The behavioral dimension of physical artifacts is clear to most of us.
In thinking about artifacts, I want to capture the concept and dimensions of behavioral artifacts. In Attanasio's imagined world, everyone who has ever lived can be reconstructed – resurrected – from their traces, much as we could still capture and watch the original broadcast of I Love Lucy or Wagon Train if only we could get out ahead of the signal with a sufficiently sensitive television antenna. Attanasio ( Citation1989) collapsed the distinction between beings and their doings in a science fiction novel that posited human action as a physical force embedded in and leaving behind an energy trail, much as a television broadcast radiates signals outward from a source. This problem arises in different ways and shapes in all languages – whether it involves a German theologian speaking through the language of Luther's Bible, a Japanese engineer who lives in the language once shaped by Hakuin Zenji, or an Indian mathematician thinking through a language that crafted the Vedas. Describing the subtleties we seek requires the right prepositions and verbs to give voice to the nouns we choose, compound noun–preposition–verb phrases that do not fit easily into the mental habits of an English language that took shape in Shakespeare and the King James Bible. While this has always been the case, the advent of new digital media focuses our attention on the virtual and immaterial, emphasizing this challenge. It is as though we lack a holistic vocabulary that allows us to speak of what we wish without excluding what we also wish to speak of.
#VIRTUAL ARTIFACT MEANING SOFTWARE#
When we speak of products and process, we generally do not think of things digital but a software package is as much a product as a block of cheese, and we produce the system that allows us to manage lines of customers at a bank. Despite this fact, shoes and cups are interfaces of a kind – a different kind, but interfaces nevertheless. When way we speak of interfaces, for example, we think of human–computer interaction and not shoes or cups. The words we use for different kinds of artifacts are also shaped by our history in using them. As we bring ideas into one focus, we lose the focus that would help us to capture another set of ideas. The language that helps us to capture one range of meanings seems always to withhold or defer another. They do so through the remains and traces of action captured in physical artifacts. Historians study what human beings do and what they have done. This historian's distinction emphasizes a paradox. 156) captures this nicely where he writes, “It is a mere accident … that the material tools which Man has made for himself should have a greater capacity to survive … than Man's psychic artifacts”. Historian Arnold Toynbee ( Citation1934, p. An object – in the common sense of the word – does not. One reason for the emphasis on physical artifacts may simply be their durability. The interesting challenge we face in the new journal Artifact involves finding a vocabulary that allows us to focus on the wide range of artifacts, those made by doing that never take physical form as well as those that are made in physical form, including remains. In this sense, an artifact is anything that we can design in the very large sense of the word design, defined as “ courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (Simon, Citation1982, p. 23) defines an artifact as a “man-made object”, he uses the word “object” in the wide sense of anything we can create, including “symbols, machines, industrial processes, social organizations, social movements”.
While the philosopher Mario Bunge (1999, p. Many artifacts exist only in human behavior, individual and social. I am as interested in the artifacts of doing as in the artifacts of making. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Citation1993, p. In archeology, applied to the rude products of aboriginal workmanship as distinguished from natural remains”, “a product of human art or workmanship”, “any object made by human beings” (Oxford English Dictionary, Citation2006, n.p. Typical definitions are “anything made by human art and workmanship an artificial product. Most definitions focus on the quality of artifacts as things, speaking of objects and remains rather than process or production. The word dates back to the early 1800s, meaning “something created by humans usually for a practical purpose especially: an object remaining from a particular period” and “something characteristic of or resulting from a particular human institution, period, trend, or individual” (Merriam-Webster, Citation1990, p. The second, “factum”, is the past participle of “facere”, to do or to make. The first, “arte”, means “by skill”, from “ars”, skill.
The word “artifact” comes from two Latin words.
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