Category Archives: Uncategorized

RELATED TERMS: Narratology; Protagonist; Human Actantiality In The Hero with a thousand faces, Joseph Campbell examines many of the world’s heroic myths and stories. He ties the processes of transformation in those stories of the heroic journey to the quest to know the truest self, a task which, he avers, takes much time. Campbell shows how,Continue reading “(The) Heroic”

RELATED TERMS: Avant-garde movements; Environments – Art; Installation Art; Performance and Performativity Happenings, the forerunners of performance art, emerged from the theatrical elements of dada and surrealism. American artist Allan Kaprow first used the term in his 1959 work ‘18 Happenings in 6 Parts’ which took place over six days from 4–10 October 1959 atContinue reading “Happenings”

RELATED TERMS: Architecture; Ecology; Habitus; Niche; Environment According to Prabakaran Mahdu (2013), “Habitat is not plain place of habitation. It is a field of negotiations. Habitats transform. The network of relationships, changes in membership patterns, transitions in the power and influence of constituents and the micro- politics of negotiations transform habitats. Transformed habitats gravitate the internal sinews andContinue reading “Habitat”

RELATED TERMS: Story (fabula) and Plot (sjuzet or sjuzhet); Defamiliarisation, Ostranenie or making strange Russian formalism distinguishes three aspects of story, i.e. fabula, sjuzet, and forma, which can roughly be translated as theme, discourse and genre. The first two terms, fabula and sjuzet, have been described by modern literary theorists as, respectively, the timeless orContinue reading “Genre”

RELATED TERMS: Use for: Frame narrative A framing narrative contains a second, or further, embedded narrative, or narratives, for which it provides a context or setting. Sometimes the framing narrative begins and ends the narrative as a whole, providing book ends. At other times, it is simply present at the beginning of the narrative, actingContinue reading “Framing Narrative”

RELATED TERMS: Agon; Agonistic politics – Mouffe; Dramatic conflict Use for: Focalization “Are you genuine? or just a play-actor? A representative? or the actual thing represented? — Ultimately you are even just an imitation play-actor … Second question for the conscience.” (Nietzsche, 1998: 9) Focalisation is a valuable concept for design practices because it facilitatesContinue reading “Focalisation”

RELATED TERMS: The term rhizome, ‘a tangle of roots’, is a metaphor for an assemblage, a multiplicity, a network, a complex adaptive system (CAS), an open system or a living ecology. In the majority of its contemporary usages, as a critique of rootedness and fundamentalism, it derives from Deleuze and Guattari (1987) who enumerate certainContinue reading “Rhizome”

RELATED TERMS: Complementarity General and restricted economies Plotnitsky (1994: 2): “General economy denotes a mode of theory that relates the configurations it considers to the loss of meaning – a loss it regards as ineluctable within any given system. The concept of general economy was introduced by Bataille and deployed by Derrida, although Nietzsche mayContinue reading “Design and General Economic Anti-Epistemology”

RELATED TERMS: Myth and philosophy can be seen as two forms of narrative, Keum (2021) suggests. Keum (2021) argues that during the 18th century, Plato was adopted as the original champion of philosophy’s long and continuing battle against myth. Prior to that, Europeans would have been more familiar with a different portrait of Plato’s thought:Continue reading “Plato, Platonism and Neoplatonism”

RELATED TERMS: Iconic Designs and Iconic Designers; Design (as) Art (as) Philosophy Design differs from art, as discussed in Iconic Designs and Iconic Designers and Design (as) Art (as) Philosophy (pending posting), even though the boundaries between them are no longer strict and admit a certain hybridity. Design also differs from technology, although it bearsContinue reading “Design and the Question of Technology”