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Fashion, Women and Power
This book addresses the relationships between fashion, women and power. One of the constants within the book is to question the enduring relationship between women and dress and how these inform and articulate the ways in which women remain represented as either suitable or not for public office and their behaviour is informed through dress when they are in power. The book critiques the interplays between politics, power, class, race and expectation in relation to the everyday practice of getting dress and the more performative and symbolic function of dress as embodiment.
As never before, women are in positions of political power, and find themselves facing the maelstroms of mass media regarding their fashion, their deportment, and their right to govern. The contributors offer a wide set of perspectives on women and their roles, and their fashions when taking up powerful positions in Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom and the United States.
From the United Kingdom, the historical issues surrounding the movement towards ‘rational dress’ for women seeking their rights to vote and exercise are interrogated. The volume also explores viewpoints from East Asia, such as the constricting role for ‘common’ women upon entering the Imperial family in Japan. From the United States come the troublesome media stories engulfing two significant American Democratic First Ladies, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Michelle Obama.
From New Zealand, the media reports on Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern upon her motherhood while serving in the office and on her clothing during the 2019 Christchurch massacre comprise a much-needed contribution to the literature on women, politics and dress.
Further, the role of dress in politics broadly as a form of resistance, will be examined in Australia from recent skirmishes over ‘appropriate dress’ with ex-prime minister Julia Gillard and other Australian female politicians. The role of women and what their fashion selections mean continues via considerable debate during worldwide events. Finally, the theme of resistance and social media continues with an examination of protest dressing in the recent street battles in Hong Kong to how young Asian women have been influenced by the social media campaigns to encourage wearing the veil in Indonesia, to Asian women negotiating femininity in political dress.
Primary readership will be among researchers, scholars, educators and students in the fields of fashion, dress studies, women and gender studies and media and history. It will be of particular value as at graduate level and as a supplementary resource. There may be some general appeal to those with an interest in the women or cultures at the centre of the discussions.
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Living Metal
This is the first study of its kind, focusing exclusively on scenes throughout the world; it makes an important contribution to metal studies.
Metal Scenes around the World is a collection of thirteen chapters that examine metal scenes from smaller communities like Dayton, Ohio in the USA, to entire countries, such as Estonia. The goal of the book is to expand the research on metal scenes.
This is the only book produced on metal scenes to date, and it will lead the way to more research in this new area of metal studies. The strongest element of the book is its international focus, with chapters from such diverse settings as post-apartheid South Africa, Graz, Nantes, Brazil and Turkey. The chapters are detailed, richly embedded in local histories and contexts, and provide important analyses of their respective scenes.
Foreword from Henkka Seppälä, former bassist with the Finnish metal band Children Of Bodom.
Primary readership will be composed of fans and scholars of metal music, and those in the fields of anthropology, musicology and history. The diversity of the chapters connects metal to other disciplines in the music field and the book is likely to have appeal more widely to anyone who likes music.
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Interpreting and Experiencing Disney
Ever since the premiere for the first Mickey Mouse cartoon in 1928, Disney has played a central role in American popular culture, which has progressively expanded to include a global market. The company positioned itself to be a central role in family entertainment, and many of its offerings – from films to consumable products – have deeply embedded themselves into not only the imaginations of children and adults, but also into the threads of one’s life experience. It is difficult to go through life without encountering one Disney product. Because of this, fans of Disney build connections with their favourite characters and franchises, some of which are fuelled further by Disney’s own marketing practices.
Similarly, Disney responds to the cultural values of the era through its films and other media offerings. In this volume, scholars from varying backgrounds take a close look at facets of the Disney canon as more than agents of entertainment or consumption, and into underlying messages at the very heart of the Disney phenomenon: the cultural response that drives the corporation’s massive production and marketing machine. The relationship between Disney and its fans is one of loyalty and love, shaping cultural behaviours and values through the brand and its products. Disney responds in kind with a synergistic approach that makes it possible to experience Disney in any format at any given time.
Primary readership will be academics, researchers, educators, scholars and students working in the fields of media and cultural studies, especially those interested in marketing and branding, and in the Disney Company in general. The accessible writing style and the range of topics covered make it suitable for postgraduate students and academics working in these fields, as well as third-year undergraduate students.
The book will also appeal to academics working in the related fields of tourism studies, film and television studies and, given the focus of some of the chapters, in gender studies.
Although academic in focus, the accessible writing style does mean that it may also have appeal to the non-academic reader and fans of Disney.
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The Music Diva Spectacle
More LessThis original new book has a unique focus on diva camp as popular music praxis. The author analyses case studies of diva concert tour shows in order to present a performance studies reading of camp, the culture-sharing process of production, and audience reception. Detailed case studies include contemporary stars Madonna, Kylie, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and a look at audience drag.
The book contains detailed descriptions of artists’ performances, along with the analysis of exciting and popular contemporary performers. The emphasis on camp is particularly interesting, as thinking about queerness has pushed camp into the background in recent years. This is an interesting and exciting revival of the question of camp in contemporary queer performance.
The book considers and investigates the relationship between camp theory as an academic subject and the figure of the diva as one that utilizes and expresses camp in various ways. It seeks to establish how camp is appropriated or owned by the diva and how this impacts on, and is in turn appropriated and owned by, the audience.
Primary readership will be among researchers and educators working in the fields of cultural studies, performance studies, theatre studies, music studies, LGBTQ+ studies, critical race studies, as well as undergraduate students interested in these topics. It will be a useful classroom resource and addition to recommended reading lists.
The Music Diva Spectacle may have interest for more general readers with an interest in the subjects of the case studies, but the main focus is on the academic market.
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Strategic Advertising Mechanisms
More LessIt is the first time that the different strategic advertising mechanisms are explained in a single book. And this is also the first time that a book has brought together the most important and transcendent (for its applicability to the advertising market) strategic advertising mechanisms.
The text explains from classic mechanisms such as Rosser Reeves's USP or Procter & Gamble's copy strategy to modern mechanisms such as Kevin Roberts's Lovemarks or Douglas Holt's iconic brands. It also considers European mechanisms such as Jacques Séguéla’s star strategy or Henri Joannis’s psychological axis. The book has the most complete academic review.
Strategic Advertising Mechanisms: From Copy Strategy to Iconic Brands, integrates the most important strategic advertising mechanisms developed throughout the time: USP, brand image, positioning, Lovemarks... This is the first and only book to date that compiles the most consolidated methods by advertisers or advertising agencies (P&G, Bates, Ogilvy or Euro) in the history of modern advertising.
Primary readership will be among practitioners, researchers, scholars and students in a range of disciplines, including communication, advertising, business and economic, information and communication, sociology, psychology and humanities. There may also be appeal to the more general reader with an interest in how advertising strategic planning works.
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Radioactive Documentary
By Helen HughesHow have nuclear issues been covered in documentary since the end of the Cold War? This original new book explores how the sometimes elusive, sometimes dramatic effects of uranium products on the landscape, on architecture and on social organisation continue to show up on-screen, maintaining a record of moving images that goes back to the early twentieth century.
It is the first book to analyse independent documentary films about nuclear energy - it suggests an approach to documentary films as agents of change.
Each chapter of this book focuses on one of ten different documentary films made in Europe and North America since 1989. Each of these films works the material and the ideological heritage of the nuclear power industry into visions of the future. Dealing with the legacy of how ignorance and neglect led to accidents and failures the films offer different ways of understanding and moving on from the past. The documentary form itself can be understood as a collective means for the discovery of creative solutions and the communication of new narratives. In the case of these films the concepts of radioactivity and deep time in particular are used to bring together narrative and formal aesthetics in the process of reimagining the relationships between people and their environments.
Focusing on the representation of radioactive spaces in documentary and experimental art films, the study shows how moving images do more than communicate the risks and opportunities, and the tumultuous history, associated with atomic energy. They embody the effects of Cold War technologies as they persist into the present, acting as a reminder that the story is not over yet.
Primary readership will be academics and students working in environmental communication and in environmental humanities more broadly. For students of independent film or documentary it will also provide a clear picture of contemporary themes and creative practice.
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Invisible Presence
More LessThis book looks at the representation of female characters in French comics from their first appearance in 1905. Organised into three sections, the book looks at the representation of women as main characters created by men, as secondary characters created by men, and as characters created by women.
It focuses on female characters, both primary and secondary, in the francophone comic or bande dessinée, as well as the work of female bande dessinée creators more generally. Until now these characters and creators have received relatively little scholarly attention; this new book is set to change this status quo.
Using feminist scholarship, especially from well-known film and literary theorists, the book asks what it means to draw women from within a phallocentric, male-dominated paradigm, as well as how the particular medium of bande dessinée, its form as well as its history, has shaped dominant representations of women.
This is the first book to study the representation of women in the French-language drawn strip. There are no other works with this specific focus, either on women in Franco-Belgian comics, or on the drawn representation of women by men.
This is a very useful addition to both general discussions of French-language comics, and to discussions of women’s comics, which are focused on comics by women only.
As it is written in English, and due to the popularity of comic art in Britain and the United States, this book will primarily appeal to an Anglo-American market. However, the cultural and gender studies approach this text employs (theoretical frameworks still not widely seen in non-Anglophone studies of the bande dessinée) will ensure that the text is also of interest to a Franco-Belgian audience.
With a focus on an art-form which also inspires a lot of public (non-academic) enthusiasm, it will also appeal to fans of the bande dessinée (or wider comic art medium) who are interested in the representation of women in comic art, and to comics scholars on a broad scale.
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Visual Research Methods in Architecture
This book offers a distinctive approach to the use of visual methodologies for qualitative architectural research. It presents a diverse selection of ways for the architect or architectural researcher to use their gaze as part of their research practice for the purpose of visual literacy. Its contributors explore and use ‘critical visualizations’, which employ observation and sociocultural critique through visual creations – texts, drawings, diagrams, paintings, visual texts, photography, film and their hybrid forms – in order to research architecture, landscape design and interior architecture. The visual methods intersect with those used in ethnography, anthropology, visual culture and media studies. In presenting a range of interdisciplinary approaches, Visual Methodologies in Architectural Research opens up territory for new forms of visual architectural scholarship.
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Shiny Things
Authors: Leonard Diepeveen and Timothy van LaarShiny Things combines an interest in visual art with a broad attention to popular culture – the wideness of its range is striking. It is more than just an expansion of subject matter, which many of today’s innovative books also have – it considers how a specific physical property manifests itself in both art and culture at large, and contributes to an analysis of and polemics about the world. It is accessibly written but with a careful application of contemporary theory.
Interesting, informative, and entertaining, this will appeal to progressive thinkers looking for new ways of presenting ideas. This is scholarship that challenges stale thought and interacts with philosophical ideas in real time, with a versatility that can often be lacking in traditional academic scholarship.
Using art, especially contemporary art, as its recurrent point of reference, the authors argue that shininess has moved from a time when rarity gave shiny things a direct meaning of power and transcendence. Shininess today is pervasive; its attraction is a foundation of consumer culture with its attendant effects on our architecture, our conceptions of the body, and our production of spectacle. Power and the sacred as readings of the shiny have given way to readings of superficiality, irony and anxiety, while somehow shininess has maintained its qualities of fascination, newness and cleanliness.
Examines the meanings and functions of shininess in art and in culture more generally: its contradictions of both preciousness and superficiality, and its complexities of representation; the way shininess itself is physically and metaphorically present in the construction of major conceptual categories such as hygiene, utopias, the sublime and camp; and the way the affects of shininess, rooted in its inherent disorienting excess, produce irony, anxiety, pleasure, kitsch, and fetishism. All of these large ideas are embodied in the instantly noticeable, sometimes precious and sometimes cheap physical presence of shiny things, those things that catch our eye and divert our attention. Shininess, then, is a compelling subject that instantly attracts and fascinates people.
The book engages primarily with visual art, although it makes frequent use of material culture, as well as advertising, film, literature, and other areas of popular and political culture. The art world, however, is a place where many of the affects of shininess come into clearest focus, where the polemical semiotics of shine are most evident and consciously explored.
Artists as diverse as Anish Kapoor (whose popular Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago is a repeating example in the book), Olafur Eliasson, Jeff Koons, Carolee Schneemann, Audrey Flack, Fra Angelico and Gerard ter Borch centre the book in an art discourse that opens up to automobiles, Richard Nixon and Liberace.
Will be relevant to academics, scholars and students with an interest in contemporary theory and material and popular cultures. Potential interest across the humanities: philosophy, gender studies, perhaps public relations, advertising and marketing.
It will also appeal to more general readers with an interest in popular and material cultures, art and aesthetics. It is written in a genuinely accessible style, and its ideas and theory are embodied through examples and narratives. Will be of interest to readers of Oliver Sacks, James Gleick, George Lakoff, James Elkins or Rebecca Solnit.
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Fat Activism (Second Edition)
More LessIn this new edition of her accessible autoethnography of fat feminist activism in the West, Charlotte Cooper revisits and discusses her activism in the context of recent shifts in the movement. The new preface explores the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic on fat people and fat activism and how Black Lives Matter is inspiring new forms of activism. Cooper issues a call to action in Fat Studies and offers alternatives to current public health approaches to Diabetes.
What is fat activism and why is it important? To answer this question, Charlotte Cooper presents an expansive grassroots study that traces the forty-year history of international fat activism and grounds its actions in their proper historical and geographical contexts. She details fat activist methods, analyses existing literature in the field, challenges long-held assumptions that uphold systemic fatphobia, and makes clear how crucial feminism, queer theory and anti-racism are to the lifeblood of the movement. She also considers fat activism’s proxy concerns, including body image, body positivity, the obesity epidemic and fat stigma.
Combining rigorous scholarship with personal, accessible writing, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement is a rare insider’s view of fat people speaking about their lives and politics on their own terms. This is the book you have been waiting for.
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The Otherness of the Everyday
At the end of 2019 to the beginning of 2020, when the coronavirus first emerged, Wuhan in China became the first city in the world affected by this deadly disease. It then rapidly spread to the entire country, and further on to Europe, America and the rest of the world.
During these strange times, we witness the emptiness of streets, squares and cities everywhere; we are estranged from and yet ‘connected’ to each other. As a response to the pandemic, Jiang Jiehong convened in-conversation talks with figures from different disciplines in the Chinese-speaking world, including anthropology, architecture, art, curating, fashion film, literature, media, museum, music and photography.
The twelve high-profile participants in these conversations are Xiang Biao, Zhang Peili, Pi Li, Zhang Zikang, Gu Zheng, Li Lin, Zhang Zhen, Shu Kewen, Jiang Jun, Wang Shouzhi, Chen Danqing and Zhu Zheqin.
These conversations foster new understandings of this present-day crisis; the threat of the invisible, notions of distance and spatialization, separation and isolation, communication and mobility, discipline and surveillance, and community and collectiveness, as well as the increase in conflicts and divisive voices between China and the world. At the same time, these reflections give us the opportunity to re-examine our past ‘normality’, and to project our future visions of a post-COVID world.
Readership will include those working and studying in the humanities and specifically in the disciplines of the interviewees, and those who have particular interests in contemporary China. The Otherness of the Everyday is also of interest to a more general audience who has experienced the pandemic and is seeking innovative understandings of this global crisis in human history.
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MEDIA
The first in the Media-Life-Universe trilogy, this volume explores a transdisciplinary notion of media and technology, exploring media as technology, with special attention to its material, historical and ecological ramifications. The authors reconceptualize media from environmental, ecological and systems approaches, drawing not only on media and communication studies, but also philosophy, sociology, political science, biology, art, computer science, information studies and other disciplines.
Featuring a group of internationally known scholars, this collection explores evolving definitions of media and how media technologies are transforming theory and practice. As the current media includes a wider and wider range of concepts, products, services and institutions, the definition of media continues to be in a state of flux. What are media today? How is media studies evolving? How have technologies transformed communication and media theory, and informed praxis? What are some of the futures of media?
The collection challenges traditional notions of media, as well as concepts such as freedom of expression, audience empowerment and participatory media, and explores emergent media including transmedia, virtual reality, online games, metatechnology, remediation and makerspaces.
