ANALYZING AND REPRESENTING ARTIFACT SOCIETY BASED ON RELATIONALITIES AMONG ARTIFACTS AND HUMANS - TOWARD THE ECOLOGY OF ARTIFACTS

摘要

We aim to analyze the society of artifacts from the viewpoint how far they influence each other. Therefore we put emphasis on the relationships among artifacts instead of focusing on functions or structures of artifacts. In this paper, we will confine ourselves to the relationships, mainly, among artifacts, humans and relevant entities such as physical quantities, states, relational structures, etc. We prepare, beforehand, relational rules for these relationships by which we can trace the influence of some changes over the environment. This means, we can analyze impact of changing some attributes of an artifact over the artifact society to which the artifact belongs. A modification will bring changes of other artifacts through relationships and then the changes of other artifacts will bring back to the artifact, which may cause the change of the original artifact. Now we can see the process that a modification propagates over the environment through the relationships. A relationship gives us various interpretations depending on our viewpoints or context. Therefore we take note of relationships that do not comprise subjective judgments, for example, physical laws between the artifacts. From such basic relationships, we can derive various interpretations about the relationships and analyze the effects of the relationships the artifacts have depending on the subjects in question. Composing the relational effects evaluated, we presume what will be brought to us from the artifact society where artifacts and humans change their states dynamically. This may be the first step for the ecological analysis of artifact society by which we can derive coordinated collective design of artifacts that will interact harmoniously with each other and with humans and the environment.