The central perspective that underlies most of the articles featured on this blog could be summarised by the notion of ‘software as discourse’. I would like to give an overview of what this concept means to me from a theoretical point of view, on which assumptions it relies, and what it entails from a methodological [...]
Reductionism could be viewed as an essential theoretical component of modern natural sciences such as biology or genetics. Although reductionist approaches work very well as long as “natural” phenomena are studied, things become more difficult when human beings are involved as the object of study. Let us try and see how this notion of reductionism [...]
Interactionism is a social scientific tradition that relies on the assumption that the “real” world is actively constructed by people: It therefore views the mind primarily as a tool for solving the “pragmatic concerns” of everyday life. Thus, the basis of all social life can be found in all the small interactions we conduct every [...]
I think that it would be interesting to explore the theoretical ramification of an interpretation of the notion of user experience from a ‘radically’ poststructuralist point of view, that would put the emphasis not only on the subjective experience of users of interactive systems, but also on the subjective experience of the people who actually [...]
In recent years, ‘software developers’ have traveled quite a distance in public imagination, from spotty-faced sociopathic nerds to geek chic alpha males. Some may want my head on a spike for such an appalling short cut, but one could argue that this change in the way software engineers are represented in cultural discourse may be [...]