Being and the Screen: How the Digital Changes Perception. Published in one volume with A Short Treatise on Design

Being and the Screen

Design Thinking, Design Theory

Ken Friedman and Erik Stolterman, editors

Design Things, A. Telier (Thomas Binder, Pelle Ehn, Giorgio De Michelis, Giulio Jacucci, Per Linde, and Ina Wagner), 2011

China’s Design Revolution, Lorraine Justice, 2012

Adversarial Design, Carl DiSalvo, 2012

The Aesthetics of Imagination in Design, Mads Nygaard Folkmann, 2013

Linkography: Unfolding the Design Process, Gabriela Goldschmidt, 2014

Situated Design Methods, edited by Jesper Simonsen, Connie Svabo, Sara Malou Strandvad, Kristine Samson, Morten Hertzum, and Ole Erik Hansen, 2014

Taking [A]part: The Politics and Aesthetics of Participation in Experience-Centered Design, John McCarthy and Peter Wright, 2015

Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation, Ezio Manzini, 2015

Frame Innovation: Creating New Thinking by Design, Kees Dorst, 2015

Designing Publics, Christopher A. Le Dantec, 2016

Overcrowded: Designing Meaningful Products in a World Awash with Ideas, Roberto Verganti, 2016

FireSigns: A Semiotic Theory for Graphic Design, Steven Skaggs, 2017

Making Design Theory, Johan Redström, 2017

Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design, Daniela Rosner, 2018

Designing with the Body: Somaesthetic Interaction Design, Kristina Höök, 2018

Discursive Design: Critical, Speculative, and Alternative Things, Bruce M. Tharp and Stephanie M. Tharp, 2018

Pretense Design: Surface over Substance, Per Mollerup, 2019

Being and the Screen: How the Digital Changes Perception, Stéphane Vial, 2019

Being and the Screen

How the Digital Changes Perception

Published in one volume with A Short Treatise on Design

Stéphane Vial

translated by Patsy Baudoin

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Originally published in France by Presses Universitaires de France/Humensis:

L’Être et l’écran, 2nd ed. © 2017, Presses Universitaires de France/Humensis

Court traité du design, 2nd ed. © 2014, Presses Universitaires de France/Humensis

This book is published with the support of the University of Nîmes, France.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in ITC Stone Serif Std and ITC Stone Sans Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Vial, Stéphane, author. | Baudoin, Patsy, translator. | Folkmann, Mads Nygaard, 1972– writer of supplementary textual content. | Lévy, Pierre, writer of supplementary textual content.

Title: Being and the screen : how the digital changes perception : publishedin one volume with A short treatise on design / Stéphane Vial ; translated by Patsy Baudoin.

Other titles: L’être et l’écran. English

Description: Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, [2019] | Series: Design thinking,design theory | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019005611 | ISBN 9780262043168 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Technology—Philosophy. | Design—Philosophy. | Digitalelectronics—Psychological aspects. | Perception (Philosophy)

Classification: LCC T14 .V53413 2019 | DDC 601—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005611

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Laëtitia, because I met her on-screen

The computer is an enigma. Not in its making or its usage, but because man appears incapable of foreseeing anything about the computer’s influence on society and humanity.

—Jacques Ellul, The Technological System (1977)

For me, the computer is the most remarkable tool we invented. It’s the equivalent of the bicycle for the mind.

—Steve Jobs in Julian Krainin and Michael R. Lawrence, Memory and Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress (1990)

Computers don’t just do things for us, they do something to us.

—Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995)

d_r0

Contents

Series Foreword

Preface to the US Edition

I Being and the Screen: How the Digital Changes Perception

Foreword to the First Edition

Critic and Visionary: The Double Gaze of the Humanities

Pierre Lévy

Introduction: What Is the Digital Revolution Revolutionizing?

1 Technology as a System

2 The Digital Technological System

3 The Technological Structures of Perception

4 The Life and Death of the Virtual

5 Digital Ontophany

6 The (Digital) Design of Experience

Conclusion: On the Radical Aura of Things

Supplement 1: Otherphany and Otherness

Supplement 2: Ontophanic Feeling

Supplement 3: Against Digital Dualism: A Phenomenological Critique of Judgment

II A Short Treatise on Design

Foreword to the First Edition

Raising the Question of Design

Mads Nygaard Folkmann

1 The Paradox of Design: Wherein We Show That Design Thinks but Does Not Reflect upon Itself

2 The Disorder of Speech: Wherein We Deconstruct and Rebuild the Word Design

3 Design, Crime, and Marketing: Wherein We Talk about the Very Horrific Alliance between Design and Capital

4 Beyond Capital: Wherein We State the Moral Law of the Designer

5 The Design Effect: Wherein We Reduce the Quiddity of Design to Three Criteria

6 Drafting a Project: Wherein We Show That the Designer Is Not an Artist

7 Design as A Thing That Thinks: Wherein We Defend the Concept of Design Thinking

8 Toward Digital Design: Wherein We Look into the Consequences of the Interactive Revolution

Postscript: The Design System: Wherein the Author Orders His Principles in Geometric Style

