Sec 1.4

Chapter 4 presents a third argument for focusing on interpretation in design: computer support of innovative design should be based primarily on an analysis of human understanding. As Norman (1993) puts it, “Without someone to interpret them, cognitive artifacts [like computer support systems] have no function. That means that if they are to work properly, they must be designed with consideration of the workings of human cognition.” The philosophy of interpretation provides just such a consideration.

This contrasts with many previous approaches to computerization of design and to artificial intelligence, which lean toward theories on the natural science model (e.g., mathematical physics), like information theory and predicate logic formalisms. Human sciences (e.g., cultural anthropology or non-behaviorist psychology), however, necessarily center on human interpretation because their subject matter is defined by what people consider to be important and by how people construe things. As one moves from routine design to highly innovative tasks, the distribution of roles in the human-computer relationship shifts more onto the people involved, and it becomes increasingly important to take into account their cognitive functioning.

An initial framework for clarifying the respective roles for computers and people in tasks like lunar habitat design is suggested by theories of situated cognition. Several influential recent books[1] argue that human cognition is very different from computer manipulations of formal symbol systems. The differences imply that people need to retain control of the processes of non-routine design because these processes rely heavily upon what might be called situated interpretation. Computers can provide valuable computational, visualization, and external memory aids for the designers by supporting such interpretation in design.

Situated interpretation, as used here, refers to a view of human understanding as taking place within tacit contexts of background skills, human concerns, and linguistic traditions that provide its grounding. Interpretation is not just a function of a disinterested rational mind, but relies on the interpreting person or people being actively involved with the situation, which includes the artifact being interpreted and supplies the basis for that artifact’s significance. (See Heidegger’s fuller definition of situation below and in Chapter 4.)

Situated cognition theory disputes the prevalent view based on the natural sciences model that all human cognition is based on explicit mental representations such as goals and plans. Winograd and Flores (1986) hold that “experts do not need to have formalized representations in order to act” (p.99). Although manipulation of such representations is often useful, there is a background of preunderstanding that cannot be fully formalized as explicit symbolic representations subject to rule-governed manipulation. This tacit preunderstanding even underlies people’s ability to understand representations when they do make use of them. Suchman (1987) concurs that goals and plans are secondary phenomena in human behavior, usually arising only after action has been initiated: “When situated action becomes in some way problematic, rules and procedures are explicated for purposes of deliberation and the action, which is otherwise neither rule-based nor procedural, is then made accountable to them” (p.54).

This is not to denigrate conceptual reasoning and rational planning. Rather, it is to point out that the manipulation of formal representations alone cannot provide a complete model of human understanding. Rational thought is an advanced form of cognition that distinguishes humans from other life forms. Accordingly, an evolutionary theorist of consciousness like Donald (1991) traces the development of symbolic thought from earlier developmental stages of tacit knowing (e.g., episodic and mimetic memory-based cognition). He shows how these earlier levels persist in rational human thought as the necessary foundation for advanced developments, including language, writing, and computer usage.

Philosophers like Wittgenstein (1953), Polanyi (1962), Searle (1980), and Dreyfus (1991) suggest a variety of reasons why tacit preunderstanding cannot be fully formalized as data for computation. It is too vast: background knowledge includes bodily skills and social practices that result from immense histories of life experience. We are unaware of much of it: these skills and practices are generally transparent to us. It must be tacit to function: the examples of biking, swimming or playing a musical instrument suggest that procedural knowledge at least gets in the way of skilled action if it is explicit. More generally, tacit knowledge is a precondition for explicit knowing: we cannot formulate, understand, or use explicit knowledge except on the basis of necessarily tacit preunderstandings.

The philosophical foundations of situated cognition theory were laid out by Heidegger (1927), the first to point out the role of tacit preunderstanding and to elaborate its implications. For Heidegger, we are always knowledgeably embedded in our world; things of concern in our situations are already meaningful before we engage in explicit cognitive activity. We know how to behave without having to think about it. For instance, an architect designing a lunar habitat knows how to lift a pencil and sketch a line or how to look at a drawing and see the rough relationships of various spaces pictured there. The architect understands what it is to be a designer, to critique a drawing, to imagine being a person walking through the spaces of a floor plan. Such tacit, background skills or preunderstandings of the design situation are necessary prerequisites for being able to design an artifact.

Heidegger defines the situation as a person’s interpretive context—including the physical surroundings, the available tools, the circumstances surrounding the task at hand, the person’s own personal or professional aims, and social or cultural relations. The situation constitutes a network of significance in terms of which each part of the situation is already meaningful. That is, the person has tacit knowledge of the situation as a whole; if something becomes a focus, it is perceived as already understood and its meaning is defined by its relations within the situation. Everything is tacitly understood in its relations to other things and to the whole.