This is the first volume in the MEDIA • LIFE • UNIVERSE Trilogy. LIFE: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry 9781789382655 follows and builds upon this 2021 collection.
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Dance and Authoritarianism
By Anthony ShayEveryone who viewed the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games can understand the power of dance and mass movement in the service of politics. While examples of such public performances and huge festivals are familiar in Nazi Germany, the former Soviet Union and today's North Korea, this new book addresses the lesser known examples of Spain under Franco, the Dominican Republic, Iran, Croatia and Uzbekistan, all of which have been subjected to various political regimes.
Dance and choreographed mass movement is the newest field of serious research in dance studies, particularly in the fields of politics and international relations and gender and sexuality. The author uses dance as a lens through which to study political, ethnic, and gendered phenomena so that the reader grasps that dance
constitutes an important non-verbal lens for the study of human behaviour.
This is the first study on dance and political science to focus specifically on authoritarian regimes. It is a significant and original contribution to scholarship in the field, with the key studies drawn from a variety of different geographical and historical backgrounds.
In Spain under Franco, the Women's Section of the fascist Falange created a folk dance program that toured widely and through the performance of Spanish regional folk dances performed by virginal young Spanish women, embodying Catholic purity, permitted the regime to re-enter the world of polite diplomacy.
The Dominican Republic dictator, Rafael Trujillo, himself a gifted dancer, raised the popular folk and vernacular dance, the merengue, to the level of the "national" dance, which became a symbol of his regime and Dominican identity, which merengue it still maintains.
For over a thousand years, Croatia, has endured a series of authoritarian regimes – Hapsburg, Napoleon, the Yugoslav royal dictatorship, fascist, Josip Broz Tito's communist regime, Franjo Tudjaman – that ruled that small nation. For over 70 years, Lado, the National Folk Dance Ensemble of Croatia, has served as "the light of Croatian identity." Through its public performances of folk dances and music, Lado has become the face of a series of different regimes.
In Iran, dance became banned under the Islamic Republic after serving the Pahlavi regime as a form of representation of its peasant population and its historic Persian identity. Uzbekistan currently has expanded the role of the invented tradition of Uzbek "classical" dance, created during the soviet period, as a representation of Uzbek identity, in national festivals. Thus, through these examples, the reader will see how dance and mass movement have become important as political means for a variety of authoritarian regimes to represent themselves.
Primary readership will be dance scholars; particularly the growing number interested in ethno-identity dances of the second half of the twentieth-century
Will be of interest to academic libraries and departments, with valuable information and interest also for scholars of ethnology, anthropology, cultural studies, history.
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The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race
Insightful, provocative and now in paperback, The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race is a collection of original material that goes beyond simple analysis of the show and examines the profound effect that RuPaul’s Drag Race has had on the cultures that surround it: audience cultures, economics, branding, queer politics and all points in between. Once a cult show marketed primarily to gay men, Drag Race has drawn both praise and criticism for its ability to market itself to broader, straighter and increasingly younger fans. The show’s depiction of drag as both a celebrated form of entertainment and as a potentially lucrative career path has created an explosion of aspiring queens in unprecedented numbers, and had a far-reaching impact on drag as both an art form and a career.
Contributors include scholars based in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and South Africa. The contributions are interdisciplinary, as well as international. The editor invited submissions from scholars in theatre and performance studies, English literature, cultural anthropology, media studies, linguistics, sociology and marketing. What he envisaged was an examination of the wider cultural impacts that RuPaul’s Drag Race has had; what he received was a rich and diverse engagement with the question of how Drag Race has affected local, live cultures, fan cultures, queer representation and the very fabric of drag as an art form in popular cultural consciousness.
This original collection, with its variety of topics and approaches, is a critical appraisal of RuPaul’s Drag Race at an important point of the programme’s run, as well as of the growing industries around RPDR, including DragCon and drag queens' post-show careers in the on- and offline world.
Primarily of interest to students, scholars and researchers in media and communication studies, gender and sexuality studies, popular culture, queer theory, LGBTQ history, media studies, and fan studies. Will also appeal to fans of the series.
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The Cultural Meaning of Aleppo
More LessThe book documents the history and morphology of the Ancient City of Aleppo, outlining first the urbanistic development of the city and then focusing on the architectural heritage with specific focus on the domestic architecture, addressing the initiatives to reconstruct and rehabilitate the urban fabric. The author argues in favour of the safeguarding and rehabilitation of the architectural heritage to protect the cultural memory of the inhabitants of Aleppo, despite of the destruction of architecture due to the recent war.
Through a capillary documentation of the palimpsest of Aleppo – the peculiar characteristics of its courtyard houses and the neighbourhoods of Bayyada, Bab Quinnesrin and al-Farafra – this is a theoretical and practical handbook for architects, urban planners and restorers alike. Through this analytical discussion of the city’s urban fabric, it introduces the concept of the cultural urban landscape acting as a 'cohesive territorial organism', nourished by different cultures, in which contrasting scales of land, city and neighbourhood are interconnected in a fractal state. With a focus on retaining the uniqueness and diversity of this residential typology, which bore witness to the rich cultural history of Syria and the Middle East as a whole, Neglia maps a future reconstruction that focuses on cultural continuity, tradition and the re-establishment of a crucial social memory.
Of particular interest and relevance to cultural heritage experts, urban planners architects and designers. Also, to researchers, scholars and students interested in studies on urban morphology and building typology, UNESCO and ICOMOS. Scholars and students interested in the Middle East.
Will also be of significant interest to professionals dealing with the implementation of rehabilitation measures in other cities inscribed on the Word Cultural Heritage List, or cities with a sound historic fabric which has been destroyed due to war or other events.
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Language of Tomorrow
More LessThis book gives an overview of the development of the evolution of language through a philosophical lens, and is a culmination of research combining visual communication, semiotic theory, cultural studies, linguistics, artificial intelligence and new media.
It discusses the future of communication – through a pictographic framework – and the possibility of developing a standardized universal pictographic communication system that fosters mutual understanding and bridges diverse cultures. The research aims to locate the direction that research and development of a universal language for the posthuman era could take through the contextualization and realization of associated practice.
Highly relevant in today's discussion about globalization, language and culture, the combination of the view of design, philosophy, culture and technology makes this book unique.
Postgraduate students of design, art, philosophy and researchers and academics in the fields. Scholars and students working in linguistics. Cultural studies. Theory of art and design. Artificial intelligence (AI) and art-tech.
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The Friday Mosque in the City
Concerned with the relationship between Friday mosque and city in the Islamic context. Focusing particularly on the Friday mosque, the book aims at exploring the concept of liminal(ity) in spatial terms and discuss it in terms of the relationship between the Friday mosque and its surrounding urban context. Transition spaces/zones between the mosque and the urban context are discussed through the case studies from various contexts. In doing so, the manuscript reveals different forms of liminality in spatial sense.
Considers widely-studied topics such as the ‘Friday mosque’ or the ‘Islamic city’ through a fresh new lens, critically examining each case study in its own spatial urban and socio-cultural context. While these two well-known themes – concepts that once defined the field – have been widely studied by historians of Islamic architecture and urbanism, this collection specifically addresses the functional and spatial ambiguity or liminality between these spaces. Thus, instead of addressing the Friday mosque as the central signifier of the ‘Islamic city’, the articles in this volume provide evidence that there was (and continues to be) a tremendous variety in the way architectural borders became fluid in and around Friday mosques across the Islamic geography, from Cordoba to Jerusalem and from London to Lahore.
By historicizing different cases and contributing to our knowledge of the way human agency through ritual and politics shaped the physical and social fabric of the city, the papers collectively challenge the generalizing and reductionist tendencies in earlier scholarship. The disciplinary approaches are varied, and include archaeology, art history, history, epigraphy and architecture.
The original approach in the book, addressing of the topic of liminality from different points of view and in different periods, creates a fresh approach that invites students and scholars to think deeply about the imbrication of congregational mosques in the daily life of the cities that host them. Moreover, in considering mosque and city together, the mosque appears as a living space subject to change and history and made with political and social purpose, rather than as a holy space disconnected from the rest of the world.
Traditional studies of mosques focus on architecture and aesthetic language and try to establish a lineal development of the building typology connected to the history of Islam across different territories. The present study offers an alternative (though not competing) perspective where locality and politics play a major role in the materialization of the congregational mosque as a religious and communal space. The wide historical frame enables comparison of congregational mosques in different historical periods: it is particularly a strong contrast to see how the liminality of the mosque changes between the early and classical periods of Islam on one side and the more contemporary times on the other. The consideration of diverging cultural, political and sectarian settings is another interesting element of comparison.
Primary market will include scholars, academics and students working on or studying Islamic studies, particularly Islamic history, Islamic architecture and Islamic archaeology.
Also of relevance to architectural historians, architects, art historians, city planners, city historians, urban designers, architectural critics, historians, sociologists, archeologists, and those interested in religious studies, and in archaeology of religion.
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Cross-Cultural Design for Healthy Ageing
This book is based on many years of research and practical pedagogical experiences around cross-cultural and multidisciplinary design for healthy ageing. It provides important insight into origins, design, implementation, and impact of cross-cultural design student study tours, and takes an original approach by foregrounding pedagogical practice for exploring healthy ageing solutions.
The populations of Australia and many other countries in the Asia Pacific region are ageing. The next few decade will see up to half of the population in many countries represented by the over 65s. The impact of this change in population balance will be profound and it represents a potential global shift in design for society. This will challenge designers, planners and health care professionals to develop solutions to better meet the needs and harness the capacity of our growing and diversifying populations of older citizens, in relation to housing, community interaction and co-operation, health and well-being, and the integration new technologies. Different disciplinary and cultural perspectives can be a means to create new ideas and approaches that provide a deeper understanding of the needs of the global ageing population.
This book examines some of the challenges associated with ageing in multi-cultural societies. We explore some of the major issues facing society in the area of ‘healthy ageing’ and propose a method of working with cross-disciplinary groups of health practitioners, designers, architects and cultural practitioners. Through case-studies of a series of workshops run in China and Singapore with Australian, Chinese and Singaporean students, we review the benefits of this approach and provide a framework for engaging designers, planners and health professionals in the process of creating new design solutions for the growing global ageing population.
This book is especially useful for academics and educators in the design and health areas. Design professionals in urban, architectural, interior, industrial, graphic, multimedia, fashion, interaction, service and user-experience design will find many useful ideas. Health professionals across the range of disciplines, including medical practitioners, nurses, physiotherapists, other allied health professionals and carers practising in different settings such as aged-care facilities, government offices and others will also find it useful.
It also provides insights and ideas for innovators, businesses and everybody interested in exploring design and innovation for an ageing population, which has been identified as a growing market. It may also be useful to anyone who wants to understand how to provide care for ageing members of the family and friends, or for anyone who wants to better understand issues around their own ageing.
Although there are many articles and books on social design, there has been very little work on the methods to combine the discipline areas of Health and Design in the creation of concepts and artefacts around design for healthy ageing. There is also very little on the understanding of ‘Cross-cultural Empathy’ in design. This book takes an original approach to ‘Design for Healthy Ageing’ by combining not only a varied discipline group of practitioners from design and health but also presenting cross-cultural methods to deal with issues associated with the social cause.
The primary readership will include professionals and academics in the areas of cross-cultural design, health, ageing and related policies, government institutions and gerontologists. It will also be of interest to tutors and lecturers across design practice internationally, and the case studies are useful for those with a specific geographical interest (Australia, Singapore, China), including clinicians, carers and other health professionals in those areas.
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Red Creative
Authors: Justin O'Connor and Xin GuThis book brings together multiple strands of debate around the cultural creative industries and contemporary capitalism, China’s position in global capitalism, the future of modernity and new ways of thinking about culture and cultural policy. Clearly written and engaging, it is the first study to provide a critical lens on creative industries discourse and to bring it together with detailed historical and social analysis.
It analyses the ongoing development of China’s cultural industries, examining the institutions, regulations, interests and markets that underpin the Chinese cultural economy and the strategic position of Shanghai within that economy. Explores cultural policy reforms in post-colonial China and articulates Shanghai’s significance in paving China’s path to modernity and entry to global capitalism. In-depth and illuminating, this book situates China’s contemporary cultural economy in its larger global and historical context, revealing the limits of Western thought in understanding Chinese history, culture and society.
This book is aimed at a broad, educated audience who seek to engage more with what is happening in China, especially in the cultural field. It tries to take such an audience outside the standard frame of Western modernity, suggesting the possibility of different historical trajectories and possibilities. Because the book is theoretical and empirical in its approach, it will be of strong interest to both those interested in Chinese cultural policy and the creative industries approach generally.
Cultural and creative industries is an increasingly important subject area in Higher Education, with undergraduate and postgraduate programs representing some of the fastest growing areas in arts, humanities and social science faculties. This audience is increasingly global, as this policy debate has now moved outside the Western countries whose economic competitiveness it was meant to promote. It is an agenda promoted by agencies such as UNESCO, UNCTAD, the World Bank, British Council and the Goethe Institute.
Primary readership will be academics with a particular interest in Chinese culture, cultural studies, media studies, public policy and management studies, cultural policy, East Asian studies and cultural policy researchers. It will also be relevant to all those interested in China and Chinese’s culture; and those interested in the history of Shanghai and the role it plays in contemporary Chinese culture and politics. Given the current interest in China, it may also be of wider appeal too.
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How Belfast Got the Blues
Authors: Noel McLaughlin and Joanna BraniffThis is not just an important music book; it is an important history book. It captures the moment before Belfast and Northern Ireland became synonymous with the Troubles. It places one of the best-known figures in global popular music, Van Morrison, in his historical and sociocultural context. It also reinstates Ottilie Patterson into her rightful role as a central figure in Ireland’s music. It addresses a significant gap in Ireland’s popular music studies by appraising the contribution of a politically and musically significant female figure.
It makes a major original contribution to the understanding of popular music culture in Northern Ireland, and to the broader popular music culture in Britain in the 1960s. It will remain for many years the definitive study of the subject and a point of reference for further research and controversy.
In light of the re-emergence of Northern Ireland in contemporary British political debate, this book presents a nicely timed intervention, placing Northern Ireland at the forefront of a key moment in British and Irish cultural history, and presenting highly innovative readings of key popular cultural figures. Integrating its account of the popular music culture and local ‘scene’ in Northern Ireland with the broader and highly complex context of the sociopolitical milieu, it offers original and insightful readings of key 1960s figures, including film director Peter Whitehead, The Rolling Stones, Them, Ottilie Patterson and Van Morrison. It includes much new material, obtained in interviews and through meticulous archival research, to challenge the mainstream narrative of the mid-1960s music scene in Belfast.
It is extremely well researched, making use of newspaper and film archives and existing publications, but also an impressive set of personal interviews with veteran musicians and others from that time. The authors challenge much of the received wisdom about the period – for instance, about the decline of the showband – and present their arguments carefully and thoughtfully. While meticulously researched and thoroughly analytic, the writing is uniquely accessible and engaging.
The chapter on the neglected Belfast blue singer Ottilie Patterson represents a paradigm shift in Irish popular music studies, and sets her story and considerable achievements centre stage. This alone makes the book very noteworthy. The chapters on Van Morrison and his band Them place his early career in the context of the local and global music industry. The story of The Rolling Stones film, made by Peter Whitehead, is discussed in the context of the international fervour of the times. The knitting of the music scene with the distinctive social, cultural, political and religious factors is deftly done.
Primary readership will be academic – scholars, researchers and students across a range of areas. Fields of interest include popular music studies, Irish studies, political history, cultural studies, film studies, jazz/blues history, women’s studies, civil rights.
It will also appeal more broadly to fans, writers, journalists and musicians interested in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the Blues, rock and roll, jazz and the 1960s, as well as to fans of the individual musicians.
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Cosmopolitics of the Camera
In Cosmopolitics of the Camera, the leading experts in the field present Les Archives de la Planète (The Archives of the Planet) – Albert Kahn’s stunning collection of early colour photography and documentary film – and discuss the extraordinary intellectual context from which it grew. The archives, collected between 1909 and 1932, show the cultural richness and diversity of humanity at a time of drastic geographical and historical change. Consisting of 183,000 metres of film, 72,000 autochromes and more than 6,000 stereographs, it portrays the beauty and creativity of cultures, and their fatal disappearance of which Kahn believed to be only a question of time.
