RELATED TERMS: Actantiality; Actor-Network Theory; Post-Humanism; De-centring the subject, situating the subject and distributing agency across a network From the perspective of design practice, the interest in ‘agency’ lies in how it may be conceived so that the action of designs over a prolonged period of time can be comprehended, once they have become partContinue reading “Agency”
Author Archives: aparsons474
Actor
RELATED TERMS: Actant; Actantiality; Actor-Network Theory; Actors are to be distinguished from actants. Actors are the concrete characters of a story or the dramatis personae of a play. The notion of actant, on the other hand, offers an inventory of classes of entities in a narrative, which are defined by their relations to one another. Thus, A.Continue reading “Actor”
Symbiocene
RELATED TERMS: Anthropocene – Capitalocene – Chthulucene; Plantationocene Glenn Albrecht (2021) argues that we must rapidly exit the Anthropocene, an era marked by its non-sustainability, its perverse resilience, its authoritarianism and its corrupt and destructive political economy. There can be no ‘good’ Anthropocene, he insists. To break with the Anthropocene, Albrecht suggests that a new foundation,Continue reading “Symbiocene”
Narrative Environments – Environmental Psychology in Architecture
RELATED TERMS: Design of Narrative Environments; Narrative Environments Jan Golembiewski is an architect and neuroscientist working at Psychological Design, an architecture practice based in Sydney, Australia. His research investigates the psychodynamic significance of environmental action. He suggests that design, at all scales, from cities to buildings to interiors, down to the objects in them, prompt, motivateContinue reading “Narrative Environments – Environmental Psychology in Architecture”
Lack, Loss and User-Centred Design Practices
RELATED TERMS: Actantiality; User; User-Centred and User-Driven Design Practices What is at stake in this post is whether it is valuable to explore a re-articulation of user-centred design and the notion of affordance through certain concepts borrowed from psychoanalysis. This may enable a conception of how designs intervene in the psycho-drama of the subject inContinue reading “Lack, Loss and User-Centred Design Practices”
User
RELATED TERMS: Actant; Actantiality; Lack, Loss and User-Centred Design Practices; Participant; Protagonist; In the understanding of design action and interaction being developed here, the term ‘user’ is situated in the context of the theory of actantiality. Actantiality is a theory of the situated and situational condition of any action. Actions are provisional: conditioned and conditional.Continue reading “User”
Afro-Pessimism
RELATED TERMS: Afrofuturism; Black Studies; Critical Race Theory; Intersectionality; Identity Politics; David Marriott (2021: viii) proposes that the work of Afro-pessimism has an extreme, audacious place in the history of Black Studies. The value for Marriott is that Afro-pessimism allowed him to rediscover what is for him the most exacting question: what is blackness? Furthermore,Continue reading “Afro-Pessimism”
Intersectionality
RELATED TERMS: Afrofuturism; Afro-Pessimism; Critical Race Theory; Identity Politics; Whiteness Studies Beginning in the 1970s and continuing through the 1980s, critical legal scholars, such as Richard Delgado, Patricia Williams, Mari Matsuda and Alan Freeman, began publishing work that developed the discourse around race, power and law. Together, they advanced the idea that the law, ratherContinue reading “Intersectionality”
Cyborg Anthropology
RELATED TERMS: Anthropology; Actor-Network Theory; Ethnomethodology; Avatar A cyborg anthropologist looks at how humans and non human objects interact with each other, and how that changes culture. Another aspect of cyborg anthropology concerns how the self can be extended, doubled or multiplied, online, through identification with an avatar. This, in turn, opens to the studyContinue reading “Cyborg Anthropology”
Avatar
RELATED TERMS: The word avatar has a number of definitions, for example, it may mean the incarnation of a Hindu deity, especially Vishnu, in human or animal form; an incarnate divine teacher; an embodiment or manifestation, as of a quality or concept; a temporary manifestation or aspect of a continuing entity; or an icon, graphicContinue reading “Avatar”
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