The situation is a complex network that can be understood (tacitly) from various perspectives, that is, with various focuses. The meaningful situation is in the first place a shared world. It can also be one with personal significance.

Shared perspectives. For Heidegger, human being is fundamentally a being with others, and this interpersonal existence takes place through the medium of a shared world. The relationships of significance that constitute the situation of an artifact point to other people and open up a realm in which they can be encountered as fellow ends for whom the artifacts are useful. So, for instance, the chairs around the habitat’s wardroom table are there not only for the individual astronaut who discovers them, but for others as well and for the group of astronauts all together. The one astronaut experiences the chairs as part of a public space and knows that this understanding of its public character will be shared by others. The astronaut’s own sleep compartment is understood as private in the privative sense that it is not for others, and that the others will recognize and acknowledge its shared private significance.

The relationship of interpersonal and personal understanding is important for analyzing collaborative design; but it is also complex, as can be seen from Heidegger’s treatment of the issue. Heidegger recognizes the fundamentally interpersonal character of the situation, but he also presents a critique of the public realm (shared “common sense”). He is interested in uncovering the meaning of being that has been lost sight of in our culture. The common sense traditional views that pervade a culture contribute to the cover-up, more than they contribute to the ability to explicate the meaning of being. “Public opinion,” according to Heidegger (1927), “regulates from the start all interpretation of the world and human existence. . . [but it] obscures everything and presents what has been covered up as familiar and universally accessible” (S. 127).[1]

The role of shared understanding is clear in the lunar habitat design sessions. The discussion of bathrooms in the videotape illustrates the complexity of the shared world. There is a publicly defined understanding of what constitutes a bathroom. Yet, if one looks closely at the concept—particularly under pressure from design constraints to rethink the concept creatively—it becomes clear that there are really many variations on the notion. There is, for instance, the British WC. One can trace the history of the concept, relating it to the development of mechanical devices and indoor plumbing, and noting its continuing evolution under international influences (Americanization). Other notions of bathrooms can be considered, such as the nautical “head”, designed under severe spatial constraints for use in a boat’s unusually confined environment.

The discussion of bathrooms in the transcribed design session serves a double purpose: (1) to problematize the inherited tacit understanding of bathrooms and (2) to establish a new shared understanding. Because the tacitly assumed character of the bathroom as a single room containing a toilet, a sink, and a shower was obstructing the ability to design in response to certain constraints that were arising, Archie started to reflect on the common conception. He discarded it in favor of a multiplicity of notions of bathrooms, named several, and explicitly described some of their characteristics. At the same time as this argued against the original public conception, it served to establish a new definition of bathroom as a shared understanding between Archie and Desi. Their new conceptualization was promptly incorporated in designs that featured a separation of toilet from shower. The new way of thinking about bathrooms corresponds closely to the NASA terminology that discusses “personal hygiene” and “human waste management” as separable functions. Desi was, in fact already familiar with this terminology as a shared understanding among lunar habitat designers, so he could easily make the transition from the public way of thinking in the civilian world to that of the NASA establishment. Archie and Desi started out from different traditions. They deliberated by switching to views from several other perspectives and eventually merging a variety of considerations to define a new, shared perspective. We know how to live in many worlds, to act in numerous situations, and to move freely among them. We understand things from a variety of shifting perspectives that we share with other people as a result of complex social histories and continuing negotiations. [2]

Personal perspectives. Understanding has its personal, as well as its interpersonal aspects. Just as society projects the conventional understanding of the shared world, so individuals project their own perspective on their situation. Heidegger uses the German term Stimmung—that can be variously translated as mood or tuning [3]—to characterize the sense we have of being in our own particular world. To say, as Heidegger does, that we are thrown into a world with a certain mood is to state that we always already find a world disclosed for us and it has a particular character that colors our perceptions of what we discover in the world. The mood is not something we explicitly think about or choose. Rather, it determines in the first place how we can direct ourselves toward things that we discover and interact with tacitly or that we can then in exceptional cases think about or make decisions about. The mood determines the way in which things are discovered as mattering to us. It defines our personal perspective on the world. For instance, things might seem threatening if we are in a state of fear or paranoia. It is neither a matter of first ascertaining a possible evil nor of first observing a neutral object and then judging it to be fearsome. Rather, if one is in a fearful mood then one may discover fearsome things. Our mood is a way in which our understanding of our world is filtered or colored for us.

