The "Technical Artifact" :
Into the Blackbox of Human Artifact Creation Data

Life is a series of discoveries of how the perception of our greater
environment changes as our cognition matures. As individuals, these
discoveries are often explorations of our complex, intersectional
realities, which in turn are highly influenced by our physical and
conceptual environment, including our heritage, local biome and
culture, language, and current cognitive maturity. Sometimes
these explorations seem more like problems or challenges.
Humans create artifacts (both tangible and intangible) as
a byproduct of these explorations and embodiment of the
discoveries thereon. Is it possible to analyze these artifacts
and reverse the process of discovery, in order to glean an
understanding of its creator and their original exploration?

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My first step in this process was to connect Industrial Design, human data, and dynamic media, by defining the specifics of the
relationship between people and objects. I start by looking into the elements that make up the artifact creation process. One of the primary elements that catches my attention is the role of problem solving in artifact making; specifically, what types of problems arise and are prioritized, which information is considered when attempting to solve them, and how is that information encoded into the resulting artifact?

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My findings are documented in the images to the left:

"Artifact Creation as Dynamic Media" Mindmap (Imgs 1-3)

As a linguist, I habitually define terms, and establishing definitions for 'artifact creation' and 'dynamic media' is a foundational step to my understanding of this project. The crucial feature of this definition was that it needed to illustrate the connection between Industrial Design and Dynamic Media that I was perceiving; to situate designed objects as central to the narrative. 

 

Thus in my work 'dynamic media' is roughly defined as "a force of continuous change evolution, communication, progress, transfer of energy and/or ideas/concepts/information (to the masses) (and depicts such a force/process)."

 

In order to establish designed objects as the focus of the work, I posit the '(process of) artifact creation' as an innate human behavior of communicating with our environment" which results in the object in question - thus creating a link between these concepts. 

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But what is the nature of this relationship?

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"Artifact as Communication" Mindmap (Imgs 4-12)

​The most important point to me is that the things we create contain and communicate information about the people who made them, the problems they were solving when the object was created, and the state of the world in which they came to be. ​

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How is this information stored?​

I came to the conclusion that the information was stored invisibly inside the object, in a similar way to philosopher Vilém Flusser's technical image (see imgs 6-8), a concept I term the 'technical artifact.'

 

Though individuals use made objects, the objects themselves are not technical artifacts. Technical artifact creation is a process that occurs to make the object in order to communicate a particular message, bridging distance, time, and language between people, places, ideas, and/or information.
 

In other words, technical artifact creation is a Flusserian apparatus that creates artifacts, and these function like Flusser’s
technical images, in that they embed information about
people and connect the user with that information. Thus, the technical artifact. 

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Any object contains every piece of information that has led to its existence; what is contained within the object, whether it’s about the object or not, is by definition data about people. Someone decided who, what, when, where, how and why that object came into being. That is human data. And the more you learn about any given product and its history, the more you can see contained within it.

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Which led to the next question: How can I classify the types of information stored in the objects?

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Defining the nature of, and relationship between, the information contained in artifacts (Imgs 13-20)

​I determined that there were 4 general categories of information that are stored in technical artifacts: 

1) Human Cognitive Development (imgs 14 & 15)- information about humans, including but not limited to the object's creator, their state of mind and the collective state of development/evolution of the species at the time of the artifact's creation, the problem or challenge humans faced when the object was devised; and the category, maturity, complexity of the exploration of human existence relative to the object created.

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2) Sociocultural Significance (imgs 16 & 17) - portion of the information contained in the object that encodes the culture, society, and time period that the person, challenge, and object originate in, as compared to their past.

This includes details such as political climate, local culture and its aesthetic and functional preferences, the object and challenge’s placement on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and in-group / out-group roles and dynamics.

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3) Product Evolution (img 18) - the versions of the object itself as it transforms from a problem/challenge to an idea to a reality. It mimics the design process, and shows how a simple, unrefined idea as a result of a conflict between a human and its environment can evolve to be a technical artifact – the conceptual evolution of its form and function.

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4) Manufacturing - fabrication part of object creation. Includes decisions about material choices, fabrication techniques, and systems of thinking about design that influence the resulting object.

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With all this information contained in the object, I realized there was a greater problem: most people do not have access to this information! 

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How can I make accessible this relationship between people and the objects we create, and the information contained thereon, with everyone, and in a simple and accessible way?