Understanding Computers and Cognition

Understanding
Computers and
Cognition
A
New
Foundation
for Design
Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores. (1986) Ablex Corporation, Norwood, NJ

“This is a ground breaking book.
It is about computers, artificial
intelligence, language… it is a
deeply thought out work”
Joseph Weizenbaum
Weizenbaum, J. (1976). Computer Power and Human Reason: From
Judgment to Calculation. United Kingdom: Penguin Books.

Preface
This is a book about the design of computer technology.
It moves among topics and purposes that appear to be worlds
apart: computer technology and the nature of human existence.
Our intention in bringing together these diverse elements is to
generate understanding -to let the apparent chasms become
spaces in which new possibilities are revealed.
All new technologies develop within the background of a tacit
understanding of human nature and human work. The use of
technology in turn leads to fundamental changes in what we do,
and ultimately in what it is to be human.
We encounter the deep questions of design when we recognize
that in designing tools we are designing ways of being.

Preface
The philosophical ideas of thinkers such as Heidegger, Gadamer,
Maturana, and Austin provided a framework to integrate what we
had previously learned through our practical experience.
It seems that the theories relevant to technological development
are those of the hard sciences and engineering. We have found
quite the opposite, theories about the nature of biological
existence, about language, and about the nature of human action
have a profound influence on the shape of what we build and how
we use it.
Matters that appear unrelated to computers but that are
nonetheless indispensable in the process of opening up for the
reader new possibilities and new directions for what we can do
with them.

Preface
We address everyone who has a
serious interest in understanding
what computers are and how they
fit into our lives.
The concern about what computers can do is not an abstract conundrum to be
puzzled over for intellectual amusement, but a practical question at the center
of a significant discourse in society as a whole.

Terry Winograd & Fernando Flores. Palo Alto, California. July, 1985

Ch. 1
We must cope with a flood of new devices, bringing with
them both benefits and dangers.
In order to understand the phenomena surrounding a new
technology, we must open the question of design -the
interaction between understanding and creation.
We address the broader question of how a
society engenders inventions whose existence in
turn alters that society.
The significance of a new invention lies in how it fits into and
changes a complex social network.

Ch. 1
The printing press, the automobile, and television are all
examples of radical innovations that opened up whole new
domains of possibilities for the network of human interactions.
One cannot understand a technology
without having a functional
understanding of how it is used.
As the use of a new technology changes human practices, our
ways of speaking about that technology change our
language and our understanding. This new way of speaking
in turn creates changes in the world we construct.

Ch. 1
In order to become aware of the effects that
computers have on society we must reveal the
implicit understanding of human language,
thought, and work that serves as a background
for developments in computer technology.
In asking what computers can do, we are drawn into asking
what people do with them, and in the end into addressing the
fundamental question of what it means to be human.
We invite the readers to create with us an openness that can
alter our collective vision of how computer technology will
develop in the coming decades.

The very narrow demographics of authors cited by Winograd and Flores

Ch. 2
The rationalistic tradition: not equated with ‘rational’, it is
distinguished by its narrow focus on certain aspects of
rationality which often leads to attitudes and activities that
are not rational.
Our commitment is to developing a new ground for rationality
–one that is as rigorous as the rationalistic tradition in its
aspirations but that does not share the presuppositions
behind it.
This tradition has been the mainspring of Western science
and technology. The rationalistic orientation underlies both
pure and applied science, and is regarded as the very
paradigm of what it means to think and be intelligent.

Ch. 2
The role of a tradition: giving
orientation to people who do not
consider themselves philosophers, but
whose ways of thinking nevertheless
embody a philosophical orientation.
Language: The rationalistic tradition regards language as a
system of symbols that are composed into patterns that stand
for things in the world.

