Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores how designers might approach human behaviour as a material to be worked on. Unlike politicians, economists, lawyers, philosophers, psychiatrists and many others, designers have few \ndisciplinary resources to draw on in this space. Indeed, it is barely discussed at all. Contemporary designers are, we are told, supposed to treat people and things differently, and ensure that the latter are subservient to the agendas of the former - calls that become all the more insistent when designers are looking for ways to incorporate the design of services and organisations into their practice, a project that summons the prospect of breaking this taboo. \n \nBut what would a form of design that took human behaviour as its object actually be like? This thesis takes up this question as an issue in the philosophy of design, through investigating a long and rich history of suspicions about designers - namely, suspicions that they might extend their material palette from dead materials to living human beings. This exploration uncovers the emergence in the Industrial Revolution of today’s fears that designers might ‘treat people like things’; but it also uncovers an older, almost lost history of ideas about design, which understood its applicability to human beings in a way \nthat, today, is strikingly unfamiliar. Here we find the almost forgotten but still-lingering link between \ncraft and being crafty, encapsulated well by the lost ancient Greek concept of mêtis, 'cunning intelligence'. Mêtis isolates that aspect of design at work when extraordinary effects are elicited from unpromising materials, connecting design to political intrigues, daring military stratagems, the operations of impresarios and salesmen, and other instances wherein, through ingenious means, the weak prevail over the strong. \n \nBy uncovering and developing these ideas, the thesis provides a view of design that connects it to human \nbehaviour not through domination but through clever manipulation, a morally complex but undoubtedly potent approach that informs an alternative conception of how human behaviour might be understood as the object of design. The principle contribution of this thesis is, therefore, to provide a novel examination of human behaviour as the object of design; its main achievement is to provide the design disciplines with, on the one hand, an exposition of the implicit associations this project has at present; and on the other, the disinterment of mêtis and related ideas as a promising counter-perspective.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".