Third Law: Technology comes in packages, big and small.
as a unified whole in a relationship with its surroundings. As a result, it isn't possible to effectively design an interactive product by decomposing it into a list of atomic requirements and coming up with a design solution for each. Even a relatively simple product must be considered in totality and in light of its context in the world.
Alan Cooper • About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
That means there are three main components to identify when looking at a system: the people, the interaction (i.e. the sharing of information), and the shared context (i.e. what that group of people have in common).
Introduction to Abundant Systems
The essence of technology, he said, is ‘nothing technological’. To investigate it properly is to be taken to much deeper questions about how we work, how we occupy Earth, and how we are in relation to Being.
Sarah Bakewell • At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others
man-made technologies evolve from previous man-made technologies, and are not invented from scratch. This is a key characteristic of evolutionary systems: the move to the ‘adjacent possible’ step.
Matt Ridley • How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
Just as DevOps lets us manage a seamless flow of capability creation, our IT systems architecture now consists of a seamless blend of components. It has become difficult to say where one product ends and another begins. The digital world is one of continuous, rather than discrete, elements.
Mark Schwartz • War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age
If there are such indivisible parts and we come to understand them and their behavior, then complete understanding of the world is possible, at least in principle. Therefore, the belief in elements is a fundamental underpinning of the Machine-Age view of the world. The doctrine that asserts this belief is called reductionism:…
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