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Series Foreword

As professions go, design is relatively young. The practice of design predates professions. In fact, the practice of design—making things to serve a useful goal, making tools—predates the human race. Making tools is one of the attributes that made us human in the first place.

Design, in the most generic sense of the word, began over 2.5 million years ago when Homo habilis manufactured the first tools. Human beings were designing well before we began to walk upright. Four hundred thousand years ago, we began to manufacture spears. By forty thousand years ago, we had moved up to specialized tools.

Urban design and architecture came along ten thousand years ago in Mesopotamia. Interior architecture and furniture design probably emerged with them. It was another five thousand years before graphic design and typography got their start in Sumeria with the development of cuneiform. After that, things picked up speed.

All goods and services are designed. The urge to design—to consider a situation, imagine a better situation, and act to create that improved situation—goes back to our prehuman ancestors. Making tools helped us to become what we are—design helped to make us human.

Today, the word design means many things. The common factor linking them is service, and designers are engaged in a service profession in which the results of their work meet human needs.

Design is first of all a process. The word design entered the English language in the 1500s as a verb, with the first written citation of the verb dated to the year 1548. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines the verb design as to conceive and plan out in the mind; to have as a specific purpose; to devise for a specific function or end. Related to these is the act of drawing, with an emphasis on the nature of the drawing as a plan or map, as well as to draw plans for; to create, fashion, execute or construct according to plan.

Half a century later, the word began to be used as a noun, with the first cited use of the noun design occurring in 1588. Merriam-Webster’s defines the noun as a particular purpose held in view by an individual or group; deliberate, purposive planning; a mental project or scheme in which means to an end are laid down. Here, too, purpose and planning toward desired outcomes are central. Among these are a preliminary sketch or outline showing the main features of something to be executed; an underlying scheme that governs functioning, developing or unfolding; a plan or protocol for carrying out or accomplishing something; the arrangement of elements or details in a product or work of art. Today, we design large, complex processes, systems, and services, and we design organizations and structures to produce them. Design has changed considerably since our remote ancestors made the first stone tools.

At a highly abstract level, Herbert Simon’s definition covers nearly all imaginable instances of design. To design, Simon writes, is to [devise] courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones (Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 2nd ed., MIT Press, 1982, p. 129). Design, properly defined, is the entire process across the full range of domains required for any given outcome.

But the design process is always more than a general, abstract way of working. Design takes concrete form in the work of the service professions that meet human needs, a broad range of making and planning disciplines. These include industrial design, graphic design, textile design, furniture design, information design, process design, product design, interaction design, transportation design, educational design, systems design, urban design, design leadership, and design management, as well as architecture, engineering, information technology, and computer science.

These fields focus on different subjects and objects. They have distinct traditions, methods, and vocabularies, used and put into practice by distinct and often dissimilar professional groups. Although the traditions dividing these groups are distinct, common boundaries sometimes form a border. Where this happens, they serve as meeting points where common concerns build bridges. Today, ten challenges uniting the design professions form such a set of common concerns.

Three performance challenges, four substantive challenges, and three contextual challenges bind the design disciplines and professions together as a common field. The performance challenges arise because all design professions:

1. Act on the physical world;

2. Address human needs; and

3. Generate the built environment.

In the past, these common attributes were not sufficient to transcend the boundaries of tradition. Today, objective changes in the larger world give rise to four substantive challenges that are driving convergence in design practice and research. These substantive challenges are:

1. Increasingly ambiguous boundaries between artifacts, structure, and process;

2. Increasingly large-scale social, economic, and industrial frames;

3. An increasingly complex environment of needs, requirements, and constraints; and

4. Information content that often exceeds the value of physical substance.

These challenges require new frameworks of theory and research to address contemporary problem areas while solving specific cases and problems. In professional design practice, we often find that solving design problems requires interdisciplinary teams with a transdisciplinary focus. Fifty years ago, a sole practitioner and an assistant or two might have solved most design problems; today, we need groups of people with skills across several disciplines, and the additional skills that enable professionals to work with, listen to, and learn from each other as they solve problems.

