Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
In science as well as in art, the Greeks of the fi fth and fourth centuries BCE
were discovering and inventing a way to view a world of unprecedented
scope and order through the rapidly evolving tools of philosophy. In ex-
ploring the nature of the drama and other arts, Aristotle employed the same
conception of causality to which he attributed the forms of living things,
and that is a good place to begin.
How does a representation of an action—a play or a human-computer
activity—get to be the way it is? What defi nes its nature, its shape, its
particulars? What forces are at work? Lest you be tempted to balk at this
excursion into the theory, I want to remind you of the reason for taking
it: Understanding how things work is necessary if one is to know how to
make them. When a made thing is fl awed or unsuccessful, it may not be
due to poor craftsmanship. People have designed and built beautiful build-
ings that wouldn't stand up, people have written plays with mellifl uous
words and solid dramatic structure that closed after one night in New Jer-
sey, and people have designed software with lovely screens and loads of
“functionality” that leave people pounding on their keyboards in frustra-
tion. The reason for failure is often a lack of understanding about how the
thing works, what its nature is, and what it will try to be and do—whether
you want it to or not—because of its intrinsic form.
The four causes are forces that operate concurrently and interactively dur-
ing the process of creation. While Aristotle also applies them to living or-
ganisms, we will restrict our discussion to the realm of made things. We
will begin with defi nitions of the four causes and then apply them, fi rst to
drama, and then to human-computer interaction.
4
Formal cause:
The formal cause of a thing is the form or shape of what
it's trying to be. So for instance with architecture, the formal cause of
a building is the architect's notion of what its form will be when it's
fi nished. Those formal properties of “building-ness” (or “church-ness,”
or “house-ness,” etc.) that are independent of any particular instance
of a building (or church or house) and that defi ne what a building is,
4. I have employed the traditional terminology, not out of a desire to promote philosophical
jargon, but because it is quite diffi cult to fi nd synonyms that do these concepts justice, and also
because more casual terminology can lead to confusion downstream.
