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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”

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”

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”

RELATED TERMS: Avant-garde movements; Modernism; Design practice and functionalism Sir Thomas More published his Utopia in 1516 . The word ‘utopia’ combines two Greek roots, ou- meaning ‘no’ and topos meaning ‘place’, hence literally utopia is a no-place, a non-existent place or nowhere. However, embedded within the word utopia is a pun. The near-identical Greek word eu-topos means a ‘good place’. In creatingContinue reading “Utopia and Utopian Thinking”

RELATED TERMS: “We constantly re-write our own biographies and continually give matters new meanings. To rewrite history in this sense – indeed, in an Orwellian sense – is not at all inhuman. On the contrary, it is very human.”  Milan Kundera, cited in McEwan, I. (1984) An Interview with Milan Kundera. Granta, 11, 34-35. SomeContinue reading “Unreliable Narrator”

RELATED TERMS: Affordances; Mode and Medium ” … stories and their worlds are crucially shaped by the affordances and limitations of the media in which they are realized.” (Ryan and Thon, 2014: 2) Design practices are often nowadays considered to be a transmedia practice, taking advantage of the affordances offered by different media, from architectural,Continue reading “Transmedia, Cross-Platform and Multimedia”

RELATED TERMS: Place, Space, Placiality and Spatiality From the perspective of design practices which incorporate thinking about the temporality of the design, the discussion of the relationships among the notions of narrative, time and the human by Paul Ricoeur (1984) may be useful. Ricoeur argues that, ‘time becomes human time to the extent that itContinue reading “Time”

RELATED TERMS: Liminality; Reception Theory and Reader Response Criticism A threshold is the entrance to a building, or sometimes a transition from one space to another. The threshold is the point at which we move from one space, state, set of ideas or view to another. Before we cross the threshold, we are outside. AfterContinue reading “Threshold”

RELATED TERMS: Epic theatre – Brecht; Deixis and Deictic Acts; Performance and Performativity; Theatre of Cruelty – Artaud; Tragic Theatre – Aristotle  “What is the real thing? The question is an ideal subject for the stage, where the actual and the illusory constantly shadowbox.” (Clapp, 2024) The ‘as if’ and the ‘what if’ at theContinue reading “Theatre and Drama Theory”

RELATED TERMS: Actantial model – Greimas; Narratology; Poststructuralism; Semiotics; Sculpture; “In short, the very manifesto of structuralism must be sought in the famous formula, eminently poetic and theatrical: to think is to cast a throw of the dice [penser, c’est e’mettre un coup de des].” Deleuze, G. (2004) ‘How do we recognise structuralism?’, in McMahon,Continue reading “Structuralism”