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”
Author Archives: aparsons474
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”
Design: Dramatisation and Narrativisation
RELATED TERMS: Theatre; Epic Theatre; Tragic Theatre – Aristotle; Theatre of Cruelty “The tension between the endless desire that is the source of human motivations and the hopeless demands that fail to appease it is the very heart of the human tragedy, according to Lacan.” Mansfield, 2000: 46) In as far as designs intervene inContinue reading “Design: Dramatisation and Narrativisation”
Afrofuturism
RELATED TERMS: Afro-Pessimism; Black Studies; Critical Race Theory; Intersectionality; Identity Politics Afrofuturism has been defined as a cultural aesthetic that combines science-fiction, history and fantasy. It aims to connect those from the black diaspora with their forgotten African ancestry (Tate, No Date). ‘The Comet,’ a short story by W. E. B. DuBois that represents DuBois’ forayContinue reading “Afrofuturism”
Design: Incomplete Conjectures
RELATED TERMS: Finnegans Wake (and Design); Methodology and Method First … Design as a professional, social practice has historically been divided according to its material outputs, its concrete products, using categories that have become conventional. For example, jewellery design produces items of jewellery, fashion design produces items of clothing and architectural design produces buildings andContinue reading “Design: Incomplete Conjectures”
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