RELATED TERMS: Collage, Montage, Assemblage and Bricolage; Sabi and Wabi-Sabi USE FOR: Incompleteness “Abstraction and perfection transport us into the world of ideas, whereas matter, weathering and decay strengthen the experience of time, causality and reality.” (Pallasmaa, 2000: 79) As noted in the About page, the approach to design taken in this website is guided byContinue reading “Incompletion”
Author Archives: aparsons474
Hypomnesis, Hypermnesis and Anamnesis
RELATED TERMS: Remembering: Mnemotechne, Mnemonics and Memory; [Of] Grammatography; Exosomatisation Design practices and designed artefacts may be understood in the context of the discussion of hypomnesis, the weakening of memory, and hypermnesis, the strengthening of memory or the making of an unusually poignant and accurate memory of the past. In Platonic language the relation betweenContinue reading “Hypomnesis, Hypermnesis and Anamnesis”
Black Mountain College
RELATED TERMS: Bauhaus; Hochschule fur Gestaltung Black Mountain College was an experimental liberal arts college in Black Mountain, near Asheville, North Carolina. It was founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice and Theodore Dreier and other former faculty members of Rollins College in Florida. It was “the site of a crucial transatlantic dialogue between EuropeanContinue reading “Black Mountain College”
Khora or Chora
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”
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”
Incomplete ... 