The Archives of the Planet was one of a string of institutions for research and international cooperation established in Kahn’s utopian World Gardens near Paris. Some of the best-known minds of the age met there regularly in order to discuss the problem of how to make new media of communication serve the cause of peace and human development. The Cosmopolitics of the Camera presents ten expert voices from seven different countries, studying the work of Kahn and his key collaborators, the geographer Jean Brunhes and the philosopher Henri Bergson, in the spirit of their culturally diverse venture, placing it in its proper historical and intellectual context, and exploring its ambitious achievements and failures. By pushing Kahn’s work back into active discussion, the analysis forces us to reflect on the ways our world is shaped and recorded by the media, and reactivates the time capsule that Kahn designed to communicate with the future.
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Taste and the TV Chef
By Gilly SmithFood journalist, podcast producer and former academic Gilly Smith offers fresh insights into the creation of contemporary British food culture. Her latest book explores the story of modern food culture with the creators of lifestyle and food TV and with the academics carving a new world in food and media studies. Taste and the TV Chef investigates how television changed the way Britain eats and sold it to the world.
While cooking shows are far from new, they have exploded in popularity in recent years and changed consumption patterns at a time when what we eat has an enormous impact on climate change.
What was once merely a genre is now a full-blown phenomenon: never before has food been so photographed, fawned over, fetishized and celebrated as various answers to saving the planet. Celebrity chefs and so-called ‘foodies’ have risen to new levels of fame, and the cultural capital of cooking has never been so valuable.
Looks at the influence of chefs like Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson and Gordon Ramsay and the role of TV storytelling in transforming how and what we consume. A ground-breaking contribution to food and media studies, which includes rare interviews with the producers who created some of the most influential stories television ever told, Taste and the TV Chef investigates how food and lifestyle TV changed the way an entire country ate, and then fed it to the rest of the world.
Main academic readership will be scholars, researchers and students in cultural studies, media studies. Also practitioners and students in the fields of TV production and writing.
Will also appeal to anyone with an interest in the development of food TV and the rise of the TV chef.
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Heavy Metal Music in Argentina
An in-depth regional discussion of heavy metal music, Heavy Metal Music in Argentina explores metal music as a catalyst for social change and site for engaging political reflection. Originally published in Spanish and sold locally in Argentina, this is the first time the work has been available in English.
Edited by leading researchers, this collection addresses the music’s rituals, circulations, cultural products, lyrics and allows readers to rethink the place of heavy metal within Argentinean politics and economics. Exclusively written by members of the Group for Interdisciplinary Research on Argentinian Heavy Metal (GIIHMA) in a communal approach to scholarship, the book echoes the working-class voices that marked early post-dictatorship metal music in Argentina.
This is the first collection of essays on Argentine metal music. It has opened up research channels between different universities in the country while also engaging a non-academic audience, and widening the potential market for the book.
The book makes an interdisciplinary examination of a complex and fascinating object: it allows for the examination, discussion and analysis of its nationalist postulates, relationship with the Creole culture (for example, with nineteenth-century ‘gauchesca’ literature), indigenism, and with the political processes of contemporary Argentina.
Metal Music Studies, as an academic area of inquiry, has focused mostly on the music’s cultural components in Europe and the United States. The few books that have addressed metal music as a global phenomenon, have severely neglected the inclusion of Latin American countries. Argentina, with the largest and oldest metal scene in the region, has also been neglected in the existing literature. There is a growing interest in this area, as demonstrated by the emergence of documentary film on metal music in Latin America.
The book has potential use as a resource on courses in several disciplines including sociology, cultural studies, musicology, ethnomusicology, sociology and Latin American studies. It will also be of interest to the more general readers with an interest in the musical genre.
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Film Studies in China 2
Film Studies in China 2 is a collection of selected articles chosen from issues of the journal Contemporary Cinema published throughout the year and translated for an English-speaking audience. As one of the most prestigious academic film studies journals in China, Contemporary Cinema has been active not only in publishing Chinese scholarship for Chinese readers but also in reaching out to academics from across the globe. This anthology hopes to encourage a cross-cultural academic conversation on the fields of Chinese cinema and media studies. Following the successful release of the first volume this is the second collection to be released in the Film Studies in China series.
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Modern Melbourne
By Rod GiblettMelbourne, founded in 1835 among marshes and beside a sluggish stream, grew from wetlands into a world-class modern city. Drawing on a wide range of historical, literary and artistic sources, this book explores the cultural and environmental history of the city and its site. Tracing the city from its swampy beginnings in a squatter’s settlement nestled in the marshy delta of the Yarra and Maribyrnong Rivers, Rod Giblett illuminates Melbourne through its visible structures and the invisible history of its site.
The book places Melbourne within an international context by comparing and contrasting it to other cities built on or beside wetlands, including London, New York, Paris, Los Angeles and Toronto. Further, it is the first book to apply the work of European thinkers and writers on modernity and the modern city – such as Walter Benjamin and Peter Sloterdijk – to an analysis of Melbourne. Giblett considers the intertwining of nature and culture, people and place, and cities and wetlands in this bioregional and ecocultural analysis. Placing the city in its proper bioregional and international contexts, Modern Melbourne provides a rich historical analysis of the cultural capital of Australia.
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Punk Now!!
Punk Now!! brings together papers from the second incarnation of the Punk Scholars Network International Conference and Postgraduate Symposium, with contributions from revered academics and new voices alike in the field of punk studies. The collection ruminates on contemporary and non-Anglophone punk, as well as its most anti-establishment tendencies. It exposes not only modern punk, but also punk at the margins: areas that have previously been poorly served in studies on the cultural phenomenon. By compiling these chapters, Matt Grimes and Mike Dines offer a critical contribution to a field that has been saturated with nostalgic and retrospective research. The range and depth of these chapters encapsulates the diverse nature of the punk subculture – and the adjacent academic study of punk – today.
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Design Discourse on Culture and Society
Just as the term design has been going through change, growth and expansion of meaning, and interpretation in practice and education – the same can be said for design research. The traditional boundaries of design are dissolving and connections are being established with other fields at an exponential rate. Based on the proceedings from the IASDR 2017 Conference, Re:Research is an edited collection that showcases a curated selection of 83 papers – just over half of the works presented at the conference. With topics ranging from the introduction of design in the primary education sector to designing information for Artificial Intelligence systems, this book collection demonstrates the diverse perspectives of design and design research. Divided into seven thematic volumes, this collection maps out where the field of design research is now.
Cultura: A Communication Toolkit for Designers to Gain Empathic Insights Across Cultural Boundaries
- Chen Hao, Annemiek van Boeijen, Pieter Jan Stappers
Designing successful products and services that people like requires an understanding of the context and the aspirations of those people. Over the past decade, a range of methods has been developed to help designers gain such empathy. These have worked well when designer and target user share a cultural context. However, designers often find it difficult to empathize with the user insights of individuals from a culture beyond their first-hand experience. To help designers step beyond this limitation, those user insights need to be placed in a larger understanding of the cultural context. In this paper, we present Cultura: a toolkit that uses nine cultural aspects based on cultural models, informing designers about user insights in a broader cultural context. The toolkit was evaluated in design sessions with four design teams. The findings indicate that Cultura provides inspiration and motivation for designers to gain empathic insights into users beyond their own cultural boundaries and to make effective designs for people.
Graphic Designers as Cultural Innovators: Case Studies of Henry Steiner and Kan Tai Keung
• Tian Yao, Ilpo Koskinen
It is common to see graphic design copies of foreign models or other Chinese designers. These designers are apathetic toward the work and neglect its ongoing challenges, including the need for constant innovation. In contrast, there are masters who use Chinese culture in creative ways and achieve outstanding reputations all over the world. The reasons design masters choose Chinese culture as a theme for their graphic work and the unique ways in which they symbolize cultural resources and knowledge are explored and explained in this study. This study also illustrates how traditional culture can become a potential innovative strategy by applying a systematic and culture-based methodology. The case studies presented concern the first generation of graphic designers in Hong Kong: Henry Steiner and Kan Tai Keung. The preliminary results of the two case studies show very positive outcomes for cultural interpretation becoming a new innovative stream of graphic design.
Cultural Differences in Aesthetic Preferences: Does Product-to-Context Match Matter?
• Tseng-Ping Chiu, Carolyn Yoon, Shinobu Kitayama, Colleen Seifert
Western cultures focus on salient objects and use categorization for purposes of organizing the environment (an analytic view), whereas, East Asians cultures focus more holistically on relationships and similarities among objects when organizing the environment (a holistic view). Previous research has shown that cognitive approaches differ between cultures: European Americans prefer an analytic style, and East Asians tend to use a holistic style. However, little is known about how cultural differences in cognition relate to aesthetic preferences. In this paper, we explored whether cultural differences arise in preferences for products set in matching vs. mismatching contexts. Participants in a laboratory experiment included European Americans and East Asians. Individually, they viewed images of a variety of furniture products (chairs, coffee tables and floor lamps) and rated their aesthetic appeal. Each product type appeared in three different contexts: matching (target product shown in its usual in-home context); mismatched (target product shown in an unusual in-home context) and neutral (the target product shown on a white background). For both cultural groups, products were judged to be more aesthetically pleasing in the matching than in the mismatched context. However, ratings for products in mismatching contexts were significantly higher among East Asians. Our findings suggest that those with holistic views (East Asians) are more tolerant of mismatches than are those with more analytic views (European Americans). The implications for product and marketing design include greater attention to context presentation.
Discourses on Japanese Lifestyle in Early Modern Design: A Turning Point from Westernization to Modern Design
• Yoshimune Ishikawa
Low-seated chairs for tatami mats that are characteristic of Japanese-style interior appeared after late 1940s. This article focuses on the ambivalence between Western lifestyles and Japanese lifestyles by tracing the comments of designers, critics, magazines and so forth to clarify a background of them. The introduction of chairs in Japan was actually involved, by definition, in a dichotomy between sitting on the floor and in chairs, which therefore was far from the domestic practicality of lifestyles among the public. Then we have to observe the two points for the introduction of chairs to break through this rigid situation: (1) how did the public establish definition of chairs outside the Westernization? This article grasps the fact that the artisans and early designers accumulated their experience of producing chairs from scratch, through trial and error. (2) How did the relation between sitting on the floor and in chairs break out of the dichotomy, through ambivalence? This article focuses on the fact that the public enjoyed the physical relaxation offered by the mix of sitting on the floor and in chairs. This constituted the domestic practicality of chairs for the Japanese. Therefore, such experiences of making and using chairs can be summarized as the awakening of a universe in the distance between the floor and the seat-height of Western chairs. It was a new frontier for Japanese designers, and low-seated chairs were born in this space. This article concludes that it marked the transition from Westernization to Japanese modern design.
Using Practice-Led Industrial/Product Design Research to Explore Opportunities to Support Manufacturing-Related Enterprise in Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) Countries
• Mark Evans, Timothy Whitehead
The profession of industrial/product design has the capacity to support wealth generation through a product-driven supply chain that extends across services that include manufacturing, distribution, sales and maintenance. Moving away from the more typical manufacturing approaches of developed countries, where the resources available to support designers employ advanced technologies and materials, this paper discusses an on-going UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project to explore ways in which industrial/product design can provide opportunities for entrepreneurship and employment in countries on the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) List and receive Overseas Development Assistance (ODA). Through practice-lad research with participants from Uganda, Kenya, Indonesia and Turkey; industrial/product design educators/researchers/practitioners shared knowledge and expertise and engaged in creative activity to translate propositions into proposals with the potential for manufacture in each of the four countries. The findings, articulated product visualizations, indicate significant potential to support manufacturing in countries in a variety of levels of economic development by adding value to the packaging of traditional foods; integrating low-cost imported components to add value to indigenous crafts and materials; producing contemporary furniture designs using materials that can be considered as traditional materials; and employing unorthodox and unexpected materials.
Preserving Craft Heritage by Forging Rural–Urban Connections
• Haodan Tan, Huaxin Wei, Eli Blevis
This study aims to explore the difficulties of preserving cultural heritage in rural areas and to inform better designs of computer systems to support such preservation. In this case study, we observed and documented craft cultures in three rural villages in China. Our methods include photo-ethnography, interview and observation. From analyzing various types of data, we were able to identify issues of cultural heritage preservation, including cultural identity and values. We propose a conceptual system design for an installation and software connecting rural craftspeople and people who appreciate crafts, as a means of fostering a mutual relationship of support and appreciation. We believe this relationship can help preserve cultural heritage in rural areas. Some of the system installation elements were prototyped in scale models. The paper’s primary contribution is the design field research, analysis of design field research and conceptualization.
Designing Language Learning for Migrant Workers’ Workplace Integration
• Young-ae Hahn, Nyamsuren Gombodoo
The number of migrant workers in South Korea is on the rise, but their inadequate Korean language skills prevent them from being promoted at work, or fairly treated as respected members of the society. In this study, in collaboration with a government-authorized language educational facility for immigrants, the authors investigated (a) challenges in migrant workers’ Korean as a second language learning, and (b) design principles of lessons and learning materials specifically targeted to their needs. Student and teacher interview data confirmed that the workers’ limited time for study, weak motivation, Korean colleagues’ indifferent attitude and limited teaching resources at educational facilities are major barriers to achieving higher levels of linguistic skills. From the data, the authors identified four design principles: personalized content, community participation, portability of materials and micro learning modules. Informal lessons via Facebook, factory safety signs and portable writing drill booklets are designed as on-going experimentations of the principles.
Designing One-Flat Church as Small-Scale Community Space in Densely Populated Urban Environment to Perform Both Sacred and Contemporary Functions
• Louis Poon Shek Wing
This research is based on the scenario in the context of Hong Kong, in which church has been built in densely populated urban environment restricted in flat space. The research objectives were: (1) firstly to investigate the relationship between theology and spatial design in Hong Kong Protestant church; (2) secondly, to analyze the issue of the lack of design with respect to sacred identity in the church of Hong Kong that leads to an unappealing and non-sacred appearance of Protestant church; (3) and finally, to establish theoretical standpoints on designing sacred space with contemporary quality without surrendering of the sacred identity. The aims of the research were to understand the influence of secularization to the rationale of church design and to generate an appropriate identity of church with a theoretical standpoint to serve the contemporary community effectively. In order to meet these objectives, the study comprised of a qualitative site observations of 171 churches, which provided comparative figures for the study of churches incorporated with design elements or no design elements. In Hong Kong approximately 775 one-flat churches, which are 66% of the total number of Protestant churches, are located in different layers of vertical space within this vertical city. When churches provide social services in the same limited space, the identity of church is surrendered to the need of the social community. This study endeavors to facilitate church design with the focus on the immanence quality in order to encounter the different spatial limitations in church design.
Design Dialogs as a Specific Mode of Communication: About the Ongoing Exploration of Solution Space
• Terry van Dijk, Matthew Cook
Decision-making with respect to urban design is a particular arena where designerly modes of interaction are used, but placed in the specific context of coordination across a variation of actors. The planning literature that describes how urban design is included in decision-making is poorly connected to design literature. This paper laments this disconnection and shows where design theories reflect planning theories, and where they can further complement in order to create a richer understanding of urban planning.
Urban Planning in the Middle East: Analyzing Al-Tahrir Square as a Public–Political Space in Iraq
• Rasha Al-Tameemi
Al-Tahrir Square, surrounded by commercial crowded streets, financial headquarters, and governmental institutions is one of the most iconic squares in Baghdad. It is part of daily life for many Iraqi people due to its central location, which is characterized by busy roads with honking cars. In this essay, I am going to explore Al-Tahrir Square in Baghdad, Iraq as a venue of rebellion for Iraqi people. Since 2015, Iraqi people from diverse backgrounds have been gathering in the square to protest for their rights every Friday. It has been the site of many historical events in Iraq although it has been established as a social place. I will explore the sociopolitical significance of Al-Tahrir Square by connecting the history of the place with how it has been changed since 1961 when the Freedom Monument was first open to the public. The research addresses the urban landscape of Al-Tahrir Square and its transformation over time, taking into consideration the political issues that affect it. I will analyze policies and regulations that have discouraged people from gathering in the Square to prevent political threats to the government and suggest ways to create safer spaces and mixed used attractions, modify the natural landscape of Al-Ummah Garden to make it more connected to the Square, and revitalize the existing kaleidoscope for closer proximity to Tigris River.
