occidental

“Following Heidegger, we prefer to talk about ‘breakdowns.’ By this we mean the interrupted moment of our habitual, standard, comfortable ‘being-in-the-world.’ Breakdowns serve an extremely important cognitive function, revealing to us the nature of our practices and equipment, making them ‘present-to-hand’ to us, perhaps for the first time. In this sense they function in a positive rather than a negative way”

— Winograd and Flores, 1986