I have developed "tennis elbow" from lugging this book around the past four weeks, but it is worth the pain, the effort, and the aspirin. It is also worth the (relatively speaking) bargain price. Including appendixes, this book contains 894 pages of text. The entire panorama of the neural sciences is surveyed and examined, and it is comprehensive in its scope, from genomes to social behaviors. The editors explicitly state that the book is designed as "an introductory text for students of biology, behavior, and medicine," but it is hard to imagine any audience, interested in any fragment of neuroscience at any level of sophistication, that would not enjoy this book. The editors have done a masterful job of weaving together the biologic, the behavioral, and the clinical sciences into a single tapestry in which everyone from the molecular biologist to the practicing psychiatrist can find and appreciate his or

Principles of Neural Science

https://ris.utwente.nl/ws/files/6761018/Geels02technological.pdf

Technological transitions as evolutionary reconfiguration processes: a multi-level perspective and a case-study

A prevalent and pervasive view of designing is that it can be modeled using variables and decisions made about what values should be taken by these variables. The activity of designing is carried out with the expectation that the designed artifact will operate in the natural world and the social world. These worlds impose constraints on the variables and their values; so, design could be described as a goal-oriented, constrained, decision- making activity. However, design distinguish- es itself from other similarly described activities not only by its domain but also by additional necessary features. Designing involves exploration, exploring what variables might be appropriate. The process of explo- ration involves both goal variables and deci- sion variables. In addition, designing involves learning: Part of the exploration activity is learning about emerging features as a design proceeds. Finally, design activity occurs within two contexts: the context within which the designer operates and the context produced by the developing design itself. The designer’s perception of what the context is affects the implication of the context on the design. The context shifts as the designer’s perceptions change. Design activity can be now characterized as a goal-oriented, con- strained, decision-making, exploration, and learning activity that operates within a con- text that depends on the designer’s percep- tion of the context.

Design Prototypes: A Knowledge Representation Schema for Design

Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories

The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms.

The dual nature of technical artefacts

Design methodology and the nature of technical artefacts

Technical Artefacts: Creations of Mind and Matter

The conceptualisation of the notion of a system in systems engineering, as exemplified in, for instance, the engineering standard IEEE Std 1220–1998 (1999), is problematic when applied to the design of socio-technical systems. This is argued using Intelligent Transportation Systems as an example. A preliminary conceptualisation of socio-technical systems is introduced which includes technical and social elements and actors, as well as four kinds of relations. Current systems engineering practice incorporates technical elements and actors in the system but sees social elements exclusively as contextual. When designing socio-technical systems, however, social elements and the corresponding relations must also be considered as belonging to the system.

Modelling infrastructures as socio-technical systems

Systems engineering has been plagued by the problem of how to separate a system from its environment or context, in particular from its social context. We propose to include anything in the system that is necessary for performing its intended function and that may be the object of design. For certain engineering systems, such as civil aviation systems, this implies that human agents and social institutions have to be taken as integral parts of these systems. These ‘socio-technical’ systems are of a hybrid nature because they are constituted by different kinds of elements, intentional and nonintentional: social institutions, human agents and technical artefacts. This paper analyses two different roles that human agents, as elements of socio-technical systems, may play with regard to technical artefacts. Furthermore, it discusses some conceptual problems concerning the modelling of socio-technical systems that are due to the hybrid nature of these systems.

/pdf/treating-socio-technical-systems-as-engineering-systems-some-wwzpourqdn.pdf

Peter Kroes

Papers

The dual nature of technical artefacts

Design methodology and the nature of technical artefacts

Technical Artefacts: Creations of Mind and Matter

Modelling infrastructures as socio-technical systems

Treating socio-technical systems as engineering systems: some conceptual problems