Author Archives: aparsons474

RELATED TERMS: Landscape Design; Structuralism; Theoretical practice; Narrative environment design; Architecture Designed artefacts, while being environmental and situational, are not, in any simple or straightforward sense, architecture nor landscape. Nor, furthermore, are they sculpture. Yet they bear some relation to all of these forms of spatial practice: architectural design, landscape design and sculpture. Such fieldsContinue reading “Sculpture”

RELATED TERMS: Paradigm; Method and Methodology; Research Methodologies The term science has come to refer to a set of practices whereby knowledge is obtained through observation and experiment, critically tested and brought under general principles. Scientific method in the natural or physical sciences is a three-step process: careful observation of some aspect of nature; speculationContinue reading “Science”

RELATED TERMS: Avant-garde movements; Multimodal research; Method and methodology Two major research philosophies or methodologies have been identified in the Western tradition of science: positivist or scientific, which is quantitative in character; and interpretivist or anti-positivist, which is qualitative in character. In the context of design practices, a third, performative, paradigm is relevant, which isContinue reading “Research Methodologies”

RELATED TERMS: Philosophy; Performative To represent, or re-present, to bring to presence and/or to indicate prior presence or existence, is the activity from which representations arise. In that sense, representation is similar to the notion of ‘sign’, as that which stands for something for someone in some respect. Representation names both a field of establishedContinue reading “Representation”

RELATED TERMS: Socially engaged art A relational aesthetics views artworks as social interstices. For Bourriaud (2002), what is important is, “The possibility of a relational art (an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space) …” BourriaudContinue reading “Relational Aesthetics”

RELATED TERMS: Alienation; The Commodity; Historical materialism – Marxism In the context of developing an actantial or a performative approach to design practices, which emphasises process and dynamic relations over static fixity, as well as the dialogical constitution of the subject and the object neither of which is prior to the other, some Marxism-derived termsContinue reading “Reification”

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”