Designing and Constructing the (Life)World: Phenomenology and Engineering

Abstract

All but a few of Don Ihde’s books from over fifty years have featured some discussion of philosophical issues associated with technics and advanced rich descriptive analyses of the ways technology transforms human experience, yet he has devoted little attention to how the technological instruments and artifacts themselves have come to be. We apply Ihde’s innovations to contemporary engineering, which utilizes instruments, science, and a technological infrastructure to create such artifacts which then serve as mediators, moving from the affective to the effective. Using Experimental Phenomenology as a primary text, we review the structural absence of both agency and engineering, and propose extending Ihde’s set of human-technology-world relations to acknowledge agency in the engineering genesis and use of technology. This move to a phenomenology of engineering raises so many philosophical issues that as a modest projection for future work, we seek to more clearly situate engineering as a variation in technological experience that deserves its own postphenomenological attention.