According to situated cognition in contrast to rationalist views, to an architect a rectangular arrangement of lines on a piece of paper is not first perceived as meaningless lines that need defining attributes (to be determined by subsequent rational thought). Rather, given the design situation, it is already understood as (say) a sleep compartment for astronauts. The sleep compartment is implicitly defined as such by the design task, the shared intentions of the design team, the other elements of the design, the availability of tools for revising the drawing, the sense of space conveyed by the design, the prevailing NASA terminology. This network of significance is background knowledge that allows the architect to think about features of the design, to make plans for changes, and to discover problems or opportunities in the evolving design. At any given moment, the background is already tacitly understood and does not need to be an object of rational thought manipulating symbolic representations.

At some point the architect might realize that the sleep compartment is too close to some source of potential noise, like the flushing of the toilet. This physical adjacency would come into focus as an explicit concern against the background of relationships of the preunderstood situation. Whereas a common sense view might claim that the sleep compartment and toilet were already immediately and objectively present, and that therefore their adjacency was always there by logical implication, Heidegger proposes a more complex reality in which things are ordinarily hidden from explicit concern. In various ways, they can become uncovered and discovered, only to re-submerge soon into the background as our focus moves on.

In this way, our knowledge of the world primarily consists neither in mental models that represent reality nor in an unmediated and objective access to objects. Rather, our understanding of things presupposes a tacit preunderstanding of our situation. This is analogous to the view of Kuhn (1962), who argues that scientists’ experimental observations presuppose their tacit ability to use their experimental equipment and to apply their frameworks of hypotheses and theory. Only by being already situated in our world can we discover things and construct meaningful representations of them by building upon, explicating, and exploring our tacit preunderstanding. Situated cognition is not a simplistic theory that claims our knowledge lies in our physical environment like words on a sign post: it is a sophisticated philosophy of interpretation.

According to the philosophy of situated interpretation, human understanding develops through interpretive explication involving both (1) preunderstanding and (2) explorative discovery of the situation. In Heidegger’s analysis, interpretation provides the path from tacit, uncritical preunderstandings to reflection, refinement, and creativity. The structure of this process of interpretation reflects the inextricable coupling of the interpreter with the situation, i.e., of people with their worlds. One’s situation is not reducible to one’s preunderstanding of it; it offers untold surprises, which may call for reflection, but which can only be discovered and comprehended thanks to one’s preunderstanding. Often, these surprise occasions signal breakdowns in a person’s skillful, transparent behavior, although one can also make unexpected discoveries in the situation through conversation, exploration, or external events.

A discovery breaks out of the preunderstood situation because it violates or goes beyond the network of tacit meanings that make up the preunderstanding of the situation. To understand what one has discovered, one must explicitly interpret it as something, as having a certain significance, as somehow fitting into an understood background. Then it can merge into one’s comprehension of the meaningful situation and become part of the new background. Interpretation of “something as something” requires a reinterpretation of the situated context if the discovery does not fit into the previously understood situation.

For instance, the lunar habitat designers discovered problems in their early sketches (their representations of the design situation) that they interpreted as issues of privacy. Although they had created the sketches themselves, they were completely surprised to discover certain conflicts among the functions of adjacent components, like the sleep compartments and the toilet. The discoveries could only occur because of their situated understanding represented in the drawings. The designers paused in their sketching to discuss the new issues. First they debated the matter from various perspectives: experiences of previous space missions, cultural variations in bathroom designs, technical acoustical considerations. Then they considered alternative conceptions of privacy, gradually developing a shared vocabulary that guided their revisions and became part of their interpretation of their task. They reinterpreted their understanding of privacy and articulated their new view using the terminology of a privacy gradient.

These themes of being situated, having perspectives, and using explicit language correspond to the three-fold structure of preunderstanding in Heidegger’s philosophy. He articulates the pre-conditions of interpretation as: (a) pre-possession of the situation as a network of preunderstood significance; (b) pre-view or expectations that things in the world are structured in certain ways; and (c) pre-conception, a preliminary language for expressing and communicating. In other words, interpretation never starts from scratch or from an arbitrary assignment of representations, but is an evolving of tentative prejudices and anticipations. (1) One necessarily starts with a preunderstanding that has been handed down from one’s past experiences and inherited traditions. (2) The interpretive process allows one to reflect upon this preunderstanding methodically and to refine new meanings, viewpoints, and terminologies for understanding things more appropriately.

The analysis of interpretation based on Heidegger’s philosophy stresses the role of tacit preunderstanding as the basis for all understanding. Preunderstanding consists primarily of the characteristics of prepossession, preview, and preconception. It also implicitly incorporates the structure of “something as something.” Through interpretation, this preunderstanding is articulated. The resultant explicit understanding can be externalized in discourse. This can be taken further through the methodologies of science to codify knowledge. Each stage in this process preserves the original structure of the preunderstanding. It is because of this structure that metaphors, speech acts, and scientific propositions have the structure they do of something as something, something is some predicate, or something has some attribute.

The process of explication through interpretation forms the basis for computer support by transforming tacit understanding into increasingly explicit forms that can eventually be captured in computer-based systems.

[1] A series of publications in the last decade has, in effect, defined an approach to cognitive science and to the theory of computer support for design that goes by the name “situated cognition.” These include Schön (1983), Winograd & Flores (1986), Suchman (1987), Ehn (1988), and Dreyfus (1991).

1.4. The Analysis of Situated Interpretation