Standards as artefacts

Abstract

While the life of all kinds of artefacts is one of the most frequented areas within the studies of material culture in today’s world, the same has not happened with standards, artefacts silently omnipresent in practically all fields of individual and social existence. In this article I propose to approach the standards from the philosophy of technology to identify their features and characterize them. This work is structured in three parts. In the first part I review the state of the art on the treatment of standards and standardization. I analyze how standards and standardization are usually understood in order to prepare the ground for introducing the idea that standards are artefacts that must be interpreted in their dual role as scaffolding and cement in today’s artificial world. In the second section I present a set of features to characterize them. The identification of these features is inspired by the general characterization of the artefacts defended by Broncano (2012), among others. Finally, I present some conclusions that point to the contribution that the philosophy of technology can make to standards and standardisation.

Keywords: Standards, standardisation, artefacts, philosophy of technology.