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Design and Digital Interaction
Just as the term design has been going through change, growth and expansion of meaning, and interpretation in practice and education – the same can be said for design research. The traditional boundaries of design are dissolving and connections are being established with other fields at an exponential rate. Based on the proceedings from the IASDR 2017 Conference, Re:Research is an edited collection that showcases a curated selection of 83 papers – just over half of the works presented at the conference. With topics ranging from the introduction of design in the primary education sector to designing information for Artificial Intelligence systems, this book collection demonstrates the diverse perspectives of design and design research. Divided into seven thematic volumes, this collection maps out where the field of design research is now.
From Software Engineering to Information Design
• Yvette Shen
Most academic methodologies are developed from a prescribed methodological process that is limited to a specific area of study. However, the disciplinary landscape in which the knowledge is established is being rapidly reconfigured. Given the vast varieties of practices and knowledge base required from information designers, it is even more crucial for them to look outside of the traditional visual design fields and seek diversities for better research and creation methods. The two disciplines, software engineering and information design, are often perceived as one provides technical solutions to the other. This essay intends to move beyond the common perception, and identify relevant issues in software engineering design that resonate with the information design process. The issues include the multi-component planning approach; the human-oriented agile method; design concepts such as abstraction, decomposition, component modularity, hierarchical relationship and extensibility. The perspectives from software engineering design and information design is examined through units of analysis, terminology explanations and forms of communications. The collective design methods and principles provide a systematic framework to the methodological thinking in information design. The discussion serves the purpose of encouraging more conceptual-based conversations between information design and other disciplines, especially in the fields of science and technology.
Designing Information for Artificial Intelligence: Path Recommendation and User Acceptance in a Virtual Space
• Jong Myoung Lee, Kyung Hoon Hyun
In this study, the authors propose two information layout strategies (informative layout and decisive layout) that influence the user acceptance rate on recommended information. The informative layout is the degree of descriptions in the recommendation process. The decisive layout is the degree of choices in recommendations. Thus, the objective of the paper is to discover how users’ acceptance of a recommendation changes when the recommendation is displayed in different degrees of informative and decisive layouts. To this end, we have conducted the following tasks: (1) sophisticated software was created with JavaScript to conduct experiments with users online; (2) experiment subjects (N=247) with various education and demographic levels were recruited; (3) user acceptance rate depending on the information layout strategy was collected; (4) the relationships between information layout strategy and user acceptance of the recommended information were computationally analyzed. The results of the study indicate that the information layout strategy proposed in this research significantly influences user acceptance of the recommended information. Also, this research identified effective combinations of informative and decisive layouts to maximize the user acceptance.
The Research on Design Framework for Citizen Science
• Zhiyong Fu, Jia Lin, Lu Wang
Citizen science is a process in which ordinary citizens contribute to scientific research. How to create citizen science design framework to achieve better awareness, initiative and action is our research focus. This paper will explore citizen science design in the context of smart city, on the basis of activity theory and by means of digital social innovation. “Smart City” concept provides new elements including social communication, collaborative design and innovative community to citizen science. With the rapid development of science and information and communication technologies (ICTs) and with the arrival of Web 2.0, social innovation is endowed with digital factors so as to be evolved to digital social innovation (DSI) which gives various design perspectives on citizen science and also plays an important part in establishing citizen science evaluation model. In this paper, a citizen science design framework consisting of citizen science content model, design model and evaluation model is proposed by discussing related theories, models and citizen science cases. It acts as not only design lead to inspire two citizen science case practices, but also an evaluation term in the view of citizen science. The framework and models developed in this research will hopefully be leveraged and refined to support citizen science design in the future.
Finding the Expectations of Smart Home and Designing the Meaningful Technology for Delivering Customers’ Satisfaction
• Yaliang Chuang, Lin-Lin Chen, Yu-Shan Athena Chen
Smart home is becoming a focus in both literature and product development practices. The current study employed a human-centered design approach to understand users’ desires and expectations from their living context. Six critical themes were developed via in-deep interviews, field observations and data analysis. They are housed as a supportive friend, atmosphere generator, theme songs for every moment, coordinator and reminder, life memory collector and routine builder for young generations. Those concepts were partially integrated to define the value proposition for the target user group of parents with young children. This guides the design ideation and video prototyping to illustrator the user experiences. Through a focus group discussion, the design concepts were validated with six potential customers. The results also show that the design concept has the potential to motivate children’s behaviors, help to build their routine, and has the flexibility to fulfill different needs toward the changes of the family’s life cycle.
Using Frame Analysis to Organize Designers’ Experience on the Cloud
• Julija Naskova
This paper demonstrates how Goffman’s frame analysis is applied in a research on designers’ experience with Cloud-based digital tools. At the base of Goffman’s structure is the “primary frame” – in this case designers’ experience with computer-based digital tools. These tools’ transition to the Cloud initiated by business are called “fabrications.” Goffman’s “structural issues in fabrication” such as “retransformations” and the “nature of recontainment” are also discussed through contemporary examples. These fabrications are used or “keyed” by “active agents” from various design fields. The data collected showed different levels of understanding of Cloud technology and the application of various tools in everyday design practices. Thus, the interviewees were clustered into three groups – designers, developers and artists. Their experiences form the creative, technology and experimental frame derived from keying of the primary frame. Design researchers can selectively borrow elements from frame analysis’ complex structure to build an effective user experience narrative.
(Un)intended Value Implications of Graphical Representations of Data
• Milena Radzikowska, Stan Ruecker
The design of meaningful graphical objects to represent collection items must balance the following: amount of useful information that can be communicated through the object’s graphical form, meaningful graphical difference between individual items or groups of items, and restraint in form complexity to allow for the simultaneous display of numerous collection items at a small size. How the user interprets difference and sameness and, more importantly, whether the user attaches hierarchical value to the emergent categories, may play a significant role in determining whether that user focuses attention on one set of data over another, on one set of processes over another, and ultimately, on one set of tasks over another. This paper examines the significant consequences for the understanding of the user resulting from representation of data, files and other objects in a human–computer interface (HCI), and proposes that new approaches may be indicated, given the growing complexity of what is being represented and how what is represented can be used.
Mapping Communication Design through the Web
• Giulia De Rossi, Paolo Ciuccarelli
Design is by nature an interdisciplinary, dynamic and fluid discipline. To define what design is has proved to be a very difficult – if not impossible and meaningless – exercise, making also the understanding of the evolution of both the design discipline and practice a complex challenge. A rapidly changing technological landscape increases the breadth of design both in geographical terms and by extending to new domains, merging with different and new disciplines. Communication Design especially, being closer to the information and the media spheres, is the most sensitive and receptive design area. Communication Design finds online a fertile ground for its growth and developments, thus the online environment and the Web especially can be explored, dug and mapped as mirrors of that evolution. The aim of our research is to map through the Web the complexity of the intersections between design as a discipline and design as a field of practice. Our exploration and representation of the online design territory covered four online environments: Behance, Wikipedia, Google and the websites of the top 100 design universities. The study has been conducted by using digital, statistical and visualization methods. This exploration seeks neither to confirm theories nor predict the future, rather, it wants to make explicit and observable what Communication Design has become today. It aims to screenshot the state of the art, the emerging paths, in order to understand where and how it is going to develop. The attempt is to make design as a complex phenomenon visible, through the construction of a set of maps and representations for professors, students and associations. These representations are tools to trigger reflections on the discipline and the profession, bringing a contribution to the experimental research in this field.
A Content Analysis of Wired Magazine and Self-Tracking Devices
• Serefraz Akyaman
Living in a modern society is becoming more complex, so in order to keep up with, a person should accomplish various kinds of task at once. Daily life requirements, obligations and the capacity of human memory lead us to collect and control our behaviors, bodies and lives through self-tracking devices. Aim of this paper analysis of emerging digitalized self-tracking trend through content analysis of Wired Magazine. Wired Magazine, both in printed and online, monthly, publish technology-related articles how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy and politics. It reaches more than 30 million people each month through wired.com, digital edition. Since the term “quantified self” emerged for the first time in Wired Magazine, for this reason Wired Magazine is one of the most important sources to be used for content analysis. This present study carries out a content analysis of all the issues until December 2016 through “self-tracking” and two other related terms: “quantified self” and “lifelogging.” The usage period and popularity of these terms and, the relation network with the main topics and the subtopics are examined. As a result, it is possible to define Wired Magazine as a medium in which industry–academia and users come together and, feed each other reciprocally. Wired Magazine has contributed significantly and continues to contribute to the development of the digitalized self-tracking trend in terms of its content.
Interaction Design and Use Innovation for Interactive Products
• Geehyuck Jeong, James Self
Product use innovation is a means to facilitate the design-driven innovation approach. We explore how the mode-of-use concept may apply to state-of-the-art product interactions to enhance user experience and provide opportunities for design-driven innovation within the interactive product space. To achieve this we apply taxonomy of interactions to classify interaction styles as along the two dimensions explanatory or exploratory and discrete or composite. Adopting the research through design approach two interactive mood lamps were developed and expressed as high-fidelity prototypes. These were then used as stimuli to evaluate the influence of interaction style on product experience. Results indicated the touch-free magic interaction style, an interaction providing explorative and composite modes of interaction, was initially considered more innovative in terms of use. However, participants also expressed negative emotions related to dissatisfaction and embarrassment toward the touch-free magic interaction due to an inability to intuitively understand the use functions. Implications for the application of use innovation within the interactive product context are finally discussed.
Study of the Implementability of Tactile Feedback While Operating Touch Panel Device: From Two Directions of Efficacy and Feasibility
• Jien Wakasugi, Masayoshi Kubo
In a few years, the number of apparatuses with touch panel displays like smartphones will increase. People who are visually impaired, hearing impaired and disabled can use tactile feedback for receiving incoming communications. However, opportunities for tactile feedback applications are limited. Our hypotheses follow: as there are haptics patterns suitable for use cases, we will design haptics samples of tactile feedback and inspect their effectiveness. This study focuses on haptics patterns showing a relationship between the user’s impression and various use situations. Previous studies have been insufficient, so our target subjects inspected a limited number of objects. This study consists of two inspections:
• We collected various haptics patterns that users had defined and analyzed the first inspection. For the next inspection, we manufactured a smartphone prototype. We matched the impression of eight haptics patterns types that we got from the subjects in the first analysis with different situations and tested various replies. Tests were repeated and recorded for various situations. As different haptics vibrations were added to e-mails, we inspected whether subjects could distinguish a difference in their meanings. Thus, we added different haptics patterns that corresponded to various situations. We concluded the hypothesis was effective for subjects. We could inspect the hypotheses in relation to subjects’ impressions of the haptics pattern.
• Additionally, we obtained different results between elders and youths. Consequently, we suggested design guidelines for the new tactile feedback of the smartphone application. We suspect that haptics will be possible for a variety of interactive designs.
Sensory Reflection toward Product Design Ideation
• Pratiksha Prabhakar, Heekyoung Jung, Vittoria Daiello
As humans’ information processing abilities, have become more and more disconnected from their senses due to an increasing quantity of abstract information, so have design processes. There is a demand for designers to include human sensation as part of engaging product forms and experiences. This qualitative case study explores the role of senses and their potential use in design ideation. A literature review of related theoretical and pragmatic perspectives and a survey of 15–20 product examples that provide unique sensory experiences are analyzed and sorted through four sensory design strategies: Sensory Augmentation, Conversion, Transition and Isolation. Using the four strategies as core concepts, a Sensory Reflective Framework with a mindful focus on sensory appreciation and translation is proposed to support designers’ ideation in creating unique product forms and experiences. The paper reports the process and findings of a sensory ideation workshop which was conducted based on the framework, and further discusses the development and implications of the framework in supporting designers’ sensory ideation.
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Design and Living Well
Just as the term design has been going through change, growth and expansion of meaning, and interpretation in practice and education – the same can be said for design research. The traditional boundaries of design are dissolving and connections are being established with other fields at an exponential rate. Based on the proceedings from the IASDR 2017 Conference, Re:Research is an edited collection that showcases a curated selection of 83 papers – just over half of the works presented at the conference. With topics ranging from the introduction of design in the primary education sector to designing information for Artificial Intelligence systems, this book collection demonstrates the diverse perspectives of design and design research. Divided into seven thematic volumes, this collection maps out where the field of design research is now.
Using Frameworks to Cross Interdisciplinary Boundaries: Addressing Wellness
• Traci Rose RiderIncreasing interest is seen at the intersection of architecture and health. The built environment has become associated with a number of negative health outcomes including obesity, cancers and diabetes. Engaging design students in these inquiries surrounding health is integral in preparing them for future practice. This paper reviews the conceptual development and tested implementation of an interdisciplinary course focusing on the well-being and overall health of the occupant, using primary and secondary framework structures in the vein of Groat and Wang’s logical argumentation. The reviewed course engages interdisciplinary teams composed of students from the School of Architecture, the College of Engineering and the College of Natural Resources, with private practice. The course puts forth an effort to break out of the conventional pedagogical structure found in architectural education, primarily the studio and large lecture spaces. The course has been specifically designed to: (1) establish a framework for common content relating to health in the built environment across disciplinary boundaries; (2) build meaningful partnerships between interdisciplinary student groups; and (3) establish a common vocabulary between architectural education and aligned disciplines regarding health and the built environment. The course structure, activities and assessments are reviewed, proposing a solid framework for including integrated design and themes of health in architectural education.
Qualities of Public Health: Toward an Analysis of Aesthetic Features of Public Policies
• Sébastien Proulx, Philippe Gauthier, Yaprak HamaratDesign is gaining popularity as a way to address complex social problems in various fields of practices. Strangely, public health which, by nature, is concerned by such kinds of problems, remains foreign to this way of thinking. Building on the increasing popularity of design in policy-making, we stress that public health could also benefit from this conceptual yet pragmatic framework. To open a critical perspective about the potential of design for public health, we examine four design projects that address social determinants of health and whose outcomes promote healthy living habits. Finally, we argue that the interest of design for public health lies on its concern for the users’ aesthetic experience emerging of its encounter with the touchpoints that embody health policies. This contribution ought to act as a stepping stone to open a debate about design as offering a critical perspective for the practice and study of public health.
Participatory Design for Behavior Change: An Integrative Approach to Healthcare Quality Improvement
• Fernando Carvalho, Gyuchan Thomas Jun, Val MitchellBehavior insights have been extensively applied to public policy and service design. The potential for an expanded use of behavior change to healthcare quality improvement has been underlined in the England’s National Health Service Five-Year Forward View report, in which staff behavior is connected to the quality of care delivered to patients and better clinical practice. Improving the quality of healthcare service delivery involves adopting improvement cycles that are conducted by multiple agents through systematic processes of change and evaluation. Despite the recognition that some of the recurring challenges to improve healthcare services are behavioral in essence, there is insufficient evidence about how behavioral insights can be successfully applied to quality improvement in healthcare. Simultaneously, the discussion on how to better engage participants in intervention design, and how to better enable participation are not seen as fundamental components of behavior change frameworks. This paper presents an integrative approach, stemming from comprehensive literature review and an ongoing case study, in which participatory design is used as the conduit to activate stakeholder engagement in the application of a behavior change framework, aiming to improve the processes of diagnosing and managing urinary tract infection in the emergency department of a hospital in England. Preliminary findings show positive results regarding the combined use of participatory design and behavior change tools in the development of a shared-vision of the challenges in question, and the collaborative establishment of priorities of action, potential solution routes and evaluation strategies.
