“Techeology: a conflation of technology and ideology. And I use it where it seems that ideology, rather than engineering or identified requirements, is driving a technical discussion.”

I can’t tell but, by my reading of his post, the term seems to have slightly negative connotations (or, perhaps, it is just tainted by ideology’s negative connotations). It seems to me that “identified” is used in contrast to “ideology” which makes ideology seem completely removed from the practicality of a situation — completely is key because ideology is to some extent removed from any particular situation. Still, I’d suggest ideological perspectives are significant to software development (that they can be identified and, often, can be requirements (though more often than not they are found as a set of assumptions rather than as cleaned defined requirements)).

I think what “techeology” is getting at is that when people stop listening and start arguing purely from their own set of assumptions the conversation tends to go downhill quickly (and with this I agree — I’ve made this mistake myself). Perhaps, I am responding in part based on the belief that sometimes people think that technical discussions don’t include anything but the uncovering of an objective truth — e.g., which is the best technology to use given the set of [cough, known] requirements — that technology is a science. I guess I definitely (how’s that for wavering) “come down” on the side of technology as art (if I have to come down anywhere). See below.

The next coinage is from Eric Morgan. This one I’ve been mulling over many years now, but thought I should add it here since it doesn’t seem wholly unrelated to the first…

“Arscience: a concantination [sic] of ‘art’ and ’science’ … describes activities that are both artistic and scientific.”

Over the years Eric has written a little on art, science, and craft. I’m not sure if he has it up though. I know there was some available when he was at NCSU. I don’t think ‘art’ has to be just the traditional arts (painting, music, etc). The art of rhetoric often plays a part in technical discussions (despite the purely ‘objective’ stance that one is supposed to take when having these sorts of conversations — this is itself, in my opinion, a rhetorical stance). This is also related, I think, to the recent weblog post from Thom Hickey or Lorcan Dempsey (I don’t remember which) about software as art (that is not the post but a link from the post).

Anyway, I’m looking forward to the SVGOpen conference starting tomorrow. Hopefully there will be some interesting things to relate back. I’m, in particular, looking forward to the Renesis presentations. SVG seems to be gaining a little traction (and in more than just the mobile phone market — where it seems to be going quite strong). It will be good to see what the leaders in the field are doing (and whether we at the library should be trying to do something with it ourselves).