This book examines  how the philosophies of today’s cultural triumvirate—American, European and Chinese—are shaped and given nuance by the cross-fertilization of engineering and development.

This philosophical analysis of new technologies leads to a novel metaphysical framework in which understanding of reality shifts from materialistic to informational. In this world, all entities, natural or artificial, are analyzed as informational entities.

Useful Material is the first book-length study in the philosophy of technical artefacts and their technical functions. It presents an action-theoretical account of using and designing that connects the material side of technical artefacts with the aims of everyday users and the tasks of engineers when designing for those everyday users. The functions of technical artefact play a key role in understanding this connection. The book’s centrepiece is an account of those functions, called the ICE theory. Wybo Houkes and Pieter Vermaas have developed this account in close contact with the engineering literature on designing and the literature on functions in the philosophy of biology and philosophy of mind. As such the book is a telling example of the successful Dutch school of philosophy of technology, aimed at understanding engineering and technology on their own merits. The reader will be presented with a broad and detailed understanding of technical artefacts and their functions, which is sensitive to the dynamic and socially structured practices of using and designing. This understanding shows how our technology-saturated everyday life can be subjected to rigorous philosophical analysis, and how artefacts and technical functions provide an area of inquiry that is equally fascinating as, but genuinely different from, biological items and their functions.

Technologies have altered our lives, opinions and attitudes dramatically. Many of these changes are desirable, but in the past people have also suffered many unexpected, undesirable impacts. This book explores how engineers, policy makers and users can take responsibility for the influence of upcoming technologies on our societies. It does so by exploring how technologies do actually interact with our factual beliefs, options and moral ideas, and it provides some vital concepts and questions that support imagining future technological and social change.