Category Archives: Uncategorized

RELATED TERMS: Intertextuality; Intersemioticity In the context of design practices, the concept of authorship is troubled, in part because the purity of the kind of ‘authorship’ that pertains to the writer of a book, as sole author, and the kind of ‘authority’ which accrues to such an author over time, does not often apply toContinue reading “Author, Authority”

RELATED TERMS: Film making; Graphic Design; Music; Narrative environment design; Performance; Theatre; Human Actantiality; Realism; Reception theory and reader-response criticism; Epic theatre – Brecht Audience comes from the latin audire meaning to hear. Nonetheless, it is used in film, theatre and performance to describe what might more naturally be called the spectators or viewers, as it isContinue reading “Audience”

RELATED TERMS: Distribution of the Sensible – Ranciere; Interaction Design; Narratology; Sculpture; Urban design; “the sense of architectural space is … related to the political distribution of the sensible and the way it frames reality through fiction.” (Grabar, 2021: 279) Rowan Moore (2014) argues that it is a terrible misconception to think that architecture isContinue reading “Architecture”

RELATED TERMS: Affordances; Object-Oriented Ontology; Speculative Realism; Like new materialism, design practice is interested in, “understanding things as active agents rather than passive instruments or backdrops for human activity” (Barnett and Boyle, 2016). Certain aspects of new materialist thinking, which Sara Ahmed has called white feminist materialism (Hickey-Moody, 2015: 169), may be of value inContinue reading “New Materialism”

RELATED TERMS: Sociology; Ethnomethodology; Agency; Actor Network Theory; Cyborg Anthropology Anthropological research may provide some methodological guidance in the understanding of design practices as complex socio-cultural, techno-economic practices. For example, Anusas and Harkness (2014) suggest that, “in both anthropology and design … there is and perhaps always should be a concern with that other whichContinue reading “Anthropology”

RELATED TERMS; Anthropocene – Capitalocene – Chthulucene; Platationocene; Cultural geography; Postanthropocentrism; Posthuman; Posthumanism; One strand of narrative environments may be defined as Anthropo-Scenes: they concern what the world is like both now, what it might be like in times to come and what life, including human life, in those present and future worlds is likeContinue reading “Anthropo-Scenes”

RELATED TERMS: Actant; Actantial Model – Greimas; Agon; Narratology; Protagonist The term antagonist is derived from the Greek word antagonistes, meaning opponent, competitor or rival. The antagonist may be a character, group of characters, or an institution representing the difficulties and obstacles against which the protagonist must struggle, preventing the protagonist from achieving his/her/its/their quest, goal,Continue reading “Antagonist”

RELATED TERMS: Tragic theatre – Aristotle; Metalepsis A Greek tragedy usually starts with a ‘flashback’ or analepsis, a recapitulation of the incidents of the story which occurred prior to those which were selected for the plot. The reader is plunged in medias res (‘into the middle of things’), and earlier incidents in the story are introducedContinue reading “Analepsis and Prolepsis”

Use for Distancing effect; estrangement effect RELATED TERMS: Avant-garde movements; Defamiliarisation; Literary theory; Psychogeography; Situationist International; Epic theatre – Brecht; Theatre of Cruelty – Artaud Mode of address and mode of engagement of audience and/or participant are important aspects of the threshold and immersive experience of design interaction, in terms of narrative beginning and sequential progressionContinue reading “Alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt)”

Related terms; Alienation-effect (Verfremdungseffekt); Alltäglichkeit; The Commodity; Historical materialism – Marxism; Lefebvre; Reification; In general, alienation refers to the sense of distance from nature, separation from others, and helplessness that is an effect of modern existence since the time of the Industrial Revolution in the West, from approximately 1750 onwards. In Karl Marx’s writings, alienationContinue reading “Alienation”