RELATED TERMS: Actant; Agonism and Avant-Gardism; Antagonist; Dissensus – Ranciere; Dramatic conflict; Focalisation; Human Actantiality; Narratology; Protagonist The word agon and its cognate terms, agonism, agonist, antagonist and protagonist are of great value in developing and understanding the dynamics of designed entities, particularly when considered in conjunction with a notion of dramatic conflict. Agon is aContinue reading “Agon”
Author Archives: aparsons474
World
RELATED TERMS: Dau Project; Diegese and Diegesis; Lifeworld – Lebenswelt – Umwelt; Storyworld; Worldlessness #1; Worldlessness #2: Worldlessness and Design; Worldlessness #3: Saving the world / at the end of / the world / is not enough ” ‘world’, that all-encompassing but all-too-nebulous category” (Ramachandran, 2015: 7) “these three types of world — the world,Continue reading “World”
Diégèse and Diegesis
RELATED TERMS: Diegesis; Storyworld; Narrative environment design Rather than the process of story-telling, that is, diegesis contrasted with mimesis in Greek philosophy and poetics, the term ‘The diegesis’, i.e. as the English translation of Gerard Genette’s term diégèse, is understood, here, as the world of the story in its entirety. This includes unseen or not presented parts of it, theContinue reading “Diégèse and Diegesis”
Heterarchy
RELATED TERMS: Actantiality; Affordances; Tangled Hierarchy and Strange Loop; Within the understanding that socio-genesis and techno-genesis are inherently interwoven, each as an original supplement of the other, designs can be said to form strange loops: tangled hierarchies that articulate a heterarchy of values. In part, they do so through the deictic framings and cross-referencing which theyContinue reading “Heterarchy”
Tangled Hierarchy and Strange Loop
RELATED TERMS: Deixis and Deictic Acts; Heterarchy; Metalepsis; Ontological Metalepsis; “A weird knowing. Weird, from the Old Norse, urth, meaning twisted, in a loop.”(Morton, 2017: 92) Douglas Hofstadter (1979: 18) argues that a strange loop occurs whenever, by moving upwards or downwards through the levels of a hierarchical system, you unexpectedly find yourself right back where you started.Continue reading “Tangled Hierarchy and Strange Loop”
Medium and Media
RELATED TERMS: Transmedia, Cross-Platform and Multimedia; Visual Arts and Visual Media; World-Building “To me, the facade of a building is like the first sentence of a novel – it sets the tone, the mood, and hints at what’s to come.” (Alexis Dornier quoted in Sharma, 2025) The choice of what media and materials to useContinue reading “Medium and Media”
World-Building
RELATED TERMS: Arendt; Design of Narrative Environments; Global Challenges; Heidegger; Lifeworld – Lebenswelt – Umwelt; Ontology; Sloterdijk; Terraforming; Theoretical Practice; World; World-as-Milieu Use for: World-forming, World-making, Worlding, World-shaping, Welt-Bilden “the last man will save from the rubble a stool or a tree stump on which to rest from his labours …” (Cliff and De Chabaneix,Continue reading “World-Building”
Affordances
RELATED TERMS: Actantiality; Disciplinary societies and Societies of control; Lifeworld – Lebenswelt – Umwelt; Methodology and Method; New Materialism; Phenomenology; The notion of affordance is important for design practices as it emphasises the active nature of perception; the importance of the moving body in perception; the co-constitution of the human, the environmental, the ecological and the economic;Continue reading “Affordances”
Actor-Network Theory
RELATED TERMS: Actant; Actantiality; Actantial model – Greimas; Human Actantiality; Agency; Theoretical practice; Ethnomethodology; Latour; Storyworld; Apparatus – Dispositif; Object-Oriented Ontology According to Jary and Jary (2000), actor-network theory combines post-structuralist insights with detailed empirical studies of scientific practices and technologies, organisations and social processes. It builds on the work of Bruno Latour, John Law and Michel Callon. TheContinue reading “Actor-Network Theory”
Actantiality
RELATED TERMS: Actant; Actantial model – Greimas; Actor; Actor-Network Theory; Affordances; Heterarchy; Human actantiality; Lack, Loss and User-Centred Design Practices “Why should you always have live things in stories? said the Professor. “Why don’t you have events, or circumstances?” “Oh, please invent a story like that!” cried Bruno. The Professor began fluently enough. “Once a coincidence was taking a walkContinue reading “Actantiality”
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