Mood is correlative with understanding. Understanding is the disclosure of the network of relations of significance. This disclosure always has its specific mood. The situation is always disclosed as a possibility of being. For instance, fear is a possible way of being in which things can possibly be discovered as fearsome. The mood of fear thereby opens up the possibility of understanding things as fearsome. Heidegger (1927) emphasizes the way in which understanding is a matter of opening up possibilities. Through one's understanding one discloses what one is able (capable, possible) to be and what can possibly be discovered:

As disclosure, understanding always pertains to the entirety of being-in-the-world. As a potentiality for being, one is always being-able-to-be-in-the-world. Not only is this, qua world, disclosed as possible significance, but when things within the world are themselves freed, they are freed for their own possibilities. Things are discovered in their serviceability, usability, and detrimentability. The network of references reveals itself as the categorical totality of a possibility of interconnectedness of things. (S.144)

People are constantly projecting these possibilities of understanding and then seeing the world in terms of them. We always anticipate the next moment’s world, and we can only discover it through this anticipation. For instance, if we project a fearful mood then we can discover things that are fearsome, but we can also discover that there is nothing fearsome there. This is not a matter of explicit planning. We do not decide to anticipate the fearful. It is more like Schön’s designers, who project a design decision not because they know what the consequences will be but rather because they anticipate some general results and want to see what really ensues in detail. In fact, Heidegger’s word for projecting, Entwurf, in addition to meaning throwing something ahead of oneself can mean designing or sketching a project. So it is appropriate to think of this in terms of moves in design. In this kind of understanding as projecting, there is not an explicit, thematic grasping of the possibilities upon which the understanding is projected. That would destroy the very character of the projection as possibilities and reduce it to specific given, intended contents. So projecting must remain tacit in order to throw before itself possibilities as possibilities and thereby let them be possible. To make an explicit choice is to limit oneself to a single, fully specified option, whereas the tacit projecting that is characteristic of understanding is an opening up of a (structured and delimited) range of possibilities for human being toward that which is understood.

Perspectives for discovery. Heidegger differentiates (1) the disclosure of a world from (2) the discovery of things in that world. Our shared perspective (traditions) or personal perspectives (moods) open up ranges of possibility. They do this by defining our understood situation as a network of significance. Within this situation, we can discover contingencies. The things we discover are always discovered as meaningful in terms of the situational network of relationships that associates the discovered thing to already tacitly understood other things. The disclosure of the situation is the opening of a range of possibilities for discovering things and understanding them.

Schön’s view of design provides a metaphor for Heidegger’s characterization of life as interpretation. For Schön (1983), the reflective practitioner projects a framing of the design problem by making design decisions or moves. This imposes a structure on the situation and determines the kinds of things that can take place. But it does not fully determine what does take place: that must be discovered by paying attention to the reaction of the situation. “In the designer’s conversation with the materials of his design, he can never make a move which has only the effects intended for it. His materials are continually talking back to him, causing him to apprehend unanticipated problems and potentials” (p.101). One can almost understand this literally in terms of a question and answer conversation. The designer poses the question, how would things work out if I make such and such a design move? The designer can choose the question, based on personal interests, intuitions, aesthetics, training, experience, anticipations. (This is the subjective or creative aspect.) But the designer does not choose the answers. (This is the objective aspect of creative discovery.) The answers are discovered, and may be surprising—despite the fact that they could not have been discovered if the question had not been posed. This is a subtle point: through the designer’s transaction with the situation, “he shapes it and makes himself a part of it. Hence, the sense he makes of the situation must include his own contribution to it. Yet he recognizes that the situation, having a life of its own distinct from his intentions, may foil his projects and reveal new meanings” (p.163).

For Heidegger, the situation is always disclosed from a certain perspective. The perspective or mood is like a questioning: how does the situation look to a fearful person? But, of course, we do not choose our moods, even if once in a mood we can try to change it. So the metaphor of interpreter as designer is limited to the extent that designers are thought to make volitional, explicit choices. But the parallel holds in that once the situation is disclosed as a network of mood-influenced meanings, the things that can be discovered within that situation have not been determined. To some extent, their possible character to us might be delimited by our anticipations, but things discovered can completely surprise us. For instance, the lunar habitat designers may have projected a certain understanding of what it is to live in the habitat while they arranged modules along one wall to keep the other side of the habitat open for group activities like eating around a table. Then they discovered that the bathroom opened onto the eating area. This was a surprise that they had not anticipated as part of their design decisions. However, the fact that they could then discover this as a new problem in their design was based not only on their having tried out an arrangement and having sketched it so they could see its implications, but also on their continuing to look at the new design with their sense of living in it. Desi actually talked about the situation that he was living in his imagination in terms of past situations that he had experienced in his office, where the bathroom opens onto a public area.

