Notes for Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores “Using Computers: A Direction for Design”, 1986


Ontological designing has practical impact on artifacts as well as for humanities inquiry.

(552) The most important designing is ontological. . . . In creating new artifacts, equipment, buildings, and organizational structures, it attempts to specify in advance how and where breakdowns will show up in our everyday practices and in the tools we use, opening up new spaces in which we can work and play.
(552) The concluding sections of this chapter will discuss the ontical-ontological significance of design – how our tools are part of the background in which we can ask what it is to be human.


1 A Background for Computer Design
Readiness-to-Hand

Readiness-to-hand sought in ontologically clean language design.

(553) 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. It is not achieved by having a car communicate like a person, but by providing the right coupling between the driver and action in the relevant domain (motion down the road). In designing computer tools, the task is harder but the issues are the same.
(553) The programmer designs the languages 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.

Anticipation of Breakdown

Anticipation of breakdown crucial in system design.

(553) A breakdown reveals the nexus of relations necessary for us to accomplish our task. This creates a clear objective for design – to anticipate the forms of breakdown and provide a space of possibilities of action when they occur.
(554) In designing computer systems and the domains they generate, we must anticipate the range of occurrences that go outside the normal functioning and provide means both to understand them and to act.

The Blindness Created by Design

Desire for attention to possibilities created and eliminate during design (Feenberg).

(554) 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.


2 A Design Example
There are no clear problems to be solved: Action needs to be taken in a situation of irresolution.

A business (like any organization) is constituted as a network of recurrent conversations.

Conversations are linked in regular patterns of triggering and breakdown.

In creating tools we are designing new conversations and connections.

Conversational structure of business organization linked to regular patterns of triggering and breakdown: creating tools means designing new conversations and connections; link to Spinuzzi weaving and splicing net work.

(555) When a change is made, the most significant innovation is the modification of the conversation structure, not the mechanical means by which the conversation is carried out (e.g., a computer system versus a manual one based on forms). In making such changes we alter the overall pattern of conversation, introducing new possibilities or better anticipating breakdowns in the previously existing ones.

Design includes the generation of new possibilities.

Design should not attempt to be formal and fully covering, instead as additions and changes to network of equipment that includes people (Kitchin and Dodge).

(556) No methodology can guarantee that all such possibilities will be found, but a careful analysis of the conversation structure can help reveal conversations with a potential for expansion. In designing computer-based devices, we are not in the position of creating a formal-”system” that covers the functioning of the organization and the people within it. . . . Instead we design additions and changes to the network of equipment (some of it computer-based) within which people work.

Domains are generated by the space of potential breakdown of action.

Space of potential breakdown and action basis of present-at-hand world of objects; software development cycles between design to experience.

(556) But even in these sedimented cases, it is important to recognize that ultimately the present-at-hand world of objects is always based on the breakdown of action.
(556) This grounding of description in action pervades all attempts to formalize the world into a linguistic structure of objects, properties, and events. This also leads us to the recognition that the development of any computer-based system will have to proceed in a cycle from design to experience and back again.

Breakdown is an interpretation – everything exists as interpretation within a background.

Everything exists as interpretation within a background, as breakdowns make manifest.

(557) satisfaction is determined not by the world but by a declaration on the part of the requestor that a condition is satisfied.

Domains of anticipation in incomplete.

Computers are a tool for conducting the network of conversations.

Computers as too for communication; computerization pejorative.

(557) “Computerization” in its pejorative sense occurs with devices that were designed without appropriate consideration of the conversational structures they engender (and those that they consequently preclude).

Innovations have their own domains of breakdown.

Design is always happening.

Design is always happening, with or without articulated theory.

(558) Design always proceeds, with or without an articulated theory, but we can work to improve its course and its results.


3 Systematic Domains

Effective tools created when computers applied appropriately to systematic domains like finance, word processing, and profession-oriented domains.

(558) Computers are wonderful devices for the rule-governed manipulation of formal representations, and there are many areas of human endeavor in which such manipulation are crucial. In applying computers appropriately to systematic domains we develop effective tools.
(558) One of the most obvious is the numbers representing financial entities and transactions. . . . Another widespread example is “word processing.”
(559) A profession-oriented domain makes explicit aspects of the work that are relevant to computer-aided tools and can be general enough to handle a wide range of what is done within a profession, in contrast to the very specialized domains generated in the design of a particular computer system. A systematic domain is a structured formal representation that deals with things the professional already knows how to work with, providing for precise and unambiguous description and manipulation. The critical issue is its correspondence to a domain that is ready-to-hand for those who will use it.

Communication a process of commitment and interpretation, not transmitting symbols.

(559) Communication is not a process of transmitting information or symbols, but one of commitment and interpretation. A human society operates through the expression of request and promises among its members. There is a systematic domain relevant to the structure of this network of commitments: a domain of “conversation for action” that can be represented and manipulated in the computer.
(559) In all situations where systematic domains are applicable, a central (and often difficult) task is to characterize the precise form and relevance of the domain within a broader orientation.


4 Technology and Transformation

New devices or systematic domains can create new ways of being; limit of phenomenology and need for degree experimentation conducted by Derrida, Ulmer, OGorman.

(560) There is a circularity here: the world determines what we can do and what we do determines our world. The creation of a new device or systematic domain can have far-reaching significance – it can create new ways of being that previously did not exist and a framework for actions that would not have previously made sense.

Maturana plasticity of cognitive system key, giving power of structural coupling.

(560) In [Humberto] Maturana's terms, the key to cognition is the plasticity of the cognitive system, giving it the power of structural coupling.

Machine coaching for new possibilities for interpretation and action.

(560) On the other hand, where there is a danger that is an opportunity. We can create computer systems whose use leads to better domains of interpretation. The machine can convey a kind of “coaching” in which new possibilities for interpretation and action emerge.

Recognition that unknown, unpredictable changes triggered by our actions prevent objective, external observation; work revealing also a source of concealment, such as Heideggerian Enframing.

(561) 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.

Ontological designing engages philosophical discourse about the self through computer use.

(561) 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.


Winograd, Terry and Fernando Flores. “Using Computers: A Direction for Design.” The NewMedia Reader. Eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2003. 552-561. Print.