Category Archives: Uncategorized

RELATED TERMS: World-Building Placemaking is about the collaboration between all elements which make the whole, coming to life through its use. It is our experience of place that gives it meaning. Placemaking is the art of creating public ‘places of the soul,’ that uplift and help us connect to each other; “making a Public SpaceContinue reading “Placemaking”

RELATED TERMS: Visual Arts and Visual Media; Photography Painting is the central, canonical medium of art history. ‘The truth in painting’ is a saying of Cezanne’s. Cezanne wrote to Emile Bernard in 1905 that, “I owe you the truth in painting and I will tell it to you”. The power ascribed to painting, Derrida (1987) argues,Continue reading “Painting”

RELATED TERMS: Painting; Apparatus – Dispositif; Promptography In the context of design practices, photography is one of the many media that may be employed, often as part of a multi-media, multi-modal environment or assemblage. As the history of the cultural and artistic disruption caused by photography shows, the use of any particular medium alters the balance ofContinue reading “Photography”

RELATED TERMS: Design and Philosophy; Design practice and Functionalism; Phenomenology; Genealogy – Nietzsche; Heidegger; Human Actantiality; Dasein; Epistemology; Ontology; Poeisis; Nihilism “The point is not to gain some knowledge about philosophy but to be able to philosophise.” Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology “Where to begin in philosophy has always – rightly – been regardedContinue reading “Philosophy”

RELATED TERMS: Actantiality; Happenings; Performance Art; Performative and Performativity; Metalepsis The terms performance and performative are important for design practice because, it is argued, designs are performed by a participant. This performance takes on a different character depending on the character of the design itself and may involve a combination of consumption by a consumer; receptionContinue reading “Performance”

RELATED TERMS: Actant; Interpretant The term passant is used to refer to a character in a narrative viewed from the perspective of the impressions registered on him or her, rather than from the perspective of the actions he or she performs. Rabinowitz (2005, 184) invented this term as a contrast to actant. Thus Rabinowitz statesContinue reading “Passant”

RELATED TERMS: Actant; Performance; Performativity Participants are those taking an active part in a design interaction, understood as an event. The term participant is preferred to that of ‘user’ to avoid the more functionalist connotations of that term, and to suggest that a ‘visitor’ to an event is more engaged than a reader, spectator orContinue reading “Participant”

RELATED TERMS: Performance and Performativity Bowers (2014) considers that an onto-epistemological paradigm permits a unique world outlook which assumes distinctive approaches to shared universal concepts. Within a paradigm, points of view about the world’s constitution and its structure are compatible ontologically. Its values, concerns, conventions and assumptions, ‘truths’ and traditions of working in the worldContinue reading “Paradigm”

RELATED TERMS: Computer Science; Epistemology; Information science; Methodology and Method; Ontological Designing; Ontological Metalepsis; Ontological Turn; Phenomenology; Philosophy; World-Building;  “J. L. Austin once quipped that existence was ‘like breathing only quieter’.” (Garrett, 2006: xiv) Ontology, Metaphysics, Philosophy … Design Ontology is a much contested term. For example, it may be used to refer to an essentialContinue reading “Ontology”

RELATED TERMS: Actantiality; Affordances; Metalepsis; As noted in the entry for Metalepsis, in the context of literary fiction, the simplest ontological structure has three levels: In contrast to the reality of the world in which the book is authored and read, the diegesis and the extradiegesis are both fictional. While constructed as a hierachy, evenContinue reading “Ontological Structure of Literary Fiction”