Development of a Design Competence Model for Learners of Human-Centered Design
• Christi ZuberLearning a new competence and attempting to perform it within an organization not only takes time, but it is heavily influenced by the real-world context of day-to-day work culture and individual perceptions. The little-understood world of learning Human-Centered Design (HCD) within an organization is studied over 1 year in inside of a group of healthcare organizations through a training and mentoring program called the “Innovation Catalyst Program.” Deep insights and personal narratives are gathered by studying learners and their coaches in real-time observations and conversations. A dynamic story unfolds as those who are learning creative approaches for organizational innovation are coached by those with many years of experience on the topic. These same participants provide feedback on the frameworks generated. The result of this Longitudinal Grounded Theory field study is a new actionable model for understanding experiences and approaches to learning HCD within the context of an organization, a novel approach to assessing development, and ultimately, a way to empower individuals with the mindsets and skillsets of HCD for real-world challenges.
Health Education that Breaks through Language Barriers: Prototyping and Evaluation of Child Care-Related ICT Self-Learning Resource
• Toshinori Anzai, Kazuyo Matsuura, Takanobu Yakubo, Tomoko Mikami, Kouta UemuraThis paper explores the findings of a study into the telecommunications environment in Mongolia. It was hoped that an effective self-learning resource for the prevention of developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH) in infants for distribution to parents in that country could be created and evaluated using these findings. Based on a field survey conducted in Mongolia, the most effective format this resource should take was identified. A prototype was created that featured video taken from both a third-person and parent’s (first-person) perspective. After further evaluation, this prototype is to undergo revisions that will be assessed in Japan and Mongolia before a final version is distributed utilizing information and communication technologies (ICT). It was found that a visual message that did not rely on written language was the most effective means of communicating the desired message. With input from nursing staff in Mongolia, the Sapporo City University School of Design and School of Nursing came to leverage their respective strengths to create an effective prototype that will be used as the basis for a resource for relaying this preventive information to the target audience.
Empowering the Preschool Children: A Service Platform Design Aiming at the Communication of Balanced Diet Information
• Xing ZhouChildhood obesity increases the risk of obesity in adulthood and is associated with cardiovascular disease risk factors. The prevalence of overweight and obesity is increasing in China. It is necessary to develop an intervention project for preschool children. Based on a service design project aiming at the communication of balanced diet information to the preschool children in China, this paper discusses how to take advantage of the digital platform and game-based learning to empower the preschool children. It argues for the importance of the DIKW hierarchy for empowerment. It also proposes an innovative model to involve new stakeholders into the whole system and to improve the viability of the project.
Snack Food Package Design: Exploratory Study on Children’s Snack Choices and Design Elements
- Sunghyun R. Kang, Debra Satterfield, Nora LadjahasanPackaging is an essential element of design for both consumers and businesses. Product packaging functions both as a communication tool for product information and for brand messages. In addition, the role of visual elements and messages on snack packages are not well understood. This is particularly true from the standpoint of influencing the selection of snack food in children, even though there has been growth in the economic power of children as a consumer group. Therefore, this study examines: (1) the role of design variables such as typography, images and the stylistic combination of these visual elements in affecting children’s snack food selection; (2) the role of health messages on children’s snack food selections; and (3) the role of perceived “healthiness” in influencing children’s snack food selections. Digitally simulated snack package images were created and sixty children ages 9–13 were recruited for this study. From these design variables, “preferred-selections” and “perceived healthy-selection” of children in this age group were identified.
Breaking through Fuzzy Positioning: Diverse Design Communication Strategies for Older Adults’ Healthcare Wearables
- Chen Li, Chang-Franw LeeIn this study, based on the perception of older adults, fuzzy positioning of healthcare wearables and impacts of differentiated product positioning on human considerations and design communication strategies are studied. Empirical researches are performed by adopting both quantitative research (248 questionnaires for clustering and regression analysis) and qualitative research (15 cases for in-depth interview). The perceptions of older adults on product positioning are divided into three types: Tech-Aid, Fash-Acc and Fash-Tech. Results indicate that the influential human considerations for each positioning were different from each other. Through coding and storyline analysis, diverse communication strategies are found for each positioning. The outcomes for each type are as follows. For Tech-Aid, wherein older adults lay emphasis on usefulness, ease of use and privacy, the designers can adopt a calm communication strategy by giving priority to older adults’ control power, fitting symptoms, user-friendly and cautious interconnection. For Fash-Acc, wherein older adults focus on personal image, aesthetic appearance and ease of use, an active communication strategy for modeling a style for elderly fashion that agrees with aesthetic appreciation and simplified operation can be adopted. For Fash-Tech, wherein older adults require to integrate usefulness, ease of use, aesthetic appearance, comfort, privacy and self-image, a persuasive communication strategy can be used, through which designers can offer older adults more data insights and entertainment, along with data association, and in the meantime, reduce data interferences and pay attention to style modality and appropriate display with context fusion and contact comfort.
Developing Design Criteria for iPad Stands to Meet the Needs of Older Adults in Group Settings
• Sonja Pedell, Jeanie Beh, Gianni Renda, Emily WrightThis paper details the evaluation process undertaken to create criteria for the development of an iPad stand for elderly users. Emphasis is on the requirements elicitation stage with end users in the field. Thirty-two elderly participants taking part in the activity group as part of the Ageing-Well program of a City Council in a cosmopolitan area in Australia were part of an evaluation in which three existing iPad stands were trialed. While commercially available stands are abundant, specific problems such as reduced grip, basic technical understanding of the stand, and concerns surrounding stability were encountered within the group. Observation and semistructured interviews were undertaken with the cohort to determine factors surrounding the suitability and uptake of these stands by elderly users – most of them with some disabilities – with findings suggesting that current tablet stands require fine levels of dexterity, which may not be appropriate for elderly users where such a device is needed. While usability in setting up the stand and use is a strong factor, aesthetics and material qualities are equally important for enjoyable use. In addition, the use of iPads in social activities between two or more older adults has specific demands in terms of visibility of screen, sturdiness and easy movement that is not considered by current tablet stands. The paper ends with proposing design recommendations. Further research is required to develop a suitable solution and refines these.
Innovative Handle Design and Evaluation of Woks for Middle-Aged and Elderly People
• Fong-Gong Wu, Yu-Chi Lin, Hsiao-Han SunWith the enhancement of medical technology and human living standards, the world is showing a trajectory toward an aging society. The elders generally suffer from degeneration, which may cause problems in their daily lives. Aging has since become a major issue of scientific researches. Elders in Taiwan mostly live alone or with a partner. Because eating out is not a habit, cooking often plays an important role in their lives. Due to the degeneration happening to their bodies, the danger during cooking activities increases. Therefore, it is necessary for them to seek help from assistive devices. In this research, we will make assistive design models that help elders use woks. The designs are for the task we have chosen from our investigation. We will also evaluate the effect of the aids objectively using the EMG system, and collect the iEMG value for evaluation. The iEMG values were collected from four muscles (FDC, FCR, biceps and deltoids). Eight middle-aged participants who will become elders in the near future were invited to participate in the experiment. Four design solutions were chosen from seven working models. The design solutions were all helpful to the task, and the performances of the stove design solutions are significantly better than the original wok. The degrees of hand trembling while performing tasks were also measured; however, the differences were not significant.
Designing with and for People with Dementia: Developing a Mindful Interdisciplinary Co-Design Methodology
• Kristina Niedderer, Isabelle Tournier, Donna Maria Coleston-Shields, Michael Craven, Julie Gosling, Julia A. Garde, Ben Salter, Michaelle Bosse, Ingeborg GriffioenThis paper reports on the development of a mindful interdisciplinary design methodology in the context of the MinD project research into designing for and with people with dementia, which takes the particular focus on supporting the subjective well-being and self-empowerment of people with early to mid-stage dementia in social context. Existing research is for the most part focused on functional support and safe-keeping from the perspective of the carer. References to decision-making and empowerment are predominantly related to action planning for dementia care or advance care planning. References to care and social interaction show that caregivers tend to take a deficit-oriented perspective, and occupation of people with dementia is often associated with doing “something” with little focus on the meaningfulness of the activity. Furthermore, caregivers and people with dementia tend to differ in their perspectives, e.g. on assistive devices, which might offer support. The MinD project, has therefore developed an interdisciplinary co-design methodology in which the voices to people with dementia contribute to better understanding and developing mindful design solutions that support people with dementia with regard to their the subjective well-being and self-empowerment a well as meaningful and equitable social engagement. This paper discussed the design methodological framework and methods developed for the data collection and design development phases of the project, and their rationale. It thus makes a contribution to interdisciplinary methodologies in the area of design for health.
Assessing a Rehabilitation Living Lab Research Project: The Meta-Analysis of an Inclusive Environment for People with Disabilities
• Tiiu Poldma, Sylvain Bertin, Sara Ahmed, Guylaine Le Dorze, Keiko Shikako-ThomasThis paper presents the results of a research based Living Lab experience, where people participate together as users, researchers, stakeholders and collaborators working to effect change to improve social inclusion and social participation for persons with functional difficulties. The Rehabilitation Living Lab in the Mall (RehabMall) transforms an urban shopping mall into an interdisciplinary, multi-sectorial research platform that supports multiple projects investigating what constitutes an accessible and inclusive environment for people with physical, sensory and cognitive disabilities. We present an overview of the RehabMALL Living Lab, the contexts of the project and the project meta-analysis to present the salient issues emerging from the projects that were done. Grounded in a design research approach, and inspired by the Ecological Systems Theory of Bronfenbrenner (1979), the investigations conducted focus on subjective and inter-subjective experiences within understanding obstacles and facilitators that frame how people experience going to the mall, and how the physical, cognitive and virtual environments that support these activities might be better served. Disability is defined within the framework of the “World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning.” The overview of the project is presented with particular attention to the various collaborations and partnerships created alongside the issues that emerge in terms of results, and how people might be better served when public spaces are designed with their input and within a perspective of universal design.
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Giuseppe Pagano
More LessGiuseppe Pagano-Pogatschnig (1896–1945) was a twentieth-century polymath operating at the intersection between architecture, media, design and the arts. He was an exhibition and furniture designer, curator, photographer, editor, writer and architect. A dedicated Fascist turned Resistance fighter, he was active in Italy’s most dramatic social and political era.
Giuseppe Pagano provides a comprehensive overview of the influential architect and his contribution to the development of modern architecture. It follows a central biographical line with in-depth, mini chapter contributions on aspects of Pagano’s cultural production, concluding with writings by Pagano himself and a critical bibliography to aid scholars in further study.
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Philosophical Frameworks and Design Processes
Just as the term design has been going through change, growth and expansion of meaning, and interpretation in practice and education – the same can be said for design research. The traditional boundaries of design are dissolving and connections are being established with other fields at an exponential rate. Based on the proceedings from the IASDR 2017 Conference, Re:Research is an edited collection that showcases a curated selection of 83 papers – just over half of the works presented at the conference. With topics ranging from the introduction of design in the primary education sector to designing information for Artificial Intelligence systems, this book collection demonstrates the diverse perspectives of design and design research. Divided into seven thematic volumes, this collection maps out where the field of design research is now.
Two Blind Spots in Design Thinking
- Estelle Berger
From the 1980s, design thinking has emerged in companies as a method for practical and creative problem solving, based on designers’ way of thinking, integrated into a rational and iterative model to accompany the process. In companies, design thinking helped valuing creative teamwork, though not necessarily professional designers’ expertise. By pointing out two blind spots in design thinking models, as currently understood and implemented, this paper aims at shedding light on two rarely described traits of designers’ self. The first relies in problem framing, a breaking point that deeply escapes determinism. The second blind spot questions the post project process. We thus seek to portray designers’ singularity, in order to stimulate critical reflection and encourage the opening-up to design culture. Companies and organizations willing to make the most of designers’ expertise would gain acknowledging their critical heteronomy to foster innovation based on strong and disruptive visions, beyond an out-of-date problem-solving approach to design.
Creating Different Modes of Existence: Toward an Ontological Ethics of Design
- Jamie Brassett
This paper will address some design concerns relating to philosopher Étienne Souriau’s work Les différents modes d’existence (2009). This has important bearings upon design because, first, this philosophical attitude thinks of designing not as an act of forming objects with identity and meaning, but rather as a process of delivering things that allow for a multiplicity of creative remodulation of our very existences. Secondly, Souriau unpicks the concept of a being existing as a unified identity and redefines existence as a creative act of nonstop production of a variety of modes of existence. In doing this he not only moves ontological considerations to the fore of philosophical discussions away from epistemological ones, but does so in such a way as to align with attitudes to ethics that relate it to ontology – notably the work of Spinoza. (This places Souriau in a philosophical lineage that leads back, for example, to Nietzsche and Whitehead, and forward [from his era] to Deleuze and Guattari.) In thinking both ontology and ethics together, this paper will introduce a different approach to the ethics of design.
Investigating Ideation Flexibility through Incremental to Radical Heuristics
- Ian Baker, Daniel Sevier, Seda McKilligan, Kathryn W. Jablokow, Shanna R. Daly, Eli M. Silk
The concept of design thinking has received increasing attention during recent years, particularly from managers around the world. However, despite being the subject of a vast number of articles and books stating its importance, the effectiveness of this approach is unclear, as the claims about the concept are not grounded on empirical studies or evaluations. In this study, we investigated the perceptions of six design thinking methods of 21 managers in the agriculture industry as they explored employee- and business-related problems and solutions using these tools in a 6-hour workshop. The results from pre and post-survey responses suggest that the managers agreed on the value design thinking could bring to their own domains and were able to articulate on how they can use them in solving problems. We conclude by proposing directions for research to further explore adaptation of design thinking for the management practice context.
Design Research and Innovation Model Using Layered Clusters of Displaced Prototypes
- Juan de la Rosa, Stan Ruecker
The ability of design to recognize the wicked problems inside complex systems and find possible ways to modify them, has led other disciplines to try to understand the design process and apply it to many areas of knowledge not traditionally associated with design. In additional, design’s creative solutions and ability to innovate have made designers a valuable resource in the contemporary economy. Nevertheless, there is still an unnecessarily constraining polemic about the meaning and model of the process of academic research in the field of design, the ways in which design research should be conducted and the specific knowledge that is produced with the design research process. This paper tries to broaden the discourse by describing the prototype as a basic element of the process of design, since it is connected to a specific type of knowledge and based on the working skills of the designer; it also proposes a model of the use of prototypes as a research tool based on four different theoretical concepts whose importance in the field of design has been strongly established by different academic communities around the world. These are embodied knowledge, displacement, complexity and that we learn about the world through transforming it. Pursuing these models, we develop a process to intentionally produce designerly knowledge of complex dynamic systems, using layered clusters of displaced prototypes.
Solution-Generation Design Profiles: Reflection on “Reflection in Action”
- Shoshi Bar-Eli
Solution-generation design behavior in general, and “reflection-in-action” in particular, can serve to differentiate designers, recognizing their personal reflecting when designing. In psychology, reflection is found a more robust tool to enhance task performance after feedback from a personal “device” that generates the process itself while interacting with visual representation. Differences among students’ interior design processes appear in their solution-generation design behavior. A “think aloud” experiment identified solution generation behavior profiles. Qualitative and quantitative methodologies showed how design characteristics unite, forming patterns of design behavior. A comprehensive picture of designers’ differences emerged. The research aimed:
- to identify individual design students’ solution-generation profiles based on design characteristics;
- to show how reflection-in-action appearing in the profiles can serve to predict how novice designers learn and act when solving a design problem;
- to enhance the uniqueness of reflection-in-action for designers as distinct from reflection in other fields.
Four distinct solution-generation profiles emerged, each showing a different type of reflective acts. Identifying reflection-in-action type can robustly predict how designers develop design solutions and help develop pedagogical concepts, strategies and tools.
