Hermeneutic Design

From Microsoft Press book Object Thinking by David West.

Early in his career, [Terry] Winograd was a strong advocate of classical AI and was a strong formalist. Exposure to the ideas of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, along with the philosophical works of Martin Heidegger, prompted his reconsideration of AI's formalist tenets. Winograd has turned his attention from formal modeling of the world to the issue of designing software to be used in the real world. He characterizes design as a conscious act, human-centric, conversational or dialogic in nature (betweens artifacts usch as software and hardware and human beings who are users of those artifacts), creative, communicational, with social consequences, and done as a social activity.

That paragraph is then repeated, rewritten, with this at the end:

...the work of Martin Heidegger, a hermeneutic philosopher. Writing with Fernando Flores, Winograd explored the work of Heidegger and its implication for computer system design.

The use of hermeneutics to describe what philosphers generally refer to as continental philosophy is interesting. Why not phenomenological or existential? I would prefer to reserve and restrict the use of the term hermeneutics in the software world to describe the interpretation of code in its original context.

On the next page, hermeneutic philosophy is aligned with the use of objects in software design.

Knowingly or not, the object community was concerned in the 1960s and 1970s with the same issues raised by the hermeneuticists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the issues that would be raised by the post-modernists in the 1990s. To an object advocate, objects are valuable because they facilitate user/computer interaction and communication among members of development teams. Objects enhance the art of software development but not necessarily the engineering.

The association of the anti-formal/logical/mathematical and pro-object-oriented computer scientists with continental philosophers in an interesting analogy, but does it survive closer inspection?