Ch. 3
Understanding and Being: Heidegger's writings are both
important and difficult. The individual is changed through the
use of language, and the language changes through its use
by individuals.
The ‘hermeneutic circle’: What we understand is based on
what we already know, and what we already know comes
from being able to understand.
The prevalent understanding is based on the metaphysical
revolution of Galileo and Descartes, which grew out of a
tradition going back to Plato and Aristotle. This
understanding, which goes hand in hand with what we have
called the `rationalistic orientation,’ includes a kind of mind-
body dualism.

Ch. 3
This dualism accepts the existence of two separate domains
of phenomena, the objective world of physical reality, and
the subjective mental world of an individual's thoughts and
feelings.
The separation of subject and object denies the more
fundamental unity of being-in-the-world (Dasein). By drawing
a distinction that I (the subject) am perceiving something else
(the object), I have stepped back from the primacy of
experience.
Heidegger argues that it is impossible for one to exist without
the other. The interpreted and the interpreter do not exist
independently: existence is interpretation, and interpretation
is existence.

Ch. 3
Heidegger insists that we have primary access to the world
through practical involvement with the ready-to-hand, the
world in which we are always acting unreflectively.
He is concerned with our condition of thrownness -the
condition of understanding in which our actions find some
resonance or effectiveness in the world.
In driving a nail with a hammer (as opposed to thinking about
a hammer), I need not make use of any explicit
representation of the hammer. My ability to act comes from
my familiarity with hammering, not my knowledge of a
hammer.

Ch. 3
Heidegger argues that this is an inappropriate starting point-
that we must take social activity as the ultimate foundation of
intelligibility, and even of existence.
A person is not an individual subject or
ego, but a manifestation of Dasein within a
space of possibilities, situated within a
world and within a tradition.

Ch. 3
Your situation:
- You cannot avoid acting
- You cannot step back and reflect on your actions
- The effects of actions cannot be predicted
- You do not have a stable representation of the situation
- Every representation is an interpretation
- Language is action

Ch. 3
In a situation: you are ‘thrown’ into action independent of
your will; anyone who has been in this kind of situation has
afterwards felt “I should have said...”; it is impossible to
take time to analyze things explicitly and choose the best
course of action; it is impossible to know how your actions
will affect other people; you cannot count on careful
rational planning; you must, as the idiom goes, ‘flow with
the situation’; two people at the same meeting could well
come away with very different interpretations; there is no
ultimate way to determine that any one interpretation is
really right or wrong; you are not describing the situation
but creating it.

Ch. 3
Objects and properties are not inherent in the world, but
arise only in an event of breaking down in which they
become present-at-hand.
To the person doing the hammering, the hammer as such
does not exist. It is a part of the background. It is part of
the hammerer's world, but is not present any more than are
the tendons of the hammerer's arm. Its `hammerness'
emerges if it breaks or slips from grasp or mars the wood.
As observers, we may talk about the hammer and reflect
on its properties, but for the person engaged in the
thrownness of unhampered hammering, it does not exist as
an entity.

In sum, Heidegger insists that it is
meaningless to talk about the existence of
objects and their properties in the absence
of concernful activity, with its potential for
breaking down.
What really is is not defined by an objective
omniscient observer but rather by a space of
potential for human concern and action.

Ch. 4
Maturana introduces a good deal of new terminology
which seems puzzling and difficult on first reading. He
questions the validity of our commonsense understanding of
perception.
Maturana describes the nervous system as a closed network
of interacting neurons. From this standpoint, the nervous
system does not have ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’. When light
strikes the retina, it is a misleading simplification to view this
change as a perception of the light. The focus should be on
the interactions within the system as a whole, not on the
structure of perturbations.

Ch. 4
The perturbations do not determine what happens in the
nervous system, but merely trigger changes of state. From
this perspective, there is no difference between perception
and hallucination.
Of course, for an observer it makes sense to distinguish the
situation of an injected irritant from one of heat. But from
the standpoint of the nervous system it is not a relevant, or
even possible, distinction.
He argues that because our interaction is always through
the activity of the entire nervous system, the changes are
not in the nature of a mapping.

