RELATED TERMS: Actantiality; Disciplinary Societies and Societies of Control; Remembering; Introduction: Design practices, political-economic and socio-cultural conditions Design practices are contextualised by the political-economic and the socio-cultural circumstances in which they are invented and deployed as specific responses that are considered appropriate to those circumstances. For example, design practices may take up different roles in aContinue reading “Fordism and Post-Fordism”
Author Archives: aparsons474
User-Centred and User-Driven Design
RELATED TERMS: Co-Design; Design Practice and Functionalism; Lack, Loss and User-Centred Design Practices Koskinen and Thomson (2012: 79) differentiate between user-centred design and user-driven design. User-centred design means that design innovation is focused on users’ needs and the delivery of new benefits to them in their use of products, services, environments, systems, and so on.Continue reading “User-Centred and User-Driven Design”
Feminism and Materialism
RELATED TERMS: Critical thinking; Cultural Studies; Design of Narrative Environments; The Everyday and Design; Feminist Avant-Garde Art Practices; Historical Materialism – Marxism; Methodology and Method; New Materialism; Phenomenology; Postmodernism Spatial practices, and not only in Western countries, are radically gendered. Feminist analyses, particularly those that emphasise the performative character of gender ‘identity’ as processes ofContinue reading “Feminism and Materialism”
Ontological Turn
RELATED TERMS: New Materialism; Ontological Designing; Ontology; Performance and Performativity; Practice; According to Andrew Pickering (2017), citing Woolgar and Lezaun (2013, 2015) and Kelly (2014), the social-constructivist consensus has broken down in the early 21st century. In response, both anthropology and science and technology studies have taken an ontological turn. This ontological turn in scienceContinue reading “Ontological Turn”
Hermeneutics
RELATED TERMS: “Three masters, seemingly mutually exclusive, dominate the school of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. It is easier to show their common opposition to a phenomenology of the sacred, understood as a propaedeutic to the ‘revelation’ of meaning, than their interrelationship within a single method of demystification.” Ricoeur, 1970: 32) By way of generalContinue reading “Hermeneutics”
Deconstruction – Derrida
RELATED TERMS: Heidegger; “Deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all; it does not settle for methodical procedures, it opens up a passageway, it marches ahead and marks a trail; its writing is not only performative, it produces rules — other conventions — for new performativities and never installs itself in the theoretical assuranceContinue reading “Deconstruction – Derrida”
Povinelli
RELATED TERMS: Critical Thinking; Deconstruction – Derrida; Entanglement; Hermeneutics; New Materialism; Ontological Turn; Posthumanism Since the beginning of the 21st century, Elizabeth Povinelli argues, critical theoretical discourses have been marked by a particular style and approach. They have shifted, she suggests, from hermeneutic and deconstructive methods of reading towards a set of methods of knowledgeContinue reading “Povinelli”
Literary Theory
RELATED TERMS: Narratology; Reception theory and reader response criticism; Interaction Design Literary theory is the study and analysis of literature in general. Narratology can be considered a branch of literary theory. More recent literary theory tends to move away from earlier critical approaches, for example, Russian Formalism, New Criticism and French structuralist narratology of theContinue reading “Literary Theory”
Ergodic
RELATED TERMS: Aleatory The term ‘ergodic’ might be said to occupy a similar territory to that of aleatory. Bringing together two Greek roots, ergon meaning work and hodos meaning path, ergodic is a term borrowed from physics by Espen Aarseth (1997: 2) who uses it to suggest that a, “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverseContinue reading “Ergodic”
Critical Race Theory
RELATED TERMS: Afrofuturism; Afro-Pessimism; Black Studies; Intersectionality Critical race theory, as a movement, is a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism and power. While traditional civil rights discourse stresses incrementalism and gradual progress, by contrast critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order,Continue reading “Critical Race Theory”
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