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RELATED TERMS: Being and Doing (and Having); Things; Time It is argued that a design ‘is’ what it ‘does’. Although constituted by materiality in the form of ‘objects’ or ‘things’, a design ‘is’ an ‘event’; it ‘occurs’, in a particular place, at a particular time for particular people. Carlo Rovelli notes that, “The basic unitsContinue reading “Objects and Events”

RELATED TERMS: In defining the soul (psuchē), or what we might now call consciousness or experience [1], Aristotle’s theory of hylomorphism holds that the relation of soul to body is that of form to matter. Hylomorphism is a doctrine stating that the order displayed by material systems is due to the form projected in advanceContinue reading “Non-Hylomorphism”

RELATED TERMS: The term nihilism is derived from the Latin nihil, nothing. Nihilism means belief in nothing. It represents a refusal to accept as given any values. In particular, nihilism questions the basis of ethical values. In one sense, it is an extreme form of scepticism, although its concern is not knowledge and knowing but believingContinue reading “Nihilism”

RELATED TERMS: Collage, Montage, Assemblage and Bricolage The term ‘narrative architecture’ has been used in many contexts. Two examples are discussed below. Narrative Architecture: NATO The term was used by a group calling itself NATO, an acronym for Narrative Architecture Today. Nigel Coates (1988), a major figure in NATO states that, “Meaning and conventional functionContinue reading “Narrative Architecture”

RELATED TERMS: Design, Narratives, Futures; Design, Narratives, Pasts; Design of Narrative Environments; Narratology “The destruction of the story means the destruction of a basic instrument of human knowledge and self-knowledge.” (Vaclav Havel, 1988) “narrative in its usual definition is a causal chain of events” (Chatman, 2016: 129) Bruno Latour (1996: vii) poses the question: “canContinue reading “Narrative”

RELATED TERMS: Sensory Design; Research methodologies; Method and methodology; Mode and Medium Since designing, creating or analysing a narrative environment requires paying attention to the ways in which narratives are woven together across many media, creating new modes of communication, narrative environment design could be argued to be a kind of multimodal practice. Although theContinue reading “Multimodal Research”

RELATED TERMS: Cultural Studies; Decolonisation and Decoloniality It has been argued, for example by Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijani and Argentinian semiotician Walter Mignolo, that modernity and coloniality are inseparable, two sides of the same coin. ‘Coloniality’, Mignolo states, is short hand for colonial matrix or colonial order of power. In this view, modernity is an epistemologicalContinue reading “Modernity and Coloniality”

RELATED TERMS: Critical thinking; Humanism; Modernism; Avant-Garde Movements; Design History; Design Practice and Functionalism; ‘Modernity’ may be taken as an example of a framing narrative, which concerns a particular historical narrative woven into the material and geographical environments of Western Europe and the USA at a particular moment in time, beginning in the mid-18th centuryContinue reading “Modernity”

RELATED TERMS: Multimodal research; Transmedia, Cross-Platform and Multimedia; The notion of a medium cannot be understood simply as a technology of production and distribution. It must also be understood as social practice and as a cultural phenomenon. Thus, Jenkins (2006), for example, suggests a model of media that works on two levels: a medium isContinue reading “Mode and Medium”

RELATED TERMS: Metalepsis; Postmodernism A metanarrative may be understood as a narrative about narration, for example, experimenting with or exploring the idea of storytelling by drawing attention to its own artificiality. In this sense, there are resonances with a Genettian conception of literary or narrative metalepsis, where boundaries between narrative levels are transgressed. Possibly moreContinue reading “Metanarrative”