Three contextual challenges define the nature of many design problems today. While many design problems function at a simpler level, these issues affect many of the major design problems that challenge us, and these challenges also affect simple design problems linked to complex social, mechanical, or technical systems. These issues are:

1. A complex environment in which many projects or products cross the boundaries of several organizations, stakeholder, producer, and user groups;

2. Projects or products that must meet the expectations of many organizations, stakeholders, producers, and users; and

3. Demands at every level of production, distribution, reception, and control.

These ten challenges require a qualitatively different approach to professional design practice than was the case in earlier times. Past environments were simpler. They made simpler demands. Individual experience and personal development were sufficient for depth and substance in professional practice. While experience and development are still necessary, they are no longer sufficient. Most of today’s design challenges require analytic and synthetic planning skills that cannot be developed through practice alone.

Professional design practice today involves advanced knowledge. This knowledge is not solely a higher level of professional practice. It is also a qualitatively different form of professional practice that emerges in response to the demands of the information society and the knowledge economy to which it gives rise.

In a recent essay (Why Design Education Must Change, Core77, November 26, 2010), Donald Norman challenges the premises and practices of the design profession. In the past, designers operated on the belief that talent and a willingness to jump into problems with both feet gives them an edge in solving problems. Norman writes:

In the early days of industrial design, the work was primarily focused upon physical products. Today, however, designers work on organizational structure and social problems, on interaction, service, and experience design. Many problems involve complex social and political issues. As a result, designers have become applied behavioral scientists, but they are woefully undereducated for the task. Designers often fail to understand the complexity of the issues and the depth of knowledge already known. They claim that fresh eyes can produce novel solutions, but then they wonder why these solutions are seldom implemented, or if implemented, why they fail. Fresh eyes can indeed produce insightful results, but the eyes must also be educated and knowledgeable. Designers often lack the requisite understanding. Design schools do not train students about these complex issues, about the interlocking complexities of human and social behavior, about the behavioral sciences, technology, and business. There is little or no training in science, the scientific method, and experimental design.

This is not industrial design in the sense of designing products, but industry-related design, design as thought and action for solving problems and imagining new futures. This new MIT Press series of books emphasizes strategic design to create value through innovative products and services, and it emphasizes design as service through rigorous creativity, critical inquiry, and an ethics of respectful design. This rests on a sense of understanding, empathy, and appreciation for people, for nature, and for the world we shape through design. Our goal as editors is to develop a series of vital conversations that help designers and researchers to serve business, industry, and the public sector for positive social and economic outcomes.

We will present books that bring a new sense of inquiry to the design, helping to shape a more reflective and stable design discipline able to support a stronger profession grounded in empirical research, generative concepts, and the solid theory that gives rise to what W. Edwards Deming described as profound knowledge (Deming, The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education, MIT, Center for Advanced Engineering Study, 1993). For Deming, a physicist, engineer, and designer, profound knowledge comprised systems thinking and the understanding of processes embedded in systems; an understanding of variation and the tools we need to understand variation; a theory of knowledge; and a foundation in human psychology. This is the beginning of deep design—the union of deep practice with robust intellectual inquiry.

A series on design thinking and theory faces the same challenges that we face as a profession. On one level, design is a general human process that we use to understand and to shape our world. Nevertheless, we cannot address this process or the world in its general, abstract form. Rather, we meet the challenges of design in specific challenges, addressing problems or ideas in a situated context. The challenges we face as designers today are as diverse as the problems clients bring us. We are involved in design for economic anchors, economic continuity, and economic growth. We design for urban needs and rural needs, for social development and creative communities. We are involved with environmental sustainability and economic policy, agriculture competitive crafts for export, competitive products and brands for micro-enterprises, developing new products for bottom-of-pyramid markets and redeveloping old products for mature or wealthy markets. Within the framework of design, we are also challenged to design for extreme situations, for biotech, nanotech, and new materials, and design for social business, as well as conceptual challenges for worlds that do not yet exist such as the world beyond the Kurzweil singularity—and for new visions of the world that does exist.

The Design Thinking, Design Theory series from the MIT Press will explore these issues and more—meeting them, examining them, and helping designers to address them.

Join us in this journey.