So the possibility of discovering surprises, constraints, and problems in a design is a function of the understanding of the situation and would not exist for someone who lacked such understanding. The projecting of a situation (with its mood and its understanding) is the posing of a question. Gadamer (1966) formulates this connection between the answers that can be discovered and the questions we come to the world with in linguistic terms: “The most fundamental phenomenon of hermeneutics is this: that any statement that is possible can be understood as an answer to a question—and in fact that is the only way it really can be understood” (S.107).

This sketch of Heidegger’s interpretation of the phenomena of the public realm and of personal moods shows that understanding is neither objectively determined nor a matter of unfounded whim. Rather, it is based on the projection of a world of specific possibility that has the character of a shared world and/or a personal mood. Understanding is founded on the disclosure of a network of references that point to the person who understands the situation and also point to other people as those who share the meaningful world. The situation is not a physical collection of objects that can be investigated scientifically,[4] but a structure of significance in which things can be discovered as already meaningful within the projected nexus of possible ways of relating to other things and serving human aims. The phenomenon of mood provides phenomenological evidence that in understanding one always finds oneself already anticipating distinct kinds of things in terms of the network of significance in which one is situated. One always understands from within some perspective, whether this perspective is primarily public or personal. Although understanding is only possible from within a mood (Heidegger), a conversation (Schön), or a questioning (Gadamer), one can subsequently modify, shift, or change perspectives within a situation.

[1] The conservative culture critique of inauthenticity that Heidegger developed from this was a questionable move (see Adorno, 1964, and Stahl, 1975b), that he dropped in his subsequent writings. In fact, his later thought increasingly emphasizes the historical character of the meaning of being, an emphasis that calls for a deeper respect for the positive role of tradition. Gadamer (1964), building on Heidegger’s later writings, tries to rehabilitate the role of historical authority, tradition, and prejudice as the necessary foundation for understanding—including for any critical reflections that go on to reject the accepted views (see the debate on this point between Gadamer, 1967, and Habermas, 1967).

[2] Because understanding is founded on social conventions, Dreyfus (1991) goes so far as to identify Heidegger’s concept of being with social practice as defined by Bourdieu (1974). He uses examples of body language, like our tacit understanding of interpersonal distance, to illustrate how we know how to be in the shared world in countless ways of which we have no explicit knowledge. While these culturally transmitted understandings provide insightful illustrations, Dreyfus’ interpretation of Heideggerian ontology threatens to collapse into anthropology (albeit one with strong ontological roots). Even this paradigm of tacit understanding has been subjected to explication and operationalizing as part of the space effort. In particular, the weightlessness of outer space and the confinement of lunar habitats transform the accustomed situations of social interaction in ways that have been made explicit and studied. (See Raybeck, 1991, and Tafforin, 1990, for example.) However, the meaning of being is arguably more pervasive and less obtrusive than even social practice. It includes, for instance, the way nature has been encountered in different historical epochs as, e.g., the creation of gods, or the way artifacts are encountered as market commodities in industrial society.

Heidegger sees the epochs of being as historically given; however he does not think they are reducible to culture, but rather that culture reflects changes in the history of being. Although it is possible to propose a materialist critique of this view (see Adorno, 1966, and Stahl, 1975a) one cannot simply reduce Heidegger’s radical rethinking to commonsensical categories. Again, it is necessary to distinguish Heidegger’s methodological (ontological) arguments from the applications (e.g., a theory of human interpretation) that one would like to garner from his discussion. Regardless of what one thinks of Heidegger’s history of being, the point for now is that all understanding involves from the start a sharing of interpersonal meaning and an initial acceptance of received opinion. Some of the perspectives we bring to bear in trying to understand the world are idiosyncratic interpretive “moves” with which we explore possible new views; others are the results of thousands of years of cultural history.

[3] See Stahl (1976) for a development of the metaphor of attunement to being.

[4] Of course, some things in the situation can become objects of scientific investigation. But this is only possible on the basis of pre-scientific, situated understanding. Scientific methodology is a derived form of understanding according to Heidegger’s analysis (see next Section).

4.2. The Role of Shared Traditions and Personal Perspectives