Ch. 4
Maturana seeks to explain the origins of all phenomena of
cognition in terms of the phylogeny (species history) and
ontogeny (individual history) of living systems.
An autopoietic system holds constant its organization and
defines its boundaries through the continuous production of
its components.
A plastic, structure-determined system (i.e., one whose
structure can change over time while its identity remains)
that is autopoietic will by necessity evolve in such a way
that its activities are properly coupled to its medium.

Ch. 4
Structural coupling is the basis not only for changes in an individual
during its lifetime (learning) but also for changes carried through
reproduction (evolution).
The structural coupling generated by the demands of
autopoiesis plays the role that we naively attribute
to having a representation of the world.
The frog with optic fibers responding to small moving dark spots
does not have a representation of flies. As a result of structural
coupling, the structure of the nervous system generates patterns of
activity that are triggered by specific perturbations and that
contribute to the continued autopoiesis of the frog.

Ch. 4
Maturana's primary concern is to understand what
‘cognition’ can mean when we relate it to the fundamental
nature of living systems. He rejects the metaphor of
information processing as the basis for cognition.
What Maturana calls ‘cognitive’ deals with the relevance of
the changing structure of the system to behavior that is
effective for its survival.
A statement like "The animal knows X" is not a statement
about its state, but a statement about a pattern of actions
(past and projected).

Ch. 4
The basic function of language as a system of
orienting behavior is not the transmission of
information or the description of an
independent universe about which we can talk,
but the creation of a consensual domain of
behavior between linguistically interacting
systems through the development of a
cooperative domain of interactions. Maturana,
“Biology of language” p. 50

Ch. 4
Reality is not objective, but neither is it individual: Cultural
differences do not represent different modes of treating
the same objective reality, but legitimately different
cognitive domains. Culturally different men live in different
cognitive realities that are recursively specified through
their living in them.
The most successful designs are not those that try to fully
model the domain in which they operate, but those that are
‘in alignment’ with the fundamental structure of that
domain, and that allow for modification and evolution to
generate new structural coupling.

Ch. 5
In this chapter we show how ‘language as action’ and
‘language as interpretation’ can be reconciled.
Meaning is created by an active listening, in which the
linguistic form triggers interpretation, rather than conveying
information.
In order to understand how meaning is shared, we must
look at the social rather than the mental dimension.
The naive view of language is that it simply reflects reality.
But even many sophisticated linguists and philosophers are
genuinely puzzled when one proposes that the basis for the
meaning of words and sentences is not ultimately definable
in terms of an objective external world.

Ch. 5
Consider an analogy: in a roadmap superimposed on a
topographic map, one sees tremendous regularities.

Ch. 5
Surely this regularity must mean that road placement is
determined by the lay of the land. But of course, it isn't. The
road network is conditioned by the lay of the land, but the
actual placement depends on who wants to get vehicles of
what kind from where to where, for reasons that transcend
geography.

Ch. 5
Words correspond to our intuition about ‘reality’ because
our purposes in using them are closely aligned with our
physical existence in a world and our actions within it. But
the coincidence is the result of our use of language within a
tradition (or, as Maturana might say, our structural coupling
within a consensual domain).
Language and cognition are
fundamentally social.
Maturana, Gadamer, and Heidegger all argue that our
ability to think and to give meaning to language is rooted
in our participation in a society and a tradition.

Ch. 5
Through structural coupling, an
organism comes to have a structure that
allows it to function successfully within
its medium.
But the correspondence is not one in which the form of the
world is somehow mapped onto the structure of the
organism. It is indirect (and partial), as created by the
results of actions produced by the structure, and their
potential to lead to breakdown. In language, the
correspondence of words to our non-linguistic medium is
equally indirect.

