Regulatory artifacts: prescribing, constituting, steering

Generally, when thinking of artifacts, one imagines “technical artifacts”. Technical artifacts are those artifacts that perform a mere causal function. They aim to instrumentally help and support behaviour, not to change it. However, technical artifacts do not exhaust the set of artifacts. Alongside technical artifacts there are also artifacts that we can call “cognitive artifacts”. Cognitive artifacts are all those artifacts that operate upon information in order to improve human cognitive performances. Moreover, there is also a third kind of artifacts that we may call “regulatory artifacts”; that is, material artifacts devised and made to regulate behaviour. Think of a roundabout, a traffic light or a speed bump. These artifacts do not make us stronger, faster, or more intelligent. They are placed on the road surface to regulate traffic. This article aims to investigate this third kind of artifacts and, especially, the functions that these artifacts perform.