Agile Software Development
Автор: Alistair Cockburn /
APPENDIX B: Naur, Ehn, Musashi Pelle Ehn, Wittgenstein's Language Game
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Часть 2
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The turnaround can be understood in the light of two Wittgensteinian lessons. The first is not to underestimate the importance of skill in design. As Peter Winch (1958) has put it, "A cook is not a man who first has a vision of a pie and then tries to make it. He is a man skilled in cookery, and both his projects and his achievements spring from that skill. " The second is not to mistake the role of description methods in design: Wittgenstein argues convincingly that what a picture describes is determined by its use.
In the following I will illustrate how our "new" UTOPIAN design methods may be understood from a Wittgensteinian position, that is, why design-by-doing and a skill-based participatory design process works. More generally, I will argue that design tools such as models, prototypes, mockups, descriptions, and representations act as reminders and paradigm cases for our contemplation of future computer-based systems and their use. Such design tools are effective because they recall earlier experiences to mind. It is in this sense that we should understand them as representations. I will begin with a few words on practice, the alternative to the "picture theory of reality".
Practice is Reality
Practice as the social construction of reality is a strong candidate for replacing the picture theory of reality. In short, practice is our everyday practical activity. It is the human form of life. It precedes subject-object relations. Through practice, we produce the world, both the world of objects and our knowledge about this world. Practice is both action and reflection. But practice is also a social activity; it is produced in cooperation with others. To share practice is also to share an understanding of the world with others. However, this production of the world and our understanding of it takes place in an already existing world. The world is also the product of former practice. Hence, as part of practice, knowledge has to be understood socially--as producing or reproducing social processes and structures as well as being the product of them (Kosik, 1967; Berger Luckmann, 1966).
Against this background, we can understand the design of computer applications as a concerned social- and historical-conditioned activity in which tools and their use are envisioned. This is an activity and form of knowledge that is both planned and creative.
Once struck by the "naive" Cartesian presumptions of a picture theory, what can be gained in design by shifting focus from the correctness of descriptions to intervention into practice? What does it imply to take the position that what a picture describes is determined by its use? Most importantly, it sensitizes us to the crucial role of skill and participation in design, and to the opportunity in practical design to transcend some of the limits of formalization through the use of more action-oriented design artifacts.
Language as Action
Think of the classical example of a carpenter and his or her hammering activity. In the professional language of carpenters, there are not only hammers and nails. If the carpenter were making a chair, other tools used would include a draw-knife, a brace, a trying plane, a hollow plane, a round plane, a bow-saw, a marking gauge, and chisels (Seymour, 1984). The materials that he works with are elm planks for the seats, ash for the arms, and oak for the legs. He is involved in saddling, making spindles, and steaming.
Are we as designers of new tools for chairmaking helped by this labeling of tools, materials, and activities? In a Wittgensteinian approach the answer would be: only if we understand the practice in which these names make sense. To label our experiences is to act deliberately. To label deliberately, we have to be trained to do so. Hence, the activity of labeling has to be learned. Language is not private but social. The labels we create are part of a practice that constitutes social meaning. We cannot learn without learning something specific. To understand and to be able to use is one and the same (Wittgenstein, 1953). Understanding the professional language of chairmaking, and any other language-game (to use Wittgenstein's term), is to be able to master practical rules we did not create ourselves. The rules are techniques and conventions for chairmaking that are an inseparable part of a given practice.
To master the professional language of chairmaking means to be able to act in an effective way together with other people who know chairmaking. To "know" does not mean explicitly knowing the rules you have learned, but rather recognizing when something is done in a correct or incorrect way. To have a concept is to have learned to follow rules as part of a given practice. Speech acts are, as a unity of language and action, part of practice. They are not descriptions but Below I will elaborate on language-games, focusing on the design process descriptions in design, design artifacts, and knowledge in the design of computer applications.
Language Games
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