Ch. 5
Nothing exists except through language
What is crucial is the nature of ‘existing’. The ‘things’ that
make up ‘software’, ‘interfaces’, and ‘user interactions’ are
clear examples of entities whose existence and properties
are generated in the language and commitment of those
who build and discuss them.

Ch. 6
The blindness of the rationalistic tradition lies in assuming
that it can serve as a basis for understanding the full range
of what we might call ‘cognition’.
Heidegger argues that our being-in-the-world is not a
detached reflection on the external world as present-at-
hand, but exists in the readiness-to-hand of the world as it
is unconcealed in our actions. Maturana states that our
ability to function as observers is generated from our
functioning as structure-determined systems, shaped by
structural coupling

Ch. 6
Heidegger and Maturana both recognize that we are
situated in a world that is not of our own making. Their
central insight is that this world, constituted as a world of
objects and properties, arises only in the concernful
activities of the person.
The essence of computation lies in the correspondence
between the manipulation of formal tokens and the
attribution of a meaning to those tokens as representing
elements in worlds of some kind. Explicit concern with
representation is one of the criteria often used in
distinguishing AI from other areas of computer science.

Ch. 6
Knowledge is always the result of interpretation, which
depends on the entire previous experience of the
interpreter and on situatedness in a tradition. It is neither
‘subjective’ (particular to the individual) nor ‘objective’
(independent of the individual).
The organism does not exist in an externally defined space.
Its history of structural coupling generates a continually
changing space of possible perturbations that will select
among its states. Interacting systems engage in mutual
structural coupling.

Ch. 6
Many of the problems that are popularly
attributed to ‘computerization’ are the result of
forcing our interactions into the narrow mold
provided by a limited formalized domain.
At the other extreme lies the attempt to build systems that
allow us to interact as though we were conversing with
another person who shares our background. The result can
easily be confusion and frustration, when breakdowns
reveal the complex ways in which the computer fails to
meet our unspoken assumptions about how we will be
understood.

Ch. 6
This can lead to the design of tools that
facilitate a dialog of evolving understanding
among a knowledgeable community.
Language and action: language cannot be understood as
the transmission of information. It is a form of human social
action, directed towards the creation of what Maturana
calls ‘mutual orientation’. To be human is to be the kind of
being that generates commitments, through speaking and
listening. Without our ability to create and accept (or
decline) commitments we are acting in a less than fully
human way, and we are not fully using language.

Ch. 6
This can lead to the design of tools that
facilitate a dialog of evolving understanding
among a knowledgeable community.
Language cannot be understood as the transmission of
information. It is a form of human social action, directed
towards the creation of what Maturana calls ‘mutual
orientation’. To be human is to be the kind of being that
generates commitments, through speaking and listening. Without
our ability to create and accept (or decline) commitments we
are acting in a less than fully human way, and we are not fully
using language. Computers are incapable of making
commitments and cannot themselves enter into language.

Ch. 6
In designing new artifacts, a standard approach is to talk
about ‘problems’.
The difficulty with such an approach, deeply influenced by
the rationalistic tradition, is that it tends to grant problems
some kind of objective existence, failing to take account of
the blindness inherent in the way problems are formulated.
Following Heidegger, we prefer to talk about breakdowns.
By this we mean the interrupted moment of our habitual,
standard, comfortable ‘being-in-the-world’. Breakdowns
serve an extremely important cognitive function, revealing
to us the nature of our practices and equipment.

Ch. 6
New design can be created and implemented
only in the space that emerges in the recurrent
structure of breakdown. A design constitutes an
interpretation of breakdown and a committed
attempt to anticipate future breakdowns.
The key to much of what we have been saying lies in
recognizing the fundamental importance of the shift from
an individual-centered conception of understanding to one
that is socially based.

Ch. 6
Knowledge and understanding do not result from formal
operations on mental representations of an objectively
existing world. Rather, they arise from the individual’s
committed participation in mutually oriented patterns of
behavior that are embedded in a socially shared
background of concerns, actions, and beliefs.
Because of what Heidegger calls our
‘thrownness’, we are largely forgetful of the
social dimension of understanding and the
commitment it entails.

