Below I am briefly presenting some of the work on our anatomy of interaction (from Chapter 4 in the book, as a teaser :-) The basic elements of the anatomy are artifact and user . Interaction takes places between a human and an artifact/system, as described in the figure below (4.3). Some of the terms used in the figure need to be explained since they mean very specific things. First of all, an artifact has certain 'states': • internal states , or i-states for short, are the functionally important interior states of the artifact or system. • externa...

In my last post, I talked about my interest in the relationship between designing and rationality. Here are some of my major inspirational sources for this project.

I have since my early days of being a Ph.D. student been intrigued by the question of what it means to be rational and to act rationally. This interest manifested itself in my Ph.D. dissertation that translated to English had the title "The Hidden Rationality of Design Work". Reading about rationality has since then been a lifelong side project, almost like a hobby. I have not done so much writing on the topic but I have read. Recently I have started a book project around designing and rationality (maybe with a title similar to my dissertation, however with different content). The main idea of this project is that the designing, as a major human approach for change, still struggles with a "hidden rationality". Even though today the praise of designing is stronger than ever before, it is far from clear what is the distinguishing features of the approach compared to other approaches. What is the rationality underlying designing that makes it into a unique approach...