billpapa.org Reading (b)log

What I found interesting in this paper is Verillon’s exposition of the notion of instrument and its relation to the artefact.

The first interesting distinction is that between Piaget’s “epistemic subject”, which is concerned with the generation of new knowledge and the “pragmatic subject”, which is concerned with altering the world. In essence this distinction by itself is dualistic, unless one presupposes that the pragmatic subject encompasses the epistemic: i.e. epistemic is concerned with thinking-theorizing and pragmatic with acting-thinking in the sense of Heidegger’s Dasein. The problem with the epistemic subject is that it is based on a purely positivist account of human practice that can be reduced to a conditioned subject-object relation (e.g. human-artifact interaction).

This reduction leads to unacceptable reductions of the user’s action, which are commonly found in HCI and usability accounts: i.e. this action serves the task, while the other serves exclusively the artifact. A dead end recognized by Norman (1991)—whose earlier work was along this path—and called for a broader unit of analysis: the total system of human, task and artifact (p.19).

Verillon then describes the “instrument”:

An instrument is any object that a subject associates with his or her action in order to carry out a task. In most cases “instrumented” activity, this object is an artifact (i.e., a made object–such as a tool or a machine–that has been designed for a specific task.) However, natural objects-such as stones, sticks or even parts of the body-can be used as instruments. Also, artifacts are brought into play to perform actions for which they were not initially intended (e.g., using a wrench as a hammer), which shows that use is relatively independent from artifact design.

There is a distinction between archaeology’s artefact(arch) and activity theory’s artefact(AT).

The Instrument mediated activity view has the plus of also taking subject-oject and tool-object interactions into account (attention: they are bidirectional), much like Lang’s (1993) more abstract and—complete I think—ecosemiotic framework.

I think the problem lies in the distinction between artefact and semiosis. I think its in itself dualistic and just takes the same problem on a higher level.

References

• Verillon, P. (2000). Revisiting Piaget and Vigotsky: In Search of a Learning Model for Technology Education. Journal of Technology Studies, XXVI(1).
• Norman, D. A. (1991). Cognitive Artifacts. In J. Carroll (Ed.), Designing Interaction. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
• Rabardel, P. (1995). Les hommes et les technologies. Approche Cognitive des instruments contemporains. Paris: Armand Colin.
• Lang, A. (1993). On the Knowledge in Things and Places. In M. Von Cranach, W. Doise & G. Mugny (Eds.), Social Representation and the Social Basis of Knowledge (Vol. 1, pp. 76-83). Bern: Huber.
• Jones, P. E. (1998). Symbols, Tools, and Ideality in Ilyenkov.

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