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RELATED TERMS: Socially engaged art A relational aesthetics views artworks as social interstices. For Bourriaud (2002), what is important is, “The possibility of a relational art (an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space) …” BourriaudContinue reading “Relational Aesthetics”

RELATED TERMS: Alienation; The Commodity; Historical materialism – Marxism In the context of developing an actantial or a performative approach to design practices, which emphasises process and dynamic relations over static fixity, as well as the dialogical constitution of the subject and the object neither of which is prior to the other, some Marxism-derived termsContinue reading “Reification”

RELATED TERMS: Praxis; Practice Design practices may be considered a form of reflexive practice, employing both reflexivity and reflection. For Mary Holmes (2010), reflexivity refers to the practices of altering one’s life as a response to knowledge about one’s circumstances. In the context of education, Kaya Prpic (2005) defines reflexive practice as reflective inquiry thatContinue reading “Reflexivity and Reflection”

RELATED TERMS: Audience; Filmmaking; Narratology The role of the reader is crucial for reception theory and reader-response criticism. Reception theory has had its greatest impact in Germany while reader-response criticism is associated mainly with American criticism. There is some continuity between the two. This is particularly the case with the work of Wolfgang Iser, whoContinue reading “Reception Theory and Reader-Response Criticism”

RELATED TERMS: Audience; Posthumanism; Humanism; Actant; Defamiliarisation, Ostranenie or making strange; Dau Project “The essence of realism … is the distance taken with regard to stories, to their temporal schemes and their sequences of causes and effects. Realism opposes situations that endure to stories that link together and pass from one to the next.” (Ranciere,Continue reading “Realism”

RELATED TERMS: Biopolitics and Biopower According to Ekin Erkan (2019: 218), while biopower may sufficiently explain the kinds of neuroses troubling citizens in the mid-to-late 20th century, psychopower, in contrast, is globalized and diffracted. As a system, it encompasses the organization of the capture of attention made possible by the psycho-technologies developed gradually through radio inContinue reading “Psychopower”

RELATED TERMS: Defamiliarisation; Derive; Detournement; Situationist International; Methodology and method; Alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt) In the practice of the Situationist International, psychogeography is defined as the study of the specific effects of the geographical (and topographical) environment, whether consciously organised or not, on people’s emotions and behaviour. Debord and his Situationist International colleagues proposed a setContinue reading “Psychogeography”

RELATED TERMS: Actantial model – Greimas; Agon; Antagonist; Epic theatre – Brecht; (The) Heroic; Narratology; New Materialism; Theatre The protagonist may sometimes be referred to as the main character, the focal character or the hero. In one sense, it is the actantiality around which the unfolding of the narrative unfolds: its movements and actions givingContinue reading “Protagonist”

RELATED TERMS: The terms product design and industrial design are often used interchangeably. Industrial designers, emerging during the Industrial Revolution beginning the mid-1700s, sought to generate new ideas within an industry. At a later time, product designers shifted the emphasis within industrial design away from how to make a product towards including questions about whyContinue reading “Product Design and Industrial Design”

RELATED TERMS: Dasein; Phenomenology; Heidegger Some design discourses have made use of the terms ‘present-at-hand’ and ‘ready-to-hand’, derived from Martin Heidegger, to discuss artefacts, entities, interactions and systems such as, for example, in human computer interaction (HCI), interaction design, game design and systems design (Ferris, 2003; Dourish, 1999; Dourish, 2001; Martin, 2012; Karlstrom, 2007; Tanenbaum,Continue reading “Present-at-Hand (Vorhanden) and Ready-to-Hand (Zuhanden)”