Ch. 6
We design ourselves (and the social and
technological networks in which our lives have
meaning) in language.
Our central claim is that the current theoretical discourse
about computers is based on a misinterpretation of the
nature of human cognition and language.
The question we now have to deal with is how to design
computers on the basis of the new discourse about language
and thought that we have been elaborating. Computers are
not only designed in language but are themselves equipment
for language. They will not just reflect our understanding of
language, but will at the same time create new possibilities
for the speaking and listening that we do -for creating
ourselves in language.

Ch. 7
This book is directed towards
understanding what can be done with
computers.
An understanding of what a computer really does is an
understanding of the social and political situation in
which it is designed, built, purchased, installed, and
used.
Our task is to provide a theoretical orientation within
which we can identify significant concerns and ask
appropriate questions.

Ch. 7
Success in programming depends on designing a
representation and set of operations that are both veridical
and effective. They are veridical to the extent that they
produce results that are correct relative to the domain: they
give the actual location of the satellite or the legal
deductions from the paycheck. They are effective to
varying degrees, depending on how efficiently the
computational operations can be carried out.
The problem is that representation is in
the mind of the beholder.

Ch. 7
One of the properties unique to the digital computer
is the possibility of constructing systems that cascade
levels of representation one on top of another to
great depth.
People who have not programmed
computers have not generally had
experiences that provide similar
intuitions about systems.

Ch. 8
Questions concerning the future uses of computers are often
intertwined with questions about whether they will be
intelligent.
The theoretical principles developed here
lead us to the conclusion that one cannot
program computers to be intelligent.
The first question one might ask is why anyone would ask if
computers could be intelligent.

Ch. 8
We can begin to grasp the limitations of this approach to
intelligence by looking carefully at what must go on when
someone constructs a computer program:
- First, the programmer must have a clear analysis of just what
constitutes the task and the potential set of actions for the
program.
- A major constraint on the characterization of the task
environment is the need for a formal symbolic representation in
which everything relevant can be stated explicitly.
- In order to use a formal representation, we need to set its
structures in correspondence with the structures available on the
computer at some level.
- Finally, the programmer designs a procedure that operates on
the embodied representation structures in order to carry out
the desired task.

Ch. 8
The essence of our Being is the pre-reflective
experience of being thrown in a situation of acting,
without the opportunity or need to disengage and
function as detached observers.
Whenever we treat a situation as present-at-hand,
analyzing it in terms of objects and their properties, we
thereby create a blindness. Our view is limited to what
can be expressed in the terms we have adopted. This is
not a flaw to be avoided in thinking-on the contrary, it is
necessary and inescapable. Reflective thought is
impossible without the kind of abstraction that produces
blindness.

Ch. 8
The program is forever limited to working
within the world determined by the
programmer's explicit articulation of
possible objects, properties, and relations
among them. It therefore embodies the
blindness that goes with this articulation.
There are restricted task domains in which this blindness
does not preclude behavior that appears intelligent.

Ch. 8
The essence of intelligence is to act appropriately when there
is no simple pre-definition of the problem or the space of
states in which to search for a solution.
Rational search within a problem
space is not possible until the space
itself has been created.
It is fruitless to search for a full formalization of the pre-
understanding that underlies all thought and action. We can
never have a full explicit awareness of our prejudices. This is
an essential condition of human thought and language.

Ch. 8
Human cognition includes the use of
representations, but is not based
on representation.
The breakdown of a representation and jump to a new
one happens independently of our will, as part of our
coupling to the world we inhabit.
The breakdown of a representation and jump to a new
one happens independently of our will, as part of our
coupling to the world we inhabit.

