Audience

RELATED TERMS: Film making; Graphic Design; Music; Narrative environment design; Performance; Theatre; Human Actantiality; Realism; Reception theory and reader-response criticism; Epic theatre – Brecht Audience comes from the latin audire meaning to hear. Nonetheless, it is used in film, theatre and performance to describe what might more naturally be called the spectators or viewers, as it isContinue reading “Audience”

Architecture

RELATED TERMS: Distribution of the Sensible – Ranciere; Interaction Design; Narratology; Sculpture; Urban design; “the sense of architectural space is … related to the political distribution of the sensible and the way it frames reality through fiction.” (Grabar, 2021: 279) Rowan Moore (2014) argues that it is a terrible misconception to think that architecture isContinue reading “Architecture”

Things

RELATED TERMS: Collecting; Defamiliarisation; Events; Material Culture; New Materialism; Representation; Tangled Hierarchy and Strange Loop “the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.” (Brown, 2001: 4) “Thing theory is at its best … when it focuses on this sense of failure, or partial failure, to name or to classify. Thing theoryContinue reading “Things”

New Materialism

RELATED TERMS: Affordances; Object-Oriented Ontology; Speculative Realism; Like new materialism, design practice is interested in, “understanding things as active agents rather than passive instruments or backdrops for human activity” (Barnett and Boyle, 2016). Certain aspects of new materialist thinking, which Sara Ahmed has called white feminist materialism (Hickey-Moody, 2015: 169), may be of value inContinue reading “New Materialism”

Apparatus – Dispositif

RELATED TERMS: Actor-Network Theory; Collage, Montage, Assemblage and Bricolage; Biopolitics and Biopower; Cinema and Film Theory; Disciplinary Societies and Societies of Control; Distribution of the Sensible; Genealogy – Nietzsche; Practice ” ‘échafaudage‘ is the term Axelos suggests best translates the Heideggerian notion of das Ge-stell, usually translated as ‘en-framing,’ or, in French, as arraissonment orContinue reading “Apparatus – Dispositif”

Anthropology

RELATED TERMS: Sociology; Ethnomethodology; Agency; Actor Network Theory; Cyborg Anthropology Anthropological research may provide some methodological guidance in the understanding of design practices as complex socio-cultural, techno-economic practices. For example, Anusas and Harkness (2014) suggest that, “in both anthropology and design … there is and perhaps always should be a concern with that other whichContinue reading “Anthropology”

Anthropocene – Capitalocene – Chthulucene; Plantationocene

RELATED TERMS: Anthropo-Scenes; Human Ecosystem; Postanthropocentrism; Posthuman; Posthumanism; Symbiocene; World; World-as-Milieu; World-Building “the Earth … is leaving the relatively stable and benign state that is known as the Holocene, the geological period of the last 11,700 or so years which is now retrospectively perceived as a rather unique period, the rare ‘long summer’ (Fagan 2004,Continue reading “Anthropocene – Capitalocene – Chthulucene; Plantationocene”

Anthropo-Scenes

RELATED TERMS; Anthropocene – Capitalocene – Chthulucene; Platationocene; Cultural geography; Postanthropocentrism; Posthuman; Posthumanism; One strand of narrative environments may be defined as Anthropo-Scenes: they concern what the world is like both now, what it might be like in times to come and what life, including human life, in those present and future worlds is likeContinue reading “Anthropo-Scenes”

Antagonist

RELATED TERMS: Actant; Actantial Model – Greimas; Agon; Narratology; Protagonist The term antagonist is derived from the Greek word antagonistes, meaning opponent, competitor or rival. The antagonist may be a character, group of characters, or an institution representing the difficulties and obstacles against which the protagonist must struggle, preventing the protagonist from achieving his/her/its/their quest, goal,Continue reading “Antagonist”