Roles ​

When we talk about complex activities, we also have to talk about the involvement of other people in these activities. But even without other people, one's own complex activities can be viewed from different perspectives. For this purpose, it will be useful to talk about roles.

Before, if we wanted to point out someone's role behavior, we could only say "all physical objects that are currently or potentially involved in the development".

We can continue to do so, but each time it will be long and inconvenient, and we also see that this way of defining these objects inevitably refers to their relationships with the system in which they belong (our project, in which someone is developing).

So, we can define a type "role," which will mean this, but also possess some interesting properties for us.

A role is a functional object, a part of the project (not an agent, as one might intuitively think). We can indicate where it is located in the system, so to speak, where the slot for any such physical object is located and what properties this slot has.

The fact that you have familiar roles means that some parts of you have a "compatible form" with what is expected of you by different systems.

Also, there is always a system of "an agent striving to adapt to the entire set of environments in which it exists," and its parts play many roles in this system (but there are likely roles that other agents play with their parts).

To talk about the parts of an agent, we refer to them as "personality traits," and if we want to take a functional/role perspective here, we will consider the agent (with its functioning) as a system, and its parts will still play roles within the personality of that agent. There may even be confusion as to the roles the agent plays for itself and for external systems, because as a rule, the agent cannot completely stop playing roles for itself.

Thus, role consideration for us is conducted according to the same rules on any scale (it turns out to be scaleless).

You may think that the roles you play exist within you, but we suggest switching from this everyday intuitive understanding to another one, in which roles are parts of the systems in which they perform specific functions.

In conclusion, we break down the common understanding of "me containing many roles" into systems with many functional parts, including roles.

Look at the examples:

In Russia, there is a President. This is a role that can be played by different people. The role of "President of Russia" is a functional part of Russia, not of the specific person currently playing it, although they currently coincide in space and time. When a person stops playing the role, the role itself remains part of the system of state management in Russia and does not disappear with them.

Or, for example, in a *family there is a husband. Currently, the role of husband in this family can be played by one person, and then by another. The husband is a role in the family, not a part of a specific person. As soon as Peter leaves the family, he ceases to be a husband.

In Vasya's internal system, for example, there is a role of "resource controller," and he refuses some tasks/opportunities/activities if Vasya is already busy. This role may initially look like a work role, and you may wonder why he is not behaving according to his usual role—for example, at work Vasya has a normal workload; but the "resource controller" works in the system of "the entire agent Vasya."

In your house, there is a table (for example, in the sense of "a stand for plates while you eat"). This is a function that can be performed by different items - something you bought in the store and it was called a table, and something you bought in the store, but it was called a chair, or even something you didn't buy in the store but brought from the forest, like a flat stone.

An agent has properties that allow them to play a role - necessary competencies/skills, intention to take on this role in the project, and something else. Similarly, an object has properties that allow it to perform a function - for something to be a table, it must have a flat enough surface to place things on it.

Functional considerations of things are the same as role considerations of people. It is more common to talk about roles for animate entities, but in general, the idea is the same, it is a functional consideration of agents - what is their purpose in the system they are embedded in.

In fact, when we consider the functional breakdown of a system, we can always say about each part, "any thing that does X in relation to the supra-system" and/or "any thing that does X in relation to a specific thing."

Regarding roles, we will say the following:

• Concern: objects of interest, areas of interest, objects of interest. These are the objects that attract attention and stand out from the background naturally for a certain role. You did such consideration in the first homework. If I go to the kitchen to cook borsch (playing the role of a chef at that moment), the activity (role) interest in the "cooking borsch" project can be elicited by: the workplace, ingredients, utensils, etc. Non-activity, non-role (for this role) interest for me would be, for example, relationships between people in the kitchen, the kitchen wall color, a bird outside the window. It is useful to highlight important characteristics - I will be interested in the freshness of the products, the cleanliness and suitability of the workplace, and so on.
• Preference: what this role wants to happen with these characteristics of the objects. If you have identified an object of interest based on a role but cannot articulate preferences for it, then that object is not part of the interests of that role (and perhaps you just want that object to exist). The chef wants the workplace to be as convenient as possible, ingredients to be fresh, and dishes to be clean and in sufficient quantities.

For each object singled out from the background in the previous step, I declare what I want to happen with them, or in what state I want them to be. Also, I can declare a preference that applies to several objects of interest, or to some complex interactions between them. You can imagine interest as a variable, and preference as the value of the variable.