Let’s Get Divorced: Pragmatic and Critical Constructive Design Research
- Jodi Forlizzi, Ilpo Koskinen, Paul Hekkert, John Zimmerman
Over the last two decades, constructive design research (CDR) –also known as Research through Design – has become an accepted mode of scholarly inquiry within the design research community. CDR is a broad term encompassing almost any kind of research that uses design action as a mode of inquiry. It has been described as having three distinct genres: lab, field and showroom. The lab and field genres typically take a pragmatic stance, making things as a way of investigating what preferred futures might be. In contrast, research done following the showroom approach (more commonly known as critical design [CD], speculative design or design fictions) offers a polemic and sometimes also a critique of the current state embodied in an artifact. Recently, we have observed a growing conflict within the design research community between pragmatic and critical researchers. To help reduce this conflict, we call for a divorce between CD and pragmatic CDR. We clarify how CDR and CD exist along a continuum. We conclude with suggestions for the design research community, about how each unique research approach can be used singly or in combination and how they can push the boundaries of academic design research in new collaboration with different disciplines.
Critical and Speculative Design Practice and Semiotics: Meaning-Crafting for Futures Ready Brands
- Malex Salamanques
This article concerns the use of critical design practices within the context of commercial semiotics, arguing that incorporating practices from a critical design approach is valuable for client brands, but also an important means with which to incite brands to consider more deeply their role in shaping the future. As an alternative to the oppositional approach frequently taken by critical design practitioners, working through design practices collaboratively alongside client brands creates potential for the radical changes sought by many of the movement’s vanguard. A case study of recent work with a corporate client demonstrates the practical effects of using critical design practice within a commercial setting, proving the complementarity between critical design practice and commercial semiotics – where the confluence of the thinking brought new value to improve product design for example – and points to the value of using current leading edge thinking within the design community.
Beyond Forecasting: A Design-Inspired Foresight Approach for Preferable Futures
- Jorn Buhring, Ilpo Koskinen
This paper engages with the literature to present different perspectives between forecasting and foresight in strategic design, while drawing insights derived from futures studies that can be applied in form of a design-inspired foresight approach for designers and interdisciplinary innovation teams increasingly called upon to help envisage preferable futures. Demonstrating this process in applied research, relevant examples are drawn from a 2016 Financial Services industry futures study to the year 2030. While the financial services industry exemplifies an ideal case for design-inspired foresight, the aims of this paper are primarily to establish the peculiarities between traditional forecasting applications and a design-inspired foresight visioning approach as strategic design activities for selecting preferable futures. Underlining the contribution of this paper is the value of design futures thinking as a creative and divergent thought process, which has the potential to respond to the much broader organizational reforms needed to sustain in today’s rapidly evolving business environment.
Developing DIVE, a Design-Led Futures Technique for SMEs
- Ricardo Mejia Sarmiento, Gert Pasman, Erik Jan Hultink, Pieter Jan Stappers
Futures techniques have long been used in large enterprises as designerly means to explore the future and guide innovation. In the automotive industry, for instance, the development of concept cars is a technique which has repeatedly proven its value. However, while big companies have broadly embraced futures techniques, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have lagged behind in applying them, largely because they are too resource-intensive and poorly suited to the SMEs’ needs and idiosyncrasies. To address this issue, we developed DIVE: Design, Innovation, Vision, and Exploration, a design-led futures technique for SMEs. Its development began with an inquiry into concept cars in the automotive industry and concept products and services in other industries. We then combined the insights derived from these design practices with elements of the existing techniques of critical design and design fiction into the creation of DIVE’s preliminary first version, which was then applied and evaluated in two iterations with SMEs, resulting in DIVE’s alpha version. After both iterations in context, it seems that DIVE suits the SMEs because of its compact and inexpensive activities which emphasize making and storytelling. Although the results of these activities might be less flashy than concept cars, these simple prototypes and videos help SMEs internalize and share a clear image of a preferable future, commonly known as vision. Developing DIVE thus helped us explore how design can support SMEs in envisioning the future in the context of innovation.
Mapping for Mindsets of Possibility During Home Downsizing
- Lisa Otto
How can design orient people to an expanded sense of future possibility? Design researchers are beginning to recognize design’s potential role not solely in producing products, services and strategies but, instead, in shifting mindsets and behaviors. This shift requires a different view of the design practice, from engaging users to gather insights to be implemented, to that process as the actual material of the design. Borrowing from the framework of practice-oriented design, a first step in these processes is expanding participants’ understanding of future possibilities. In opening future possibilities, one recognizes an expanded range of futures and, ideally, engages in dialog with other people and their range of possibilities. This paper introduces mapping activities that are intended to reframe participants’ perception of possible futures. This study conducted pilot workshops with participants who were downsizing their home and struggling with decisions about their things and spaces. This paper argues that working with people already engaged in life transitions such as downsizing presents a rich opportunity for these futuring [sic] methods, as they are already beginning to grapple with designing for possible futures. These methods provide a stake in the ground for future exploration of potential methods to engender mindsets of possibility and engage in trialing methods like living labs.
Storytelling Technique for Building Use-Case Scenarios for Design Development
- Sukwoo Jang, Ki-young Nam
Numerous studies have dealt with what kind of value narrative can have for creating a more effective design process. However, there is lack of consideration of storytelling techniques on a stage-by-stage level, where each stage of storytelling technique can draw attention to detailed content for creating use-case scenarios for design development. This research aims to identify the potential implications for design development by using storytelling techniques. For the empirical research, two types of workshops were conducted in order to select the most appropriate storytelling technique for building use-case scenarios, and to determine the relationship between the two methods. Afterwards, co-occurrence analysis was conducted to examine how each step of storytelling technique can help designers develop an enriched content of use-case scenario. Subsequently, the major findings of this research are further discussed, dealing with how each of the storytelling technique steps can help designers to incorporate important issues when building use-case scenarios for design development. These issues are: alternative and competitor’s solution which can aid designers to create better design features; status quo bias of user which can help the designer investigate the occurring reason of the issue; and finally, social/political values of user which have the potential of guiding designers to create strengthened user experience. The results of this research help designers and design researchers concentrate on crucial factors such as the alternative or competitor’s solution, the status quo bias of user, and social/political values of the user when dealing with issues of building use-case scenarios.
Group Storymaking: Understanding an Unfamiliar Target Group through Participatory Storytelling
- Hankyung Kim, Soonju Lee, Youn-kyung Lim
Based on a sound research plan, qualitative user data help designers understand needs, behaviors and frustrations of a target user group. However, when a design team attempts to design for unfamiliar target groups, it is extremely difficult to accurately observe and understand them by simply using traditional research methods such as interviews and observation. As a result, the quality of user research data can be called into a question, which leads to unsatisfying design solutions. Inspired by a fiction writer’s technique of generating stories together with readers, we present the new method, Group Storymaking that supports designers to quickly gain broad and clear understanding of an unfamiliar target group throughout a story-making activity with actual users. We envision Group Storymaking as a new user study method that designers can easily implement to learn about an unfamiliar target, involving actual users in a research process with less time and cost commitment.
Animation as a Creative Tool: Insights into the Complex
- Ian Balmain Hewitt, David A. Parkinson, Kevin H. Hilton
A Design for Service (DfS) approach has been linked with impacts that significantly alter touchpoints, services and organizational culture. However, there is no model with which to assess the extent to which these impacts can be considered transformational. In the absence of such a model, the authors have reviewed literature on subjects including the transformational potential of design; characteristics of transformational design; transformational change; and organizational change. From this review, six indicators of transformational change in design projects have been identified: evidence of nontraditional transformative design objects; evidence of a new perspective; evidence of a community of advocates; evidence of design capability; evidence of new power dynamics; and evidence of new organizational standards. These indicators, along with an assessment scale, have been used to successfully review the findings from a doctoral study exploring the impact of the DfS approach in Voluntary Community Sector (VCS) organizations. This paper presents this model as a first-step to establishing a method to helpfully gauge the extent of transformational impact in design projects.
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Teaching and Learning Design
Just as the term design has been going through change, growth and expansion of meaning, and interpretation in practice and education – the same can be said for design research. The traditional boundaries of design are dissolving and connections are being established with other fields at an exponential rate. Based on the proceedings from the 2017 International Association of Societies of Design Research conference, Re:Research is an edited collection that showcases a curated selection of 83 papers – just over half of the works presented at the conference. With topics ranging from the introduction of design in the primary education sector to designing information for Artificial Intelligence systems, this book collection demonstrates the diverse perspectives of design and design research. Divided into seven thematic volumes, this collection maps out where the field of design research is now.
Opening a Design Education Pipeline from University to K-12 and Back
• Peter Scupelli, Doris Wells-Papanek, Judy Brooks, Arnold Wasserman
To prepare students to imagine desirable futures amidst current planetary-level challenges, design educators must think and act in new ways. In this paper, we describe a pilot study that illustrates how educators might teach K-12 students and university design students to situate their making within transitional times in a volatile and exponentially changing world. We describe how to best situate students to align design thinking and learning with future foresight. Here we present a pilot test and evaluate how a university-level Design Futures course content, approach, and scaffolded instructional materials – can be adapted for use in K-12 Design Learning Challenges. We describe the K-12 design-based learning challenges/experiences developed and implemented by the Design Learning Network (DLN). The Design Futures course we describe in this paper is a required course for third-year undergraduate students in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. The “x” signifies a different type of design that aligns short-term action with long-term goals. The course integrates design thinking and learning with long-horizon future scenario foresight. Broadly speaking, we ask how might portions of a design course be taught and experienced by teachers and students of two different demographics: within the university (Design Undergraduates) and in K-12 (via DLN). This pilot study is descriptive in nature; in future work, we seek to assess learning outcomes across university and K-12 courses. We believe the approach described is relevant for lifelong learners (e.g., post-graduate-level, career development, transitional adult education).
Re-Clarifying Design Problems Through Questions for Secondary School Children: An Example Based on Design Problem Identification in Singapore Pre-Tertiary Design Education
• Wei Leong, Leon Loh, Hwee Mui, Grace Kwek, Wei Leong Lee
It is believed that secondary school students often define design problems in the design coursework superficially due to various reasons such as lack of exposure, inexperience and the lack of research skills. Questioning techniques have long been associated with the development of critical thinking. Based on this context and assumption, the current study aimed to explore the use of questioning techniques to enable pre-tertiary students to improve their understanding of design problems by using questions to critique their thinking and decision-making processes and in turn, generate more effective design solutions. A qualitative approach is adopted in this study to identify the trajectories of students during design problem identification and clarification process. Using student design journals as a form of record for action and thoughts, they are analyzed and supplemented by hearing survey with the teacher-in-charge. From the study, the following points can be concluded: (1) questions can be a useful tool to facilitate a better understanding of the design problem. (2) The process of identification and clarification of design problem is important in the development of critical thinking skills and social-emotional skills of the students. (3) It is important that students are given time and opportunity to find out the problems by themselves. (4) Teachers can be important role models as students may pick up questioning techniques from teacher–student discussions. (5) Departmental reviews and built-in professional development time for weekly reviews on teaching and learning strategies are necessary for the continual improvement D&T education.
Surveying Stakeholders: Research Informing Design Curriculum
• Andrea Quam
Fundamental to design education is the creation and structure of curriculum. Neither the creation of design curriculum, nor the revaluation of existing curriculum is well documented. With no clear documentation of precedent, best practices are left open to debate. This paper and presentation will discuss the use of a survey as a research tool to assess existing curriculum at Iowa State University in the United States. This tool allowed the needs and perspectives of the program’s diverse stakeholders to be better understood. Utilizing survey methods, research revealed the convergence and divergence of stakeholders’ philosophies, theories and needs in relation to design curriculum. Accreditation and professional licensing provide base level of guidelines for design curriculum in the United States. However, each program’s curricular structure beyond these guidelines is a complicated balance of resources, facilities, faculty and the type of institution in which it is housed. Once established, a program’s curriculum is rarely reassessed as a whole, but instead updated with the hasty addition of classes upon an existing curricular structure. Curriculum is infrequently re-addressed, and when it is, it is typically based on the experience and opinions of a select group of faculty. This paper presents how a survey was developed to collect data to inform curricular decision-making, enabling the reduction of faculty bias and speculation in the process. Lessons learned from the development of this research tool will be shared so it might be replicated at other institutions, and be efficiently repeated periodically to ensure currency of a program’s curriculum.
New Challenges when Teaching UX Students to Sketch and Prototype
• Joep Frens, Jodi Forlizzi, John Zimmerman
In this paper we report on new challenges when teaching User Experience (UX) students how to sketch and prototype their designs. We argue that UX students sketch and prototype differently than other design students, and we discuss how changes in the field necessitate a response in education. We describe sketching and prototyping as a continuum that students successfully traverse when they follow a process of “double loop learning.” We highlight three new challenges: (1) New computational design materials, (2) new maker tools and (3) changes within the tech industry. We explore these three challenges through examples from our students, and we outline strategies for sketching and prototyping in this new reality. We conclude that this is a starting point for further work on keeping education up to speed with practice.
How to Teach Industrial Design?: A Case Study of College Education for Design Beginners
• Joomyung Rhi
Industrial design education has existed for a long time as part of the university system, but the curriculum and contents of each subject vary considerably from school to school. In recent years, the introduction of new concepts that change the definition of design has blurred the boundaries of design, making the curriculum different. Establishing a standard curriculum to address these challenges is an important task, but it is necessary to fully understand how design education actually takes place and to share content with educators. This paper aims to contribute to the debate on industrial design education by fully disclosing the process and results of the first stage of industrial design education of a university by autobiographical method. The first course, Product Design Practice 1, is a studio class based on a task feedback iteration system. Students are required to submit assignments showing weekly progress. The instructor reviewed the assignments submitted before the class and gave written comments in class. In addition, details of the design process and method that are difficult to identify as novice students are learned through twelve case studies and applied to the project. This Task Feedback Repeating Class system gives students the opportunity to implement design ability while gaining detailed skills with a comprehensive view. Through this process, the researcher got a reflection on the class and implications for the improvement of the class.
Preliminary Study on the Learning Pressure of Undergraduate Industrial Design Students
- Wenzhi Chen
Learning pressure affects students’ learning process and performance. Industrial design education emphasizes that operations on real design problems that have heavy working loads may cause learning pressure. The purpose of this study is to explore the issues causing learning pressure and the pressure management strategies of undergraduate industrial design students. There were 297 students who participated in the questionnaire survey. The main findings are as follows: First, learning pressure includes academic pressure, peer pressure, self-expectations, time pressure, financial pressure, pressure from instructors, external pressure, future career, pressure from parents, resource pressure, achievement and situational pressure. In addition, the main learning pressure is caused by finance, time, resources, external issues and future career. Second, the pressure management strategies include problem solving, procrastination and escape, help seeking, leisure, emotional management and self-adjustment. The most useful strategy for managing pressure is leisure, and procrastination and escape is the least useful strategy. Third, all learning pressures are significantly correlated with procrastination and escape strategy, but the coefficients are low. The results can be a reference for industrial design education and related research.
Rewarding Risk: Exploring How to Encourage Learning that Comes from Taking Risks
• Dennis Cheatham
High-stakes testing that became the norm after the “No Child Left Behind Act” of 2001 helped condition students to strive for correct answers for clear problems, all on the first try. However, the iterative process inherent in designing requires risk-taking to conduct a trial-and-error process of defining problems and exploring possible solutions. This design research project was operated with Miami University Graphic Design students to test their willingness to take risks in their coursework to achieve their self-defined measures of success. Students identified that improving their skills was how they defined success. An interaction design assignment involving front-end coding was modified to test students’ comfort taking risks to grow their skills. Most students took risks in the assignment to grow their interaction design skills. The project revealed that closer attention to student motivation when developing learning experiences could help students make the transition to practicing design as an iterative process fraught with risk.
An Analysis of the Educational Value of PBL Design Workshops
• Ikjoon Chang, Suhong Hwang
The purpose of this study is to plan and operate design-workshops based on project-based learning (PBL), and examine their educational value for students. The PBL workshop encourages direct participation from students and produces educational value, and it is important to raise the interest level of workshops to elicit proactive participation. The workshop in this study was carried out over 2 weeks in January 2017 at Korea’s Yonsei University. The workshop was composed of eight teams of students from three countries, including Korea, China and Japan, and the course was primarily divided into two sessions. The workshop participants examined in this thesis were notably satisfied with the elements of the course meant to garner interest. In the questionnaire results, participants also indicated that they obtained ample educational value through the workshop. An important element of the workshop was to connect the participants with businesses, which is also an important component of design education. Despite this, participants expressed a relatively lower level of satisfaction compared to other elements of the workshop. The results and analysis of this study will hopefully become a meaningful resource for educators when designing workshops in the future.
