RELATED TERMS: Alltäglichkeit; Dasein; De Certeau; Feminism and Materialism; Heidegger; Lefebvre; Lifeworld – Lebenswelt; Modernism; Sabi and Wabi-Sabi; Situationist International Use for: le quotidien “Ordinary life, [Barry Cryer] used to say, is badly written, so he infused it with jokes.” (Andrew Martin, 2023) “Design and the everyday are inextricably intertwined. Because it plays such aContinue reading “The Everyday and Design”
Author Archives: aparsons474
Fiction
RELATED TERMS: (Of) Grammatography NOVELS Pervert the masses. Less immoral in serial form than when published in hardback. Only historical novels ought to be allowed, because they teach history. The Three Musketeers for instance. Some novels are written with the tip of a scalpel (Madame Bovary, for example). Some are built on the point ofContinue reading “Fiction”
Libidinal Economy – Part 1
RELATED TERMS: Body; Design, Axiology and Value – Part 1; Disciplinary Societies and Societies of Control; Fordism and Post-Fordism; “It is said that the reader of an American magazine was so disturbed by an article on the subject of smoking and cancer that he decided to give up reading.” (Anecdote cited by Tim Harford, 2025)Continue reading “Libidinal Economy – Part 1”
Mimesis and Diegesis
RELATED TERMS: Diégèse and Diegesis Plato and Aristotle define literary and dramatic genres in terms of the form of enunciation. They distinguish between diegesis, reported speech which articulates the writer’s authorial voice, and mimesis, in which the writer speaks, as if directly, through the characters. This sense of diegesis differs from that developed by EtienneContinue reading “Mimesis and Diegesis”
Narrative environments – Celia Pearce
RELATED TERMS: Artifactuality and Actuvirtuality; Design of Narrative Environments; Narrative Environments The following entry brings to attention a number of key themes for the design of narrative environments. They include: storytelling; social imaginaries; immersion; spatial narrative; experience design; illusion of authenticity; agency; identity; community; persistent community; participation; to live; to visit; guest; citizen; stranger; polity;Continue reading “Narrative environments – Celia Pearce”
Whiteness Studies
RELATED TERMS: Black Studies; Intersectionality; Native Studies Use for: Critical Whiteness Studies Kenan Malik (2022) discusses the work of American historian Tyler Stovall, particularly his final book, White Freedom, a book, Malik says, that while demonstrating the significance of his work also exhibits the confusions that plague contemporary thinking about race. For Stovall, liberty andContinue reading “Whiteness Studies”
Ethnomethodology
RELATED TERMS: Actor-Network Theory; Anthropology; Ethnography; Method and methodology; Sociology; Participants Ethnomethodology is an approach within sociology initiated by Harold Garfinkel (1984, 1967). It seeks to uncover the methods and social competence that people, as members of social groups, employ in constructing their sense of social reality. Ethnomethodology is mentioned by Bruno Latour (2005, fn.Continue reading “Ethnomethodology”
Agency
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”
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”
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