Ch. 8
But what if the programmer didn't have to
explicitly determine the representation and
its embodiment? What if somehow these
could develop on their own?
We get a very different perspective on computers if,
instead of looking at the problem of programming
them, we look at them as plastic structure-
determined systems. A computer system need not
have a fixed structure built by a programmer but
can be an evolving structure shaped by interactions.

Ch. 8
The evolutionary approach to AI is theoretically
possible. [But] it is highly unlikely that any system we
can build will be able to undergo the kind of
evolutionary change (or learning) that would enable
it to come close to the intelligence of even a small
worm, much less that of a person.

Ch. 8
In attributing intelligence to machines,
one is doing more than just taking what
Dennett calls the ‘intentional stance’.
We treat other people not as merely ‘rational
beings’ but as ‘responsible beings’. An essential part
of being human is the ability to enter into
commitments and to be responsible for the courses of
action that they anticipate.

Ch. 9
There is an intimate connection between intelligence and
language. Our position, in accord with the preceding
chapters, is that computers cannot understand language.

Ch. 9
It may be possible... to construct a conceptual structure
that corresponds to the meaning of the sentence, "Will
you come to dinner with me this evening?" But it is hard
to see... How [such] schemes could possibly understand
that same sentence to mean a shy young man's
desperate longing for love. - Weizenbaum, Computer
Power and Human Reason (1976), p. 200
The phenomena of background and interpretation pervade our
everyday life. Meaning always derives from an interpretation
that is rooted in a situation.

Ch. 9
Gadamer, Heidegger, Habermas, and others argue that the
goal of reducing even ‘literal’ meanings to truth conditions is
ultimately impossible, and inevitably misleading.
When we squeeze out the role of interpretation, we are left
not with the essence of meaning, but with the shell. Looking at
computer programs, we see this kind of problem lurking at
every turn.
The question “Is X a bachelor?” cannot be answered without
considering the potential answers to “Why do you want to
know?” This is what Gadamer means by “A question is behind
each statement that first gives it its meaning”.

Ch. 9
The problem, then, is to account for how the background
of knowledge and expectations leads to interpretation.
It may be difficult for a person to recognize the
program’s limitations. Nonetheless, the program responds
on the basis of a fixed set of patterns provided by a
programmer who anticipated certain inputs.
The limitation lies in the nature of the process by which
representations are fixed in a computer program.
The illusions described by Weizenbaum are fueled by
subject matter that makes it appear that complex and
subtle understanding is taking place.

Ch. 9
When we say that a person understands
something, we imply that he or she has
entered into the commitment implied by
that understanding. But how can a
computer enter into a commitment?
Of course there is a commitment, but it is that of the
programmer, not the program. This intermediation is not
trivial. We are engaging in a particularly dangerous
form of blindness if we see the computer -rather than the
people who program it -as doing the understanding.

Ch. 9
Understanding is not a fixed relationship
between a representation and the things
represented, but is a commitment to carry
out a dialog within the full horizons of both
speaker and hearer in a way that permits
new distinctions to emerge.
Our critique challenges the common understanding of how
these techniques are related to the human use of
language.

Ch. 9
What is important is that people using the system
recognize (as those duped by ELIZA did not) two critical
things:
- First, they are using the structures of their natural
language to interact with a system that does not
understand the language but is able to manipulate
some of those structures.
- Second, the responses reflect a particular
representation that was created by some person or
group of people, and embodies a blindness of which
even the builders cannot be fully aware.

Ch. 10
There is an apparent contradiction between our critical
view of the potential for AI and the current mood of
optimistic expansion that dominates research and
development in the area.
We need to be able to distinguish fantasy from genuine
potential for development.
It is naive to say that computers of any generation will be
able to “understand our thoughts” or “comprehend the
environment”, and it is unrealistic to expect that they will
have a major positive impact on a wide variety of
problems.

