Category Archives: Uncategorized

RELATED TERMS: Story (fabula) and Plot (sjuzet or sjuzhet); Semiotic Square “the world has always been in the middle of things in unruly and practical conversation, full of action and structured by a startling array of actants and of networking and unequal collectives.” Donna Haraway, The Promises of Monsters “As Frank Kermode has put it, manContinue reading “In Medias Res”

RELATED TERMS: Enlightenment; Posthumanism; Posthuman; Postanthropocentrism; Realism; Modernity Michel Foucault argues that the term humanism should not be confused with that of Enlightenment. The importance of grasping the notions of humanism and Enlightenment for design practices is that it bears directly upon how the domain of humanity and the human is understood in the designContinue reading “Humanism”

RELATED TERMS: History; Design of Narrative Environments; Metalepsis; Genealogy – Nietzsche; Aleatory Historicism, Hal Foster (1996: 10) notes, can be negatively defined in the most simple terms as the conflation of before and after with cause and effect, by making the presumption that the prior event produces the later one. Foster also notes that historicism in this sense pervades art history and modernistContinue reading “Historicism”

RELATED TERMS: History; Critical Thinking; Cultural Studies; Design of Narrative Environments; Epic theatre – Brecht; Feminism and Materialism; Lefebvre; Methodology and Method; Even though the crude teleological determinism, historicism and reductive economism of official communist ideology, or orthodox Marxism-Leninism, came to occupy the space of Marxist thinking, design practices may yet still benefit from considering aContinue reading “Historical Materialism – Marxism”

RELATED TERMS: Narratology; Protagonist; Human Actantiality In The Hero with a thousand faces, Joseph Campbell examines many of the world’s heroic myths and stories. He ties the processes of transformation in those stories of the heroic journey to the quest to know the truest self, a task which, he avers, takes much time. Campbell shows how,Continue reading “(The) Heroic”

RELATED TERMS: Avant-garde movements; Environments – Art; Installation Art; Performance and Performativity Happenings, the forerunners of performance art, emerged from the theatrical elements of dada and surrealism. American artist Allan Kaprow first used the term in his 1959 work ‘18 Happenings in 6 Parts’ which took place over six days from 4–10 October 1959 atContinue reading “Happenings”

RELATED TERMS: Architecture; Ecology; Habitus; Niche; Environment According to Prabakaran Mahdu (2013), “Habitat is not plain place of habitation. It is a field of negotiations. Habitats transform. The network of relationships, changes in membership patterns, transitions in the power and influence of constituents and the micro- politics of negotiations transform habitats. Transformed habitats gravitate the internal sinews andContinue reading “Habitat”

RELATED TERMS: Story (fabula) and Plot (sjuzet or sjuzhet); Defamiliarisation, Ostranenie or making strange Russian formalism distinguishes three aspects of story, i.e. fabula, sjuzet, and forma, which can roughly be translated as theme, discourse and genre. The first two terms, fabula and sjuzet, have been described by modern literary theorists as, respectively, the timeless orContinue reading “Genre”

RELATED TERMS: Agon; Agonistic politics – Mouffe; Dramatic conflict Use for: Focalization “Are you genuine? or just a play-actor? A representative? or the actual thing represented? — Ultimately you are even just an imitation play-actor … Second question for the conscience.” (Nietzsche, 1998: 9) Focalisation is a valuable concept for design practices because it facilitatesContinue reading “Focalisation”

RELATED TERMS: The term rhizome, ‘a tangle of roots’, is a metaphor for an assemblage, a multiplicity, a network, a complex adaptive system (CAS), an open system or a living ecology. In the majority of its contemporary usages, as a critique of rootedness and fundamentalism, it derives from Deleuze and Guattari (1987) who enumerate certainContinue reading “Rhizome”