Ken Friedman and Erik Stolterman

Editors, Design Thinking, Design Theory Series

Preface to the US Edition

Two books undertaking the same challenge make up this book: to build a phenomenology of technology and design in order to cast light on our experiences relating to artifacts, especially digital artifacts, and to grasp the philosophical meaning of the act of design.

*

First published in 2013 with the Presses Universitaires de France, Being and the Screen stems from my doctoral thesis in philosophy, completed at the Sorbonne at Paris Descartes University. Reissued and extended in 2017, this book has garnered many invitations for me in the most diverse circles, including one from the president of the French Republic, François Hollande, to a lunch about the digital at the Elysée Palace in Paris. There are few books on the philosophy of technology that have had such a path.

I see this as a sign that Being and the Screen answers to a profound intellectual need: to offer philosophical meaning to the digital revolution on a level other than the most common one of analyzing technology through economic and political lenses. Being and the Screen is not about digital capitalism and carefully tries to avoid being about it. It has no interest in the economico-political dimensions of the digital, that is, of the digital in its relation to the individual and society. Rather, it inscribes its effort in the epistemological analysis of technologies, and it deals with the digital in relation to subjects and objects, that is, in its anthropological-phenomenological dimension, considered as the substratum or the basis of all other dimensions.

Being and the Screen tries to introduce a new approach to the historical phenomenology of technologies, which I also call the phenomenological archaeology of technologies. This is a new branch of the phenomenology of technologies that is parallel and complementary to that of postphenomenology. It is based on ontophany theory, according to which the process of appearance of being is constantly technologically conditioned. Thus, technologies are not only tools; they are structures of perception. They are apparatuses in which appearance makes its appearance. In recent years, this theory has been supplemented by other publications and has been extended by other researchers in France, for example, by Samira Ibnelkaïd in her remarkable, empirical work on multimodal screen interactions.¹

This American edition of Being and the Screen is a translation of the second, revised and enriched edition published in 2017. It has been subject to some clarifications and adaptations for the US and English public, but it remains intact in its essence and is relatively timeless. The theory of ontophany is indeed a lasting philosophical solution to many current debates on the digital, such as the fear of screens.²

The fear of screens is in a sense a normal and inevitable phenomenological anxiety owing to the slow acculturation of our perceptual structures to the new digital ontophany of the world. The phenomenological trauma of the digital is not so easy to absorb. A background of IRL fetishism persists in all of us.³ It will take time, years and decades, to fully integrate the digital into the lens of our perception. Working on oneself, meditating on one’s own ontophanic transformation, however, can speed things up. By this, I mean a kind of contemporary spiritual exercise,⁴ which I understand as a work of phenomenological self-analysis, whereby each of us can observe ourself and try to understand our own ontophanic process. When we succeed, we become sensitive to the technoperceptual aspect of presence, and we get in touch with ontophanic feeling, which alone allows us to get some necessary distance. A French researcher recently told me, Your chapter on technology as ontophanic matrix is really changing my way of perceiving my environment. I cannot explain it yet, but that will come. That’s all that I wish for you!

*

A Short Treatise on Design appeared in 2010, before Being and the Screen, with the Presses Universitaires de France, after I taught philosophy for five years at École Boulle, a well-known Parisian school of art and design. Revised in 2014 for the second edition, this book was conceived as an introduction to the possible philosophical dimension of design. It has been translated into Swedish (2011), Korean (2012), and Chinese (2017). This is the book of a philosopher who discovers design in a design school, a philosopher among designers, introduced to the world of studios and the practice of projects, and who will then in turn design—interaction design—in his own studio in Paris.

I am no longer at École Boulle or professionally doing web design. I am now in academia, engaged in research about design, and my ideas on design have evolved. Yet they remain largely faithful to the intuitions in this book. Deliberately short, A Short Treatise on Design is above all an introduction to the discipline of design—not a history book, but a book built of philosophical problems. The philosophy of design is still an emerging discipline,⁵ but this book’s modest contribution lies in the theory of the effect of design. This theory proposes that we think about design not as producing beings but, rather, events; not things that are but things that happen; what I call effects—along three axes: ontophanic (effect of experience), callimorphic (effect of formal beauty), and socioplastic (societal effect). That is precisely where the link is between A Short Treatise on Design and Being and the Screen. Design is creative work on ontophany. Creative phenomenology is what produces neophanies, novel ways of appearing and structuring lived experience. Doing design is therefore to be philosophically responsible for existential experience.