Ch. 10
- Can computer technology play a major role in solving
social problems? We must not fall into the trap of
assuming that the technology will fix the problems.
- Is the major technical problem to increase the
effectiveness with which people use computers? The key
to design lies in understanding the readiness-to-hand of
the tools being built, and in anticipating the
breakdowns that will occur in their use. We can create
tools that are designed to make the maximal use of
human perception and understanding without projecting
human capacities onto the computer.

Ch. 10
- Is the key the development of 'intelligent' systems?
Often this is simply an advertising slogan for a more
advanced and comprehensive version of what is
available now.
The grandiose goals, then, will not be met, but there will
be useful spinoffs. In the long run, the ambitions for truly
intelligent computer systems will not be a major factor in
technological development. They are too rooted in the
rationalistic tradition and too dependent on its
assumptions about intelligence, language, and
formalization.

Ch. 11
“What can people do with computers?”
Instead of talking about ‘decisions’ or ‘problems’ we
can talk of ‘situations of irresolution’, in which we
sense conflict about an answer to the question “What
needs to be done?”
The question “What needs to be done?” arises in a
breakdown, in which the course of activity is interrupted by
some kind of ‘unreadiness’. It is often manifested in
hesitation and confusion, and is always already oriented to
a certain direction of possibilities.

Ch. 11
Commitment to an action, with exclusion of other
possibilities, is the common feature of the processes that
precede action.
We call the process of going from irresolution to resolution
‘deliberation’. The principal characteristic of deliberation is
that it is a kind of conversation:
- At some moment in the process of articulating the claims, some
incipient partial proposals can be discerned.
- At some moment, a sedimented opinion about possible courses of
action to be evaluated and considered may begin to appear.
Resolution concerns the exploration of a situation, not the
application of habitual means.

Ch. 11
There is an in-between area of ‘semi-structured’ tasks
with some degree of recurrence but not so much that one
can fully specify the relevant rules. Keen and Scott-
Morton see this as the relevant area for computer aid to
human decision making. They state their goal not as
‘efficiency’ but ‘effectiveness’.
A system can be ineffective
but be highly efficient.

Ch. 11
Some of the dangers of ‘decision-support systems’:
- Orientation to choosing. The emphasis serves to reinforce the
decisionist perspective and to support a rigid status quo in
organizations, denying the validity of more social, emotive, intuitive,
and personalized approaches to the complex process of reaching
resolution.
- Assumption of relevance. Once a computer system has been
installed, it is difficult to avoid the assumption that the things it can
deal with are the most relevant things for the manager's concern.
- Unintended transfer of power. Professionals in computer technology
tend to place high values on efficiency and predictability, and to
devalue the need for human discretion and innovation.

Ch. 11
Some of the dangers of ‘decision-support systems’:
- Unanticipated effects. The potential misuses of facts is far less
serious than that which stems from the individual's simple
knowledge that the data bank exists, an awareness which has
a subtle but inevitable effect on how he conducts himself. -
Wessel, Freedom's Edge (1974), p 30.
- Obscuring responsibility. it becomes all too easy to make the
dangerous mistake of interpreting the machine as making
commitments, thereby concealing the source of responsibility for
what it does.
- False belief in objectivity. One immediate consequence of
concealing commitment is an illusion of objectivity.

Ch. 11
Like it or not, even the most ardent anti-computerist would
admit that the computer, lacking emotions, hunches and
prejudices, would consider and generate only the stark facts of
the matter. - Evans, The Micro Millennium (1979), p, 92
But this is nonsense.
Computers neither consider nor generate facts. They
manipulate symbolic representations that some
person generated on the belief that they
corresponded to facts.

Ch. 11
Tools for conversation: What we propose is to make
the user aware of this structure and to provide tools
for working with it explicitly. Substantial experience is
being amassed with a computer program that we
have developed called “The CoordinatorTM
Workgroup Productivity System”. It is the first example
of a new class of products that we are calling
‘coordination systems’ or ‘workgroup systems’.
There are a surprisingly few basic conversational
building-blocks.

