RELATED TERMS: Place, Space, Placiality, Spatiality In philosophy, the term khôra or chora is associated with four main authors: Plato, Heidegger, Derrida and Kristeva. In the context of developing an understanding of design as practice, discipline and material public discourse, that is, as professional, academic and socio-cultural practice at once, khôra or chora is takenContinue reading “Khora or Chora”
Author Archives: aparsons474
Complementarity
RELATED TERMS: Design and General Economic Anti-Epistemology; Uncertainty Karen Barad (2007: 19-20), through a discussion of Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, analyses the disagreement between Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr concerning the former’s uncertainty principle. She summarises the difference between their views in the following way. For Bohr, what is at stake is that particles doContinue reading “Complementarity”
Artifactuality and Actuvirtuality
RELATED TERMS: Design and Philosophy Artifactuality As Victor Margolin (2006: 107) comments, design is the conception and planning of the artificial. The scope and boundaries of design are intimately entwined with our understanding of the limits of the artificial. As design continues to make incursions into realms that were once considered as belonging to nature,Continue reading “Artifactuality and Actuvirtuality”
Collage, Montage, Assemblage and Bricolage
RELATED TERMS: Narrative Architecture; Incompletion “Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s [novel] The Pledge (1958) … is about the inability of an ‘expert system’ (the police) to solve the ‘problem’, that is, a mysterious crime. Dürrenmatt’s work is all about the demise of rationality and the triumph of chaos. Acknowledging this tragic fact, my book [What Design Can’t Do]Continue reading “Collage, Montage, Assemblage and Bricolage”
Gesamtkunstwerk
RELATED TERMS: Bauhaus; An important reference point for the modern movement was the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the ‘total work of art’. This concept, though it plays a key role in the theory and practice of modernist avant-gardes, is notoriously difficult to define. In broad outline, it suggests both the blurring of boundaries between artContinue reading “Gesamtkunstwerk”
Bauhaus
RELATED TERMS: Hochschule für Gestaltung; Black Mountain College; Gesamtkunstwerk The Bauhaus, a revolutionary art and design school, opened in 1919 under the architect Walter Gropius (1883–1969). He remained director until 1928. In all, there were three directors of the Bauhaus, all of them architects. After Gropius, Hannes Meyer (1889–1954) held the directorship between 1928 and 1930Continue reading “Bauhaus”
Visual Arts and Visual Media
RELATED TERMS: Mode and medium; The proper goal of sculpture and of all the visual arts, it might have been held at one time in the past, is the depiction of physical beauty. However, this universalistic horizon, as well as the horizon of critics and philosophers of the Enlightenment, are rendered problematic by the opacityContinue reading “Visual Arts and Visual Media”
Utopia and Utopian Thinking
RELATED TERMS: Avant-garde movements; Modernism; Design practice and functionalism Sir Thomas More published his Utopia in 1516 . The word ‘utopia’ combines two Greek roots, ou- meaning ‘no’ and topos meaning ‘place’, hence literally utopia is a no-place, a non-existent place or nowhere. However, embedded within the word utopia is a pun. The near-identical Greek word eu-topos means a ‘good place’. In creatingContinue reading “Utopia and Utopian Thinking”
Urban Design
RELATED TERMS: Architecture; Closely related to urban planning, urban design is an aspect of urban or suburban planning that focuses on creating a desirable environment in which to live, work and play. Design analysis includes the relationship between buildings, streets, land use, open space, circulation, height, natural features and human activity. A well designed urbanContinue reading “Urban Design”
Unreliable Narrator
RELATED TERMS: “We constantly re-write our own biographies and continually give matters new meanings. To rewrite history in this sense – indeed, in an Orwellian sense – is not at all inhuman. On the contrary, it is very human.” Milan Kundera, cited in McEwan, I. (1984) An Interview with Milan Kundera. Granta, 11, 34-35. SomeContinue reading “Unreliable Narrator”
Incomplete ... 