The Metaphysics of Front-End Engineering (0)

Metaphysics... what I mean is, I want to talk about things beyond technology.
This post will be revised often.

Why I'm writing this

Front-end engineering is a peculiar profession. To borrow an elegant phrase, the front-end engineer is both painter and hacker. Along the product chain, front-end engineers sit between the server side and the designers, a bridge between engineering and design.

This means front-end engineers have to care not only about engineering but also about product design and user experience on the other end. Yet from what I see around me, many front-end engineers have built up far more on the engineering side than on the other.

This series introduces some of the more "humanistic" knowledge in front-end engineering, and it tries to cover only the parts where the humanistic can be explained with reason.

Explaining the humanistic with reason?

Take the relationship between design and psychology as an example:

Biology is grounded in chemistry, and chemistry is grounded in physics

In the natural sciences, one idea has had a far-reaching influence: reductionism. The sentence above roughly means that all biological phenomena can ultimately be traced back to the various chemical phenomena inside organisms, and all chemical phenomena can be traced back to the combinations and motions of various particles.
Reductionism is highly contested, but judging by the history of the natural sciences, it has been the most effective intelligible approach to research, producing a great many results through reductive analysis, and so it has been borrowed by other social disciplines (psychology, economics).
Modern psychology is barely a hundred years old. From the 1960s and 70s on, advances in medical technology and experimental methods, such as the arrival of EEG (electroencephalography) and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), drove rapid progress in fields like cognitive psychology and neuropsychology, and also gave psychology a foundation that supports reductionism.

Psychology is grounded in biology

This sentence may be more contested, but following the reductionist line of thinking, at least some phenomena can be pushed one step further down to the level of biology.

The psychological foundations of design

Carrying the analogy all the way down, some parts of design can also find more universal psychological grounding, for example the alignment, proximity, contrast, and so on proposed in many design principles. This gives design a "universal explanatory foundation," so that design no longer looks like merely the expression of a designer's personal taste. When there are disagreements over a design, you can find a more relaxed way to settle them (relaxed compared with validating through data such as A/B tests): let's reduce it one level down and see what that says.

The plan

Roughly: design psychology, then information media, then philosophy of technology.
My knowledge is limited. Discussion and criticism is welcome.