Beyond Engineering

Beyond Engineering: Software Design as a bridge over the Culture/Technology Dichotomy

Software design differs from "classical" engineering domains in several ways; most notably, the equality in material cost for production and consumption opens the possibility of writing computer code to anyone with access to a PC. This – and the inherent open-endedness of software – led to a blurring of boundaries between designers and users. Scripting technologies, modular applications and modifiable game engines are examples for domains in which production becomes a hybrid endeavor, between designers and users, strategies and tactics.

This popularization of "software authorship" is taken to its logical limit in the open source community, where the production of computer code becomes a semi-public activity, controlled neither by state nor market. Projects like the GNU/Linux operating system or (to a lesser extend) the Java programming language make an effort of creating communities of designers/users where the notion of a "proper" (de Certeau) territory gives way to a "common" space.

An increasingly large number of practices revolve around digital tools/spaces and as a consequence, (post)industrial societies on the hole are – in large parts – being shaped by software on both the discursive and non-discursive level (Foucault). If technology is a form of "Entbergen" (Heidegger), the changes in how we produce our tools affect the way we relate to the world.

This paper will ask in which way the recent development in design practice open up new perspectives on software production/use from both the humanities and the design standpoint. We will show how this "breaking up" of the delimitations of engineering offers an occasion to rephrase the design question as a question not only of production of technology but of the "ways of being" that make up a culture.

The question is finally whether the new modes of writing code can contribute to a wider discourse on the relations between "culture" and technology; a discourse that seeks to overcome the different barriers that characterize a highly specialized society, divided in a lot more than "two cultures" (Snow).