Language, Frames, and Domain Understanding
A companion series to Planning and Design that investigates how linguistic structure - verb semantics, case grammar, frame semantics, and the morphosyntactic categories that languages grammaticalise - shapes how both human designers and computational agents represent the abstract entities that services are.
- 1
Beyond 'Good Services Are Verbs': Theoretical Foundations and Critical Limitations
July 5, 2025
Linguistic structure shapes the way both human designers and computational agents understand and describe the abstract entities that services are. The connection to the Planning and Design series'...
- 2
When Nouns Surface as Verbs: Denominal Conversion and Service Naming
July 8, 2025
The previous post argued that the "good services are verbs" heuristic, while valuable as a corrective to bureaucratic naming, obscures as much as it reveals. The noun/verb distinction in service...
- 3
Case Grammar and Service Semantics: Toward a Richer Vocabulary for Action
July 12, 2025
In the previous post, I argued that the "good services are verbs" heuristic, while valuable, is incomplete. Verbs alone cannot capture the material infrastructure, institutional rules, practice...
- 4
Three Frames: Fillmore, Goffman, and Dorst on Structure and Meaning
July 19, 2025
The word "frame" appears across multiple intellectual traditions, each using it to describe how structure shapes meaning and possibility. In the domain engineering vocabulary, frames are domain...
- 5
Situational Mapping for Service Design: From Frame Analysis to Design Method
July 26, 2025
The previous post traced connections between three uses of "frame" - Fillmore's linguistic frames, Goffman's situational frames, and Dorst's design frames - and concluded by noting that framing as a...