Collaborative Design Education with Industry: Student Perspective by Reflection
- Nathan Kotlarewski, Louise Wallis, Michael Lee, Gregory Nolan, Megan Last
This study suggests that student reflection on academic and industry collaborative projects can enhance student’s understanding on the design process to solve live industry problems. It contributes to the body of design literature to support students learning of explicit and implicit knowledge. A 2017 learning by-making (LBM) unit in the School of Architecture and Design, at the University of Tasmania, Australia, developed a unit for students to collaborate with Neville Smith Forest Products Pty. Ltd (NSFP). NSFP is a local Tasmanian timber product manufacturer who currently stockpiles out-of-grade timber that has limited market applications. Undergraduate design students from second- and third-year Furniture, Interior and Architecture degrees collaborated with NSFP to value-add to their out-of-grade resource in the LBM unit. A series of design challenges, observations of industry practice and access to out-of-grade timber from NSFP exposed students to live industry problems and provided them the opportunity to build professional design skills. Students reflected on the collaborative LBM unit in a reflection journal, which was used to provide evidence of their learning experiences. The collaborative environment between academia and industry allowed students to acquire an understanding of timber product manufacturing that helped them develop empathy toward the industry problem and influence the development of new products. This study presents how student reflections influenced a change in their design process as they progressed through sequential design challenges to address an industry problem by adopting Valkenburg and Dorst reflective learning framework.
Interdisciplinary Trends in Design Education: The Analysis of Master Dissertation of College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University
• Lisha Ren, Yan Wang
This paper expounds the background of Chinese design education as well as the orientation of the design education of Tongji University in the new times, it also collects 458 Master Thesis of College of Design and Innovation during 2010–2016 as analyzed sample. Based on the coding of subject classification, quantitative analysis and content analysis are made in order to understand the interdisciplinary education status of College of Design and Innovation from the two perspectives: the overall cross-disciplinary performance and the relationship between different cross-disciplinary directions.
From ANT to Material Agency: A Design and Science Research Workshop
• Anne-Lyse Renon, A. De Montbron, Annie Gentes, Julien Bobroff
This paper studies a design workshop that investigates complex collaboration between fundamental physics and design. Our research focuses on how students create original artifacts that bridge the gap between disciplines that have very little in common. Our goal is to study the micro-evolutions of their projects. Elaborating first on Actor Network Theory we study how students’ projects evolved over time and through a diversity of inputs and media. Throughout this longitudinal study, we use then a semiotic and pragmatic approach to observe three “aesthetical formations”: translation, composition and stabilization. These formations suggest that the question of material agency developed in the field of archeology and cognitive science need to be considered in the design field to explain metamorphoses from the brief to the final realizations.
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Art inSight
More LessA first encounter with art is like meeting a stranger: it opens you to new ideas, people, places and parts of yourself. In Art inSight: Understanding Art and Why It Matters, Fanchon Silberstein delves into the first known art and explores what it can reveal about how its makers saw the world and how contemporary artists can help us to see our own. The result is equal parts an ode to the joy of artful engagement, a how-to for anyone interested in understanding art and culture and a journey around the world from prehistory to the present day. Readers confront strangeness through observation, description and conversation, and are given the skills to understand cross-cultural divisions and perceive diverse ways of interpreting the world.
Organized by ideas rather than history, chronology or cultures, the book presents dialogues, imagining interactions between paintings created centuries apart and describing discussions among students learning the role of art in conflict resolution. By emphasizing the relationship between viewer and image, Art inSight urges readers to discover meaning in their own ways and offers questions that lead them into profound connections with works of art and the cultures behind them.
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Queer Communion
Ron Athey is one of the most important, prolific and influential performance artists of the past four decades. A singular example of lived creativity, his radical performances are at odds with the art worlds and art marketplaces that have increasingly dominated contemporary art and performance art over the period of his career.
Queer Communion, an exploration of Athey’s career, refuses the linear narratives of art discourse and instead pays homage to the intensities of each mode of Athey’s performative practice and each community he engages. Emphasizing the ephemeral and largely uncollectible nature of his work, the book places Athey’s own writing at its centre, turning to memoir, memory recall and other modes of retrieval and narration to archive his performances.
In addition to documenting Athey’s art, ephemera, notes and drawings, the volume features commissioned essays, concise 'object lessons' on individual objects in the Athey archive, and short testimonials by friends and collaborators including Dominic Johnson, Amber Musser, Julie Tolentino, Ming Ma, David Getsy, Alpesh Patel and Zackary Drucker, among others. Together they form Queer Communion, a counter history of contemporary art.
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Design Discourse on Business and Industry
Just as the term design has been going through change, growth and expansion of meaning, and interpretation in practice and education – the same can be said for design research. The traditional boundaries of design are dissolving and connections are being established with other fields at an exponential rate. Based on the proceedings from the IASDR 2017 Conference, Re:Research is an edited collection that showcases a curated selection of 83 papers – just over half of the works presented at the conference. With topics ranging from the introduction of design in the primary education sector to designing information for Artificial Intelligence systems, this book collection demonstrates the diverse perspectives of design and design research. Divided into seven thematic volumes, this collection maps out where the field of design research is now.
Interaction Between Client and Design Consultant: The Stance of Client to Design Consultant and Its Influence on Design Process
- Haebin Lee, Muhammad Tufail, Myungjin Kim, KwanMyung Kim
Design is essential in product development but several small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) relatively capable of manufacturing are suffered from lack of in-house design ability. For new product design, these SMEs typically employ external designers. In this client–designer interaction, designers propose design solution alternatives to their clients, which clients may accept or reject. In some cases, clients provide designers further design requirements. A study on how interactions are performed and what effects these interactions have on the results of product development is essential to determine what is needed to achieve successful collaborative relationships. Thus, this study analyzed three design development cases that were previously performed to understand how interactions work between clients and designers and its effect on the outcomes. In all cases, the design team developed designs for the clients based on their technological requirements. This study focused on the effect of client stance on the process and deliverables. Clients usually take various actions that accept or reject design solutions or give additional demands. This is because clients take initiative in decision making. Clients’ stance was divided into receptive and expressive stances. As a result, a receptive stance ensured the design capabilities of design consultants, whereas expressive stance confined design capabilities to some extent but a new design direction may be proposed based on a client’s knowledge, information and judgment.
Speed Dating with Design Thinking: An Empirical Study of Managers Solving Business Problems with Design
- Seda McKilligan, Tejas Dhadphale, David Ringholz
The concept of design thinking has received increasing attention during recent years, particularly from managers around the world. However, despite being the subject of a vast number of articles and books stating its importance, the effectiveness of this approach is unclear, as the claims about the concept are not grounded on empirical studies or evaluations. In this study, we investigated the perceptions of six design thinking methods of 21 managers in the agriculture industry as they explored employee and business-related problems and solutions using these tools in a 6-hour workshop. The results from pre and post-survey responses suggest that the managers agreed on the value design thinking could bring to their own domains and were able to articulate on how they can use them in solving problems. We conclude by proposing directions for research to further explore adaptation of design thinking for the management practice context.
Product Design Briefs as Knowledge-Based Artifacts of Cross-Functional Collaboration in New Product Development
- Ian Parkman
Contemporary research in business strategy, new product development and design management has suggested that cross-functional collaboration within team-based environments is critical to successful product development processes. However, scholars have also demonstrated that the mere presence of inter-functional structures does not necessarily lead to better outcomes. Indeed, the very differences which cause cross-disciplinary teams to result in improved design processes may also lead to friction as team members’ backgrounds, orientations and training often cause them to have different perspectives on what information is important to the product design process and to solve development-related problems. Improved understanding how to integrate information from differing functional areas is a clear emphasis of research, yet very few empirical studies have precisely defined the units of knowledge flowing through NPD projects, differences in importance of information elements by functional area or the structures which may facilitate the sharing of information within NPD. This study presents an investigation of product design briefs as knowledge-based artifacts of cross-functional collaboration within NPD. Drawing on a proprietary sample of 68 briefs analyzed through an expert rating procedure alongside survey questionnaire of 153 product development managers our results define 51 information elements commonly shared between functional areas during an NPD project. We organize these information elements as eight factors, categorize the “importance” of each element to NPD success and describe differences in evaluation from across three primary functional domains of NPD: (a) Design, (b) Marketing and (c) Engineering/ R&D/ Development.
Entrepreneurial Universities Meet Their Private Partners: Toward a Better Embedding of the Outcomes of Cross-Sector Collaborations
- Baldini Luca, Calabretta Giulia, De Lille Christine
In the past decades, universities’ involvement in socio-economic development, which goes along with their teaching and researching activities, has defined a new role for them in society’s ecosystem. This new role is often referred with the term of “entrepreneurial” university, whose objectives are positive societal, economic and environmental impacts. In order to fulfill such objectives, entrepreneurial universities might engage in cross-sector collaborations with external organizations. Despite the great contributions that cross-sector collaboration can give to the partners involved, the outcome is mostly unfocused and rarely embedded. This paper explores the outcome embedding in the cross-sector collaboration between entrepreneurial universities and the private sector. To this end, we provide the case of the collaboration between a Dutch airline company and four Dutch entrepreneurial research and teaching institutions. We aim to uncover hindering and enabling factors to the outcome embedding in order to design an interaction platform, design it together. This platform will be a tool to encourage the outcome embedding, moving from being inspired by to the actual implementation of the cross-sector collaboration. In order to fulfill this goal, this study employs a research through design methodology. This approach is a generative process, where cyclic loops of iterations and evaluations with stakeholders tend to the research goal. The solution is a digital platform, co-created with all stakeholders. This study can inspire practitioners and future research on the problem of unsuccessful cross-sector collaborations, between entrepreneurial universities and external organizations, with more emphasis on the value of embedding and translating the outcomes.
Expert Opinion on the Barriers to Communicating Excellent Research in Commercially Driven Design Projects
- Dana Al Batlouni, Katie Beverley, Andrew Walters
Effective university–industry collaboration has become a major focus for governments in recent years. Universities are increasingly expected to play a greater role in the innovation system and evidence their contribution to economic development. At the same time, the growth in research quality assessment exercises makes it imperative that the excellence of research conducted in commercially driven activities can be appropriately evaluated. This paper explores the challenge of reconciling commercially focused activity and research quality assessment in design. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 13 experts including representatives from the design discipline, other applied academic disciplines, research quality assessment leaders and commercial designers. The interviews identified a number of barriers to demonstrating research excellence in commercially driven projects. These were classified as barriers resulting from: the nature of industry/academic relationships; the nature of the project; and the nature of the research quality assessment. It is concluded that there is a need to build a simple, easily usable framework for assessing the research potential of commercially driven design projects from the outset to ensure that the appropriate processes are put in place to communicate research conducted within them.
Exploring Design-Specific Factors for Building Longer Term Industry Relationships
- Medeirasari Putri, Mersha Aftab, Mark Bailey, Nicholas Spencer
When design works with industry it tries to sell two things, first, selling design as an agent of transformation and second, selling design as a skill. Whilst historically design has been successful in the latter, it is the former that is more challenging, making it a necessity for design to work in none design contexts in order to build trust and credibility. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the ways in which design interacts with industry, and how these interactions enable design to establish longer term relationships. This investigation set out to answer the question, what design-specific characteristics are applied to establish successful longer term relationships between design and industry? The paper aims to illustrate the intrinsic factors that enable design to get access, and designers to get authority to play a significant role in organizations. Five well-established relationships between design and industry have been used to analyze to find correlations. The investigation identifies three stages of collaboration between design and industry, namely, involvement, collaboration and partnerships, contrary to Cahill’s theoretical model, which claimed four stages to long-lasting partnerships. Also, the case studies confirm three stages of trust and credibility as factors that help in strengthening a relationship between design and industry. Finally, several intrinsic factors that are unique to design have been identified, which are seen to have helped design in building high levels of trust and credibility.
Collaborating Design Risk
- Laura Ferrarello, Ashley Hall, Mike Kann, Chang Hee Lee
The “Safety Grand Challenge” is a collaborative research project between the Royal College of Art (RCA) School of Design, and the Lloyd’s Register Foundation (LRF). The maritime industry is dominated by “grandfathering” leading to a slow-pace of adopting innovations that can reduce risk and save lives at sea. We describe how impact was achieved through collaboration and design innovations that bridged the risk gap between technologies and human behaviors. Starting from the project brief we designed a collaborative platform that supported a constructive dialog between academia and partner organizations that aimed to foster innovative design approaches to risk and safety. The project generated an engaged community with diverse expertise that influenced the outcomes which included seven prototypes designed by a group of 30 students from across the RCA. Throughout the course of the project the network extended to other partners beyond the initial ones that included the RCA, LRF and Royal National Lifeboat Institution. The “Safety Grand Challenge” demonstrates how research can be an explorative platform that offers opportunities to analyze and design solutions to real-life safety problems in mature industries through the prototypes that reflect the sophistication of the project’s collaborations. Our conclusions support how design research helped identify the value of design for safety in tackling complex issues that intertwine human, environmental and commercial views and can shape new forms of collaborative research between academia and industrial partners.
Understanding Passengers’ Experiences of Train Journeys to Inform the Design of Technological Innovations
- Luis Oliveira, Callum Bradley, Stewart Birrell, Rebecca Cain, Andy Davies, Neil Tinworth
In this paper, we present results from a collaborative research between academic institutions and industry partners in the UK, which aimed to understand the experience of rail passengers and to identify how the design of technology can improve this experience. Travelling by train can often provide passengers with negative experiences. New technologies give the opportunity to design new interactions that support the creation of positive experiences, but the design should be based on solid understanding of user and their needs. We conducted in-depth, face-to-face semi-structured interviews and used additional questionnaires given to passengers on board of trains to collect the data presented on this paper. A customer journey map was produced to illustrate the passengers’ experiences at diverse touchpoints with the rail system. The positive and negative aspects of each touchpoint are plotted over the course of a “typical” journey, followed by the explanations for these ratings. Results indicate how the design of technological innovations can enhance the passenger experience, especially at the problematic touchpoints, e.g. when collecting tickets, navigating to the platform, boarding the train and finding a seat. We finalize this paper pointing toward requirements for future technological innovations to improve the passenger experience.
Taxonomy of Interactions and the Design of the Airport Passenger Screening Process
- Levi Swann, Vesna Popovic, William Mason, Benjamin MacMahon
This paper presents a case study analyzing the interactions of nine security officers during the mandatory passenger screening process at an Australian international Airport. Eye-tracking glasses were used to observe the visual, physical and verbal interactions of security officers while they performed the x-ray task. Stationary video recording devices were used to record physical and verbal interactions performed by security officers during the load, search and metal detector tasks. Six taxonomic groups were developed that define the different types of interactions performed by security officers during each task. Each taxonomic group is comprised of several discrete interactions specific to each of the tasks observed. Through analyzing the composition of interactions and the relationships between interactions in different tasks, this paper highlights the prominence of interactions that security officers perform with passengers and their belongings. These interactions play an important role in the first and last stages of the passenger screening process, as well as influence the functioning of the overall passenger screening process. Due to this, they have substantial effect on passenger experience, throughput efficiency and security efficacy. In response to these findings, we draw from emerging security technologies and persuasive design principles to present potential design solutions for optimizing the passenger screening process. These are presented in the context of a preliminary framework with which to inform the design of current and future passenger screening processes.
