RELATED TERMS: A narrative of the ‘past’ is taking shape in the ‘present’ in contrast to which other narratives of the ‘future’, in the form of ‘bets’, are developing. The historical or hindsight narrative suggests that the 30 years from the 1990s to the early 2020s constituted a ‘golden’ age, a period of steady growthContinue reading “Investing, Narration, Theorisation [Snippets 2]”
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Politics, Reality, Narrativity [Snippets 1]
RELATED TERMS: Unending Discourse The entries in this Snippets series are cut from larger texts. Although not explicitly focused on design practices, they operate as discourse-collage elements that aim to provoke broader discussions about the potential ethico-political value of what might otherwise be taken solely as the aesthetic value of design practices, particularly those thatContinue reading “Politics, Reality, Narrativity [Snippets 1]”
Narrative Environments
RELATED TERMS: Design of Narrative Environments; Narrative Environments – Celia Pearce; Narrative Environments – Environmental Psychology in Architecture A narrative environment is a many-dimensional, orientational interface. In one direction, it makes the world comprehensible and navigable. In another direction, it opens up to the challenges that the world presents or harbours. It may explain, butContinue reading “Narrative Environments”
Alltäglichkeit
RELATED TERMS: The Everyday and Design; Alienation Alltäglichkeit – Lefebvre, Lukács, Heidegger Alltäglichkeit is a German word meaning everydayness. Michel Trebitsch (2014: 13) highlights a curious affinity between Georg Lukács and Henri Lefebvre, by way of Heidegger, concerning the use of that term. The issue for design practices, from the perspective of Incomplete …, concerns aContinue reading “Alltäglichkeit”
User-Centred and User-Driven Design
RELATED TERMS: Co-Design; Design Practice and Functionalism; Lack, Loss and User-Centred Design Practices Koskinen and Thomson (2012: 79) differentiate between user-centred design and user-driven design. User-centred design means that design innovation is focused on users’ needs and the delivery of new benefits to them in their use of products, services, environments, systems, and so on.Continue reading “User-Centred and User-Driven Design”
Feminism and Materialism
RELATED TERMS: Critical thinking; Cultural Studies; Design of Narrative Environments; The Everyday and Design; Feminist Avant-Garde Art Practices; Historical Materialism – Marxism; Methodology and Method; New Materialism; Phenomenology; Postmodernism Spatial practices, and not only in Western countries, are radically gendered. Feminist analyses, particularly those that emphasise the performative character of gender ‘identity’ as processes ofContinue reading “Feminism and Materialism”
Ontological Turn
RELATED TERMS: New Materialism; Ontological Designing; Ontology; Performance and Performativity; Practice; According to Andrew Pickering (2017), citing Woolgar and Lezaun (2013, 2015) and Kelly (2014), the social-constructivist consensus has broken down in the early 21st century. In response, both anthropology and science and technology studies have taken an ontological turn. This ontological turn in scienceContinue reading “Ontological Turn”
Hermeneutics
RELATED TERMS: “Three masters, seemingly mutually exclusive, dominate the school of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. It is easier to show their common opposition to a phenomenology of the sacred, understood as a propaedeutic to the ‘revelation’ of meaning, than their interrelationship within a single method of demystification.” Ricoeur, 1970: 32) By way of generalContinue reading “Hermeneutics”
Literary Theory
RELATED TERMS: Narratology; Reception theory and reader response criticism; Interaction Design Literary theory is the study and analysis of literature in general. Narratology can be considered a branch of literary theory. More recent literary theory tends to move away from earlier critical approaches, for example, Russian Formalism, New Criticism and French structuralist narratology of theContinue reading “Literary Theory”
Ergodic
RELATED TERMS: Aleatory The term ‘ergodic’ might be said to occupy a similar territory to that of aleatory. Bringing together two Greek roots, ergon meaning work and hodos meaning path, ergodic is a term borrowed from physics by Espen Aarseth (1997: 2) who uses it to suggest that a, “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverseContinue reading “Ergodic”
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