Author Archives: aparsons474

RELATED TERMS: Praxis; Practice Design practices may be considered a form of reflexive practice, employing both reflexivity and reflection. For Mary Holmes (2010), reflexivity refers to the practices of altering one’s life as a response to knowledge about one’s circumstances. In the context of education, Kaya Prpic (2005) defines reflexive practice as reflective inquiry thatContinue reading “Reflexivity and Reflection”

RELATED TERMS: Audience; Filmmaking; Narratology The role of the reader is crucial for reception theory and reader-response criticism. Reception theory has had its greatest impact in Germany while reader-response criticism is associated mainly with American criticism. There is some continuity between the two. This is particularly the case with the work of Wolfgang Iser, whoContinue reading “Reception Theory and Reader-Response Criticism”

RELATED TERMS: Audience; Posthumanism; Humanism; Actant; Defamiliarisation, Ostranenie or making strange; Dau Project “The essence of realism … is the distance taken with regard to stories, to their temporal schemes and their sequences of causes and effects. Realism opposes situations that endure to stories that link together and pass from one to the next.” (Ranciere,Continue reading “Realism”

RELATED TERMS: Biopolitics and Biopower According to Ekin Erkan (2019: 218), while biopower may sufficiently explain the kinds of neuroses troubling citizens in the mid-to-late 20th century, psychopower, in contrast, is globalized and diffracted. As a system, it encompasses the organization of the capture of attention made possible by the psycho-technologies developed gradually through radio inContinue reading “Psychopower”

RELATED TERMS: Defamiliarisation; Derive; Detournement; Situationist International; Methodology and method; Alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt) In the practice of the Situationist International, psychogeography is defined as the study of the specific effects of the geographical (and topographical) environment, whether consciously organised or not, on people’s emotions and behaviour. Debord and his Situationist International colleagues proposed a setContinue reading “Psychogeography”

RELATED TERMS: Actantial model – Greimas; Agon; Antagonist; Epic theatre – Brecht; (The) Heroic; Narratology; New Materialism; Theatre The protagonist may sometimes be referred to as the main character, the focal character or the hero. In one sense, it is the actantiality around which the unfolding of the narrative unfolds: its movements and actions givingContinue reading “Protagonist”

RELATED TERMS: The terms product design and industrial design are often used interchangeably. Industrial designers, emerging during the Industrial Revolution beginning the mid-1700s, sought to generate new ideas within an industry. At a later time, product designers shifted the emphasis within industrial design away from how to make a product towards including questions about whyContinue reading “Product Design and Industrial Design”

RELATED TERMS: Dasein; Phenomenology; Heidegger Some design discourses have made use of the terms ‘present-at-hand’ and ‘ready-to-hand’, derived from Martin Heidegger, to discuss artefacts, entities, interactions and systems such as, for example, in human computer interaction (HCI), interaction design, game design and systems design (Ferris, 2003; Dourish, 1999; Dourish, 2001; Martin, 2012; Karlstrom, 2007; Tanenbaum,Continue reading “Present-at-Hand (Vorhanden) and Ready-to-Hand (Zuhanden)”

RELATED TERMS: Poeisis; Reflexivity and Reflection The term praxis is one of Aristotle’s three main categories action, alongside poiesis and theoria. Praxis is taken to mean doing or acting, rather than making (poiesis) or thinking (theoria), although ‘thinking’ here is restricted to thinking about ‘universals’. Each form of action is associated with a characteristic form of knowing: theoria with epistemeContinue reading “Praxis”

RELATED TERMS: Apparatus – Dispositif; Design Practice and Functionalism; Ontological Turn; Reflexivity and Reflection; Theoretical Practice; The ‘practice’ approach to social phenomena is very important for design, as it underlies the conceptualisation of designs as forms of spatio-temporal (social) practice. The notion of practice is a way of understanding the co-implication and entanglement of environments,Continue reading “Practice”