Ryan Mitchell Wittingslow – författare

Ryan Mitchell Wittingslow connects aesthetics and ethics to understand how designed objects acquire and maintain their functions.Building on work in philosophy of technology and design theory, Wittingslow introduces a framework based on Nelson Goodman’s concept of exemplification. He shows how designed objects can exemplify different functions in different contexts of use and evaluation, addressing a key puzzle in design theory: how do we understand objects with conflicting functions? Wittingslow is able to capture how functions can be stable enough to ground normative judgments, while remaining flexible enough to evolve through use and maintenance.This original theory, illustrating how objects shape human capabilities through their exemplified use, presents an alternative way of thinking about objects with conflicting functions. Wittingslow's philosophical analysis, grounded in design examples, creates new tools for ethical evaluation and lays the foundations for understanding functional beauty and analyzing potential design futures.

We derive a great deal of cognitive pleasure from asking what artworks mean. And yet, despite the seriousness with which we approach these questions, they all too often rely on theories of art that fail to adequately explain how art conveys meaning.This book proposes a new theory. In contrast to more conventional definitions of art, What Art Does defends the claim that artworks constitute a class of tool. Like other tools, artworks are objects that have functions and that furnish affordances. However, thanks to the particular social and material facts that underpin the creation of artworks, the functions that artworks have and the affordances they furnish are special.It is thanks to these special functions and affordances that artworks obtain their privileged character and status. Because artworks do things that other tools cannot, we take artworks to be meaning-making objects with something to say.