A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

A Design

The outcome of an engineering design process involves typically a material object or its description. These objects are technical artifacts and are different from natural objects in that they are based on (human) designs. Exactly what a design in this sense is, is not so easy to spell out. On the one hand, a design may be taken to be a blueprint for production: a description of all the physical (chemical) properties of a technical artifact that are relevant for actually making a token of the artifact type defined by the design. In this sense, a design is a complete description of all the parts and their relations. But this does not capture the full notion of design. Somebody with the appropriate skills and equipment would be able to produce such a technical artifact without having any idea what it is for. The notion of design has strong teleological connotations in that a designed object has a specific property of “for-ness” as it has been made to do something: to be for something (see analysis of teleology in relation to technical artifacts in McLaughlin 2001). A design may therefore, on the other hand, also include a description of the function of the technical artifact, and furthermore (usually implicitly) an explanation of how the physical structure realizes that function (Kroes 1998). In this “thick” sense, a design becomes a description of a “teleological arrangement” of physical parts that together realize a function.

A closer look at the outcome of a design process ...