Category Archives: Uncategorized

RELATED TERMS: Alienation effect – Verfremdungseffekt; Avant-garde movements; Defamiliarisation, Ostranenie or making strange; Detournement; Method and methodology; Psychogeography; Situationist International In Debord’s theorisation of Situationism, dérive, détournement and psychogeography are closely aligned practices. Dérive translates literally as drifting but it is a more active and purposefully disorienting strategy than this rather neutral term suggests. DebordContinue reading “Dérive”

RELATED TERMS: Interaction; Interaction design; Taxonomy Paul Dourish (2004) brings to attention Matthew Chalmers’ observation that computer science is based on philosophical assumptions and arguments that were prevalent before the 1930s. Dourish continues, “Computer-science in practice involves reducing high-level behaviors to low-level, mechanical explanations, formalizing them through pure scientific rationality; in this, computer science revealsContinue reading “Computer Science”

RELATED TERMS: Ken Garland wrote and proclaimed the First Things First manifesto in 1963 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. It was first published in January 1964. Co-signed by 21 colleagues, the manifesto proposed that design effort should re-directed, away from advertising towards more worthwhile, purposeful activities. A second version, entitled First Things First 2000,Continue reading “First Things First Manifesto”

RELATED TERMS: Modernism; Avant-garde movements; Socially engaged art; Critical thinking; Agonism and avant-gardism; Dissensus – Ranciere Design practice has long been influenced by art practice, and vice versa, for example, the minimalism of the 1960s and 1970s influenced graphic and industrial design, in one direction, while modernist art of the early 20th century incorporated designedContinue reading “Modernism and Avant-Garde Art Practices”

RELATED TERMS: Avant-garde movements; Design History; Postmodernism; Utopia and Utopian thinking; Design practice and functionalism; Defamiliarisation, Ostranenie or making strange; Modernity; Dasein; Everyday Eagleton (2021) states that, “Modernism is among other things a crisis of narration, as the world ceases to be story-shaped. History is no longer informed by the plot once known as progress.Continue reading “Modernism”

RELATED TERMS: Agon; Khora or Chora Originally developed in relation to the work of artists and architects by Jane Rendell (2006), critical spatial practice has since expanded to include discourse among designers, geographers, planners, landscape architects, activists and philosophers.  According to Max Willis (2019), three core principles of agonism, in relation to design practices, canContinue reading “Agonism and Design”

RELATED TERMS: Spatial Practices As Schalk et al (2017) note, spatial practices is a broad term for architectural, artistic, design and other disciplinary and interdisciplinary practices engaged in studying and transforming space. Feminism, because feminist politics believes that things can be otherwise and that they can be changed, offers an optimistic outlook on the future.Continue reading “Feminist Spatial Practices”

RELATED TERMS: Remembering; A vocative expression is one in which a person is directly referred to in dialogue, for example, by their name, their job title or position or by a term of endearment, respect or disrespect. In the context of writing, vocatives can serve several purposes, such as, to help readers to keep track ofContinue reading “Vocatives”

RELATED TERMS: Actant; Happenings; Metalepsis; Methodology and Method; Paradigm; Performance Art; “You are more than entitled to know what the word ‘performative’ means. It is a new word and an ugly word, and perhaps it does not mean anything very much. But at any rate there is one thing in its favour, it is notContinue reading “Performance and Performativity”

RELATED TERMS: According to their website, Soft Agency is a group of female architects, artists, curators, scholars and writers from across the world who work with spatial practices. Their work is rooted in feminist methodological practices and formats, at the intersection of critical spatial practice, radical pedagogies, collectivities of becoming otherwise and alternative modes ofContinue reading “s-o-f-t.agency [Soft Agency]”