*

I cannot finish this preface without warmly thanking the people without whom the publication of this book would not have been possible or who contributed in one way or another to making its publication possible. I am thinking of Erik Stolterman and Ken Friedman, Douglas Sery and Maria Vlachou, Neal Stimler and Lev Manovich, Pierre Lévy and Mads N. Folkmann. I also thank Patsy Baudoin for her outstanding work of translation. And finally, a personal thank you to Laëtitia for her patience and encouragement.

Stéphane Vial

Montreal, Canada

November 2018

www.stephane-vial.net

I Being and the Screen: How the Digital Changes Perception

Foreword to the First Edition

Critic and Visionary: The Double Gaze of the Humanities

Pierre Lévy

If we want to see a little more clearly, beyond the simple posture of consumers or users, how we integrate our thoughts and symbols in the algorithmic medium, if we want to understand the digital mutation going on, and if we want to give ourselves the means of weighing in on its progress, we have to keep both eyes wide open—our critical eye as well as our visionary eye.

When it comes to the critical eye, let’s first learn to smile when facing junky slogans; marketers’ click bait, competition for Klout scores,¹ and open rebel poses. For some, the internet may be a new religion. Why not? But for heaven’s sake, let’s not build new idols: the internet is not an actor or a source of information, not a universal solution or a model. (Evgeny Morozov explains all of this nicely in his latest book, To Save Everything, Click Here.)²

The internet is not an actor. The new algorithmic medium that is becoming increasingly more complex under our very eyes and fingers is certainly not a homogeneous actor, but rather the hypercomplex assemblage of multitudinous human and nonhuman actors of all kinds, an assemblage that is constantly and rapidly changing, a metamedium that houses and interweaves a great variety of media, each of which calls for a particular analysis in a particular sociohistorical context. The algorithmic medium does not make decisions and does not act independently.

Nor is it a source of information: only the people and institutions that express themselves there are actual sources. Many journalists maintain the confusion that stems from the fact that in traditional media with unilateral dissemination (organs of the press, radio, television), the channel merges with the transmitter. But in the new communications environment, many independent sources may use the same platform.

Garden-variety common sense also suggests that neither the internet nor even the proper use of the internet, whether along the lines of crowdsourcing or open data, can provide a universal solution and a little magic to all economic, social, cultural, or political problems. When all that almost everyone can utter are words like disruption, innovation, networking, and collective intelligence, these order-words no longer make sense because they no longer make a difference.³

In a similar vein, the internet is no model either. Wikipedia (since 2001) without a doubt indicates success in the area of collaborative work and the dissemination of knowledge. But must one imitate it, however, for projects and in contexts that are different from that of an online encyclopedia? One can say the same of other successful initiatives such as open source software (since 1983) or Creative Commons licenses (since 2001). Wikipedia and free intellectual property are now interdependent and well-established institutions. If you have to copy the Wikipedia community or the open community, it should be their ability to conceive nearly from scratch what unique models they themselves needed for their own projects.

Here it is 2013, and there is no reason that new, original models cannot be added to these, perhaps looking forward to more ambitious projects. One certainly must make fruitful our technological, legal, and organizational inheritance of the multifaceted sociotechnical movement that has carried the emergence of the algorithmic medium, but why should one conform to any given model?

To wrap up this section on the critical eye, let’s look at some trending order-words such as big data and digital humanities. It is clear that the vast amounts of publicly available data call for a concerted effort to extract from them a maximum amount of useful information. But the proponents of big data maintain the epistemological illusion that they can do without theories and that it is possible to extract knowledge thanks to simple statistical analyses of the data—as if the selection of data sets, the choice of categories that are applied to them, and the design of the algorithms that process them did not stem from a pragmatic perspective, a particular hypothesis, and, in short, some sort of theory! But can one ask engineers or journalists, as well intentioned as they may be, to explain humanities theories, when researchers in the humanities themselves provide so few of them, which are so poor, so simplistic, or so limited to a given situation?

This brings me to the contemporary craze for digital humanities. Efforts to edit and provide access to humanities data, process these data with big data tools, and organize communities of researchers around this processing are surely commendable. Alas, for the moment, I see no substantial work being done to solve the huge problems of disciplinary fragmentation, testing assumptions, and theoretical hyperlocality that prevent the humanities from emerging from their epistemological Middle Ages. The technological tools are not enough! When will the humanities rid themselves of the postmodernist spell that bars access to scientific knowledge and a universal open dialogue? Why do so many researchers, although very talented, confine themselves to politico-economic denunciations, to the protection or attack of such or such an identity, or to disciplinary confinement? It will