Raising Crime Awareness through Design Thinking within a ‘High Street Retailer’ in the United Kingdom
- Meg Parivar, David Hands
Since the 1800s, England became an industrialized country and experienced extensive urban growth, so sales associates chose this location to establish large stores. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the aim was to create the stores to entice customers through space, impressive architecture, interior design and the elegant display of merchandise. At the same time, the display techniques were growing to promote sales. Therefore, more retail equipment manufactured and supplied for displaying products in the stores. This significant variation led the retail industry as the goods could be touched by the customers and they were not accessible only through retail assistant anymore. Since then due to this new differentiation, retailers have been experiencing a significant change in their customer’s behavior. Now the retailers are trying to give a brilliant shopping experience to their customers with more reason to increase the sale. However, there are some restrictions to this strategy that afford excellent opportunities for shoplifters and opportunist criminals. Store design can be a fantastic and efficient tool to increase sales. Also, it could significantly increase the chance of retail crime. This paper examines how to minimize criminal activity in retail environments to reduce loss prevention and retail shrinkage by raising awareness through design thinking. Therefore, interviews, observation and exploration were done based on the experience of employees and customers in “The High Street Retailer.” The research project outcome included as over, a creative retail crime learning package and a digital platform to raise awareness and improve communication.
A Study on the Entrepreneurial Path of Design-Led Startups in Taiwan
- Fang-Wu Tung
The phenomenon of design entrepreneurship has received attention in the field of design. The trend of design entrepreneurship emerges in Taiwan and becoming a new career option for designers. Entrepreneurial activities can promote economic growth through innovation and knowledge spillovers. Studies on designer entrepreneurship are warranted because it proposes the possibility of entrepreneurial innovation, contributing to industrial and economic development. A multiple case study was employed, and seven design-led startups were selected as case study subjects to explore and conclude how these firms integrate their own profession and acquire resources to construct the value chain so as to keep the company operational and profitable. According to the results, the value chain of design-led startups identified. The findings are further discussed to provide a better understanding of the entrepreneurial path of design-led startups in Taiwan.
EV 3.0: A Design-Driven Integrated Innovation on Rapid Charging Model BEV Mobility
- Miaosen Gong, Qiao Liang, Juanfang Xu, Xiang Zhou
This submission reports a design-driven integrated innovation on EV mobility, EV 3.0, as a collaboration between design research institution and a small BEV company in China. The on-going project provides a novel vision and design strategies of Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) and mobility and has achieved a key technological performance on rapid charging of BEV. The current situation of BEV Industry and their recharging patterns show a big gap of new energy mobility. Key issues of BEV and mobility are defined by analysis of users’ need of mass market and a case study of a leading BEV. Usability of charging is identified as a bottleneck of BEV industry. Hence a new vision and scenario of rapid charging are defined, leading to respective design strategies and technological routines. With a long-term investigation and iterative prototyping, an established prototype is developed and officially tested in the National Center of Supervision and Inspection on New Energy Motor Vehicle Products Quality in Shanghai. The test result indicates that the prototype has 431-km range in speed of 80km/h with only 15 minutes’ recharging, which provides a valid routine to break bottleneck of BEV industry.
Design for Better Comprehension: Design Opportunities for Facilitating Consumers’ Comprehension of Really New Products (RNPs)
- Peiyao Cheng, Cees de Bont, Ruth Mugge
Developing successful really new products (RNPs) can bring competitive advantages for companies. However, the success rate of RNPs are relatively low because consumers often feel resistant to adopt them. One reason for consumers’ resistance is their lack of comprehension of RNPs. To facilitate consumers’ comprehension, this paper conceptually discusses the opportunities related to designing the appearances of RNPs. More specifically, to facilitate consumers’ internal and external learning, this paper explores four underlying mechanisms: (1) product appearance as a visual cue to trigger category-based knowledge transfer, (2) to trigger analogy-based knowledge transfer, (3) product appearance as an information carrier to communicate innovative functionality directly, and (4) product appearance as a way to trigger congruity with innovative functionality of RNPs. The rationales for each underlying mechanism are conceptually discussed, supported with relevant empirical evidence and examples found in the markets.
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Connecting People, Place and Design
More LessConnecting People, Place and Design examines the human relationship with place, how its significance has evolved over time and how contemporary systems for participation shape the places around us in our daily lives. Divided into three parts – place, people and participation – this interdisciplinary volume examines people, place and design across the fields of architecture, design, cultural studies, sociology, political science and philosophy.
Part I, on place, considers the cultural, political and philosophical shifts in our historical relationship to place. Part II, on people, considers movement and migration and how it affects place relations. Part III, on participation, examines forms of public engagement and cultural systems for collaborative contribution to the design and creation of place. Improving people’s relationships with place requires connection, and in Connecting People, Place and Design, Edmonds demonstrates the importance of connection, underscoring that working together to nurture and sustain places that celebrate the diversity of our human species is one of the most critical issues of our time.
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Architecture Filmmaking
Unlike other books on architecture and film, Architecture Filmmaking investigates how the now-expanded field of architecture utilizes the practice of filmmaking (feature/short film, stop motion animation and documentary) or video/moving image in research, teaching and practice, and what the consequences of this interdisciplinary exchange are. While architecture and filmmaking have clearly distinct disciplinary outputs and filmmaking is a much younger art than architecture, the intersection between them is less defined. This book investigates the ways in which architectural researchers, teachers of architecture, their students and practising architects, filmmakers and artists are using filmmaking uniquely in their practice.
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Joshua Sofaer
Joshua Sofaer works across boundaries, borders and disciplines to create artworks that engage with all levels of society. In cultural institutions or on the street, for art galleries or personal homes, staged as operas or cast as golden sculptures, Sofaer’s work weaves with and through social fabric to consider the ideas that hold us together.
Co-published with the Live Art Development Agency, this lavishly illustrated volume is the first in-depth study of the artist’s work, featuring discussions with producers and participants, documentary images and a new photographic essay, interviews with the artist himself, and thirteen commissioned essays by scholars, curators and artists from the perspectives of performance studies, archaeology and opera criticism. With a mixture of intellect, humour and striking design, Joshua Sofaer: Performance | Objects | Participation analyses the artist’s oeuvre in the contexts of liveness, visual art and participatory practices. It explores the binding aesthetics of his approach as a model for contemporary practice, and it considers the impact of his work on audiences, institutions and pedagogy, as well as on fine art and performance ecologies as a whole.
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Israel as a Modern Architectural Experimental Lab, 1948–1978
This collection discusses the innovative and experimental architecture of Israel during its first three decades following the nation’s establishment in 1948. Written by leading researchers, the volume highlights new perspectives on the topic, discussing the inception, modernization and habitation of historic and lesser-researched areas alike in its interrogation. Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler and Anat Geva show how Israeli nation building, in its cultural, political and historical contexts, constituted an exceptional experiment in modern architecture. Examples include modern experiments in mass housing design; public architecture such as exhibition spaces, youth villages and synagogues; a necessary consideration of climate in modern architectural experiments; and the exportation of Israeli modern architecture to other countries.
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Culture, Technology and the Image
Culture, Technology and the Image explores the technologies deployed when images are archived, accessed and distributed. The chapters discuss the ways in which habits and techniques used in learning and communicating knowledge about images are affected by technological developments. The volume discusses a wide range of issues, including access and participation; research, pedagogy and teaching; curation and documentation; circulation and re-use; and conservation and preservation.
The book illustrates how knowledge about images is intertwined with the methods that are used to store, retrieve and analyse those images and the information associated with them. Focusing on the implications of technology for processes and practices brings into view the permeable nature of boundaries between such disciplines as art history, media studies, museum studies and archiving. As such, this text will appeal to a broad academic audience, including art historians interested in the digital; media studies scholars; digital humanities scholars interested in expanding beyond textual scholarship; as well as new students in any of these fields.
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MASKS
This interdisciplinary anthology explores the complex relationships in an artist’s life between fact and fiction, presentation and existence, and critique and creation, and examines the work that ultimately results from these tensions.
Using a combination of critical and personal essays and interviews, MASKS presents Bowie as the key exemplifier of the concept of the 'mask', then further applies the same framework to other liminal artists and thinkers who challenged the established boundaries of the art/pop academic worlds, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Søren Kierkegaard, Yukio Mishima and Hunter S. Thompson. Featuring contributions from John Gray and Slavoj Žižek and interviews with Gary Lachman and Davide De Angelis, this book will appeal to scholars and students of cultural criticism, aesthetics and the philosophy of art; practising artists; and fans of Bowie and other artists whose work enacts experiments in identity.
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Spiritual Herstories
This is a collection of works by internationally recognized women leading the field of dance research and spirituality across the globe. Building on current soulful research scholarship in the discipline, these authors offer extensive and detailed research into spirituality, dance, gender, religion, somatics and women-centred dance research. Written by women dance scholars in higher education, this evocative and illuminating work highlights a growing discourse on gendered leadership in dance research. Spiritual Herstories provides new pathways and innovative research methods that respond to the educational needs of women emerging in male-centric socio-historic research traditions.
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Redefining Theatre Communities
Redefining Theatre Communities explores the interplay between contemporary theatre and communities. It considers the aesthetic, social and cultural aspects of community-conscious theatre-making. While doing so, the volume reflects on recent transformations in structural, textual and theatrical conventions and traditions, and explores the changing modes of production and spectatorship in relation to theatre communities. The essays edited by Marco Galea and Szabolcs Musca present an array of emerging perspectives on the politics, ethics, and practices of community representation on the contemporary international theatre landscape. An international, interdisciplinary collection featuring work by theatre scholars, theatre-makers and artistic directors from across Europe and beyond, Redefining Theatre Communities will appeal to those interested in the diverse forms of socially engaged theatre and performance.
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The Poetics and Politics of the Veil in Iran
More LessThis volume explores the lives of women in Iran through the social, political and aesthetic contexts of veiling, unveiling and re-veiling. Through poetic writings and photographs, Azadeh Fatehrad responds to the legacy of the Iranian Revolution via the representation of women in photography, literature and film. The images and texts are documentary, analytical and personal.
The Poetics and Politics of the Veil in Iran features Fatehrad’s own photographs in addition to work by artists Hengameh Golestan, Shirin Neshat, Shadi Ghadirian, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Adolf Loos, Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault and Alison Watt. In exploring women’s lives in post-revolutionary Iran, Fatehrad considers the role of the found image and the relationship between the archive and the present, resulting in an illuminating history of feminism in Iran in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
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Teachers and Teaching on Stage and on Screen
Authors: Diane Conrad and Monica PrendergastWhy are educators and their profession the focus of so much film and theatre? Diane Conrad and Monica Prendergast bring together scholars and practitioners in education, examining dramatic portrayals of teachers and teaching to answer this very question. Films such as Freedom Writers, Bad Teacher and School of Rock, to name a few, intentionally or inadvertently comment on education and influence the opinions and, ultimately, the experiences of anyone who has taught or been taught. The chapters gathered in this collection critique the Hollywood 'good teacher' repertoire, delve into satiric parodies and alternative representations and explore issues through analyses of independent and popular films and plays from around the world. By examining teacher-student relationships, institutional cultures, societal influences and much more, Teachers and Teaching on Stage and on Screen addresses these media’s varied fascinations with the educator like no collection before it.
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Writing Belonging at the Millennium
By Emily PotterIn Writing Belonging at the Millennium, Emily Potter critically considers the long-standing settler-colonial pursuit of belonging manifested through an obsession with firm and stable ground. This pursuit continues across the field of the postcolonial nation today; the recognition of colonization’s destructive impacts on humans and environments troublingly generates a renewed desire to secure non-indigenous belonging. Focusing on the crucial role that Australia’s contemporary literature plays in shaping ideas of place and its inhabitation, Potter tracks non-indigenous belonging claims through a range of fiction and non-fiction texts to examine how settler-colonial anxieties about belonging intersect with intensifying environmental challenges. Significantly, she proposes that new understandings of unsettled and uncertain non-indigenous belonging may actually be fruitful context for decolonizing relations with place – something that is imperative in a time of heightened global environmental crisis.
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#Nodes
#Nodes is not a book about science, nor about art, literature or the humanities – or maybe it is about all of them at once.
This collection investigates reality from these perspectives and others, demonstrating the possibility of intense interdisciplinary collaboration. It is a book that resists categorization, because reality and thought do not exist in separate compartments. #Nodes proposes an intellectual adventure: an exploration of the boundaries between different fields of knowledge. The book explores topics ranging from elementary matter to consciousness to the complexity of living beings, asking questions along the way: How does life arise? What is consciousness? How can chaos elicit order? These questions require new approaches. To tackle this, #Nodes brings together the contributions of scientists, writers, artists and humanists from various disciplines and countries with the purpose of stimulating new ideas.
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Morality by Design
By Wade RowlandThe eleven short, linked essays in Morality by Design represent a culmination of two decades of research and writing on the topic of moral realism. Wade Rowland first introduces readers to the basic ideas of leading moral thinkers from Plato to Leibniz to Putnam, and then explores the subject through today’s political, economic and environmental conundrums. The collection presents a strong argument against postmodern moral relativism and the idea that only science can claim a body of reliable fact; challenges currently fashionable notions of the perfectibility of human individuals – and even the human species – through technology; and argues for the validity of common sense.
In guiding the reader through Enlightenment-era rationalist thought as it pertained to human nature and the foundations of morality, Rowland provides a coherent, intellectually sound and intuitively appealing alternative to the nihilistic views popularised by contemporary radical relativism. Morality by Design ultimately seeks to convince readers that there is such a thing as moral fact, and that they do indeed have what it takes to make robust and durable moral judgments.
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Architectural Dynamics in Pre-Revolutionary Iran
This volume considers the major trends and developments in Iranian architecture during the 1960s and 70s in order to further our understanding of the underpinnings and intentions of Persian architecture during this period. While narrative explorations of modernism have relied heavily upon classifications based on western experiences and influences, this book provides a more holistic view of the development of Persian architecture by studying both the internal and external forces that influenced it in the late twentieth century. The chapters compiled in Architectural Dynamics in Pre-Revolutionary Iran, accompanied by more than eighty images, shed light on the fascinating — and sometimes controversial — evolution of Iranian architecture and its constant quest for a new paradigm of cultural identity.
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Instafame
More LessLaunched in 2010 as a modest mobile photo-sharing application for Apple’s iPhone that uploads images in a square format and add filters that mimic vintage photographs, Instagram has grown to become one of the most-used social media platforms, alongside Facebook and Twitter. This book examines the rise of Instagram and its impact on visual culture by considering how it has shaped two inter-related and highly popular global forms: graffiti and street art. The book traces the intuitive connections between graffiti, street art and Instagram, beginning with the simple observation that when turned on its side, the scrolling feed of Instagram images displayed on a mobile phone resembles graffiti viewed from the windows of a moving train. It argues that with Instagram’s privileging of flows of images tied to mobile devices and the real-time battles for impact and attention that this generates, is more closely synced with the aesthetics of graffiti and street art and the needs of its producers and consumers than any other digital platforms. It analyses the architecture, data, networks and audiences of Instagram, showing how they underpin a dramatic shift in how graffiti and street art are produced and consumed.
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Keepin' It Real
More LessThe past decade has been one of the most racially turbulent periods in the modern era, as the complicated breakthrough of the Obama presidency gave way to the racially charged campaigning and eventual governing of Donald Trump. Keepin' It Real presents a wide-ranging group of essays that take on key aspects of the current landscape surrounding racial issues in America, including the place of the Obamas, the rise of the alt-right and White nationalism, Donald Trump, Colin Kaepernick and the backlash against his protests, Black Lives Matter, sexual politics in the black community and much more.
America's racial problems aren't going away any time soon. Keepin' It Real serves as a marker of the arguments raging right now, and an argument for the changes that need to be made to become the better nation it has long imagined itself to be.
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The Idea of the Avant Garde
The concept of the avant garde is highly contested, whether one consigns it to history or claims it for present-day or future uses. The first volume of The Idea of the Avant Garde – And What It Means Today provided a lively forum on the kinds of radical art theory and partisan practices that are possible in today’s world of global art markets and creative industry entrepreneurialism. This second volume presents the work of another 50 artists and writers, exploring the diverse ways that avant-gardism develops reflexive and experimental combinations of aesthetic and political praxis. The manifest strategies, temporalities, and genealogies of avant-garde art and politics are expressed through an international, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary convocation of ideas that covers the fields of film, video, architecture, visual art, art activism, literature, poetry, theatre, performance, intermedia and music.
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Dancing with Parkinson's
By Sara HoustonThis book explores