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Design for Community: Toward a Communitarian Ergonomics

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Abstract

This paper explores how the designed world could be better supportive of better communal ways of relating. In pursuit of this end, I put the philosophy of technology dealing with the role that technologies play in shaping, directing, mediating, and legislating human action in better communication with a diverse literature concerning community. I argue that community ought to viewed as composed of three interrelated dimensions: experience, structure, and practice. Specifically, it is a psychological sense evoked via a particular arrangement of ties and constellation of social practices guided, at its best, by phronetic reasoning. It is a mode of social being that I set in opposition to networked individualism. I examine the existent and potential communitarian ergonomics of the design of contemporary urban spaces and network devices. However, I conclude that artifacts remain only one part of the picture. A communally ergonomic mode of being requires not only compatible artifacts and built spaces but also an institutional context supportive of community as an economic and political entity.

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Acknowledgments

The author thanks his reviewers and E.J. Woodhouse for their helpful comments.

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  1. Science and Technology Studies Department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Sage Building 5th Floor, Troy, NY, 12180-3590, USA

    Taylor Dotson

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  1. Taylor Dotson
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Correspondence to Taylor Dotson.

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Dotson, T. Design for Community: Toward a Communitarian Ergonomics. Philos. Technol. 26, 139–157 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-013-0100-4

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