Philosophy and Design

• Other Authors: Vermaas, Pieter E.
• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Published: Springer 2017
• Subjects: Humanities; Social Science; Law; 124
• Online Access: http://repository.vnu.edu.vn/handle/VNU_123/25361
• Institution: Vietnam National University, Hanoi

The present collection of essays provides an overview of current work by philosophers and ethicists on the design process and its products. We have collected a group of essays on topics which are not usually considered together. The volume contains essays on engineering and architecture, focusing on a broad spectrum of items, ranging from cars to software, from nano-particles to cities, and from buildings to human beings. As such the volume trades on the ambiguous meaning inherent in the general term “design” which we will consider in the broadest sense of “changing existing situations into preferred ones.” By bringing these diverse essays together, current thinking a bout design can be presented in all its facets, permitting us to consider the broad category of design, despite its different meanings, as an activity with a common root. One of the conclusions which can be gleaned from these essays is that new developments in engineering allow for a more integrated understanding of engi-neering and architectural design, two areas of design which may have been thought to be too far apart to be comparable. But in these chapters engineering is presented as an activity that is not merely concerned with composing material products. Due to the emergence of new technological capabilities and the growth in demands that society puts on the implementations of technology, engineers are forced to consider how the material products they create interact with human agents. For philosophers and ethicists this is a familiar observation. Philosophy of technology, emerging after World War II as an independent field, first concerned with the social impacts of technology, and now more robustly directed toward the