Ch. 12
Using computers: A direction for design
The most important designing is
ontological. It constitutes an
intervention in the background of our
heritage, growing out of our already
existent ways of being in the world,
and deeply affecting the kinds of
beings that we are.

Ch. 12
Ontologically oriented design is
therefore necessarily both
reflective and political.
Through the emergence of new tools, we come to a
changing awareness of human nature and human
action, which in turn leads to new technological
development. The designing process is part of this
‘dance’ in which our structure of possibilities is
generated.

Ch. 12
Phenomenologically, you are driving down the road,
not operating controls. The long evolution of the
design of automobiles has led to this readiness-to-
hand.

Ch. 12
A bad design forces the user to deal
with complexities that belong to the
wrong domain.
The programmer designs the language
that creates the world in which the user
operates. This language can be
‘ontologically clean’ or it can be a
jumble of related domains. A clearly
and consciously organized ontology is
the basis for the kind of simplicity that
makes systems usable. Xerox Star, 1981

Ch. 12
The user is ‘driving’, not
‘commanding’. The challenge for
the next generation of design is to
move this same effectiveness
beyond the superficial structures of
words and pictures into the
domains generated by what
people are doing when they
manipulate those structures.
Xerox Star, 1981

Ch. 12
A breakdown is not a negative situation to be
avoided, but a situation of non-obviousness, in which
the recognition that something is missing leads to
unconcealing.
This creates a clear objective for design
-to anticipate the forms of breakdown
and provide a space of possibilities for
action when they occur.

Ch. 12
Breakdowns play a fundamental
role in design.
We must anticipate the range of occurrences that go
outside the normal functioning and provide means
both to understand them and to act.
“In writing the program try to think of
everything that could go wrong”
The analysis of a human context of activity can begin
with an analysis of the domains of breakdown.

Ch. 12
The blindness created by design.
Any opening of new possibilities closes
others, and this is especially true of the
introduction of technology.
In an electronic library, the unexpected and unintended encounters
one has in browsing can at times be of much greater importance
than efficient precise recall.
Blindness is not something that can be avoided, but it is something of
which we can be aware. The designer is engaged in a conversation
for possibilities. Attention to the possibilities being eliminated must
be in a constant interplay with expectations for the new possibilities
being created.

Ch. 12
Computers are wonderful devices for the rule-
governed manipulation of formal representations, and
there are many areas of human endeavor in which
such manipulations are crucial.
In the future we will see the development of many domains, each
suited to the experience and skills of workers in a particular area,
such as typography, insurance, or civil engineering.
Computer programs can help a lawyer manipulate
formal structures and the deductions that can be made
from them, while leaving the ‘hard questions’ open to
human interpretation.

Ch. 12
Our book has focused on the designing
of computer-based tools as part of a
larger perspective of ontological design.
There is a circularity here: the world determines what we
can do and what we do determines our world.
The machine can convey a kind of ‘coaching’ in which new
possibilities for interpretation and action emerge.

Ch. 12
Computers, like every technology, are a vehicle for the
transformation of tradition. We cannot choose whether to effect
a transformation: as designers and users of technology we are
always already engaged in that transformation.
We cannot choose what the transformation will be: individuals
cannot determine the course of a tradition. Our actions are the
perturbations that trigger the changes, but the nature of those
changes is not open to our prediction or control.
We cannot even be fully aware of the transformation that is
taking place: as carriers of a tradition we cannot be objective
observers of it. Our continuing work toward revealing it is at
the same time a source of concealment.

Ch. 12
In ontological designing, we are doing
more than asking what can be built.
We are engaging in a philosophical discourse about the
self -about what we can do and what we can be. Tools are
fundamental to action, and through our actions we generate
the world.
The transformation we are concerned with is not a technical
one, but a continuing evolution of how we understand our
surroundings and ourselves -of how we continue becoming
the beings that we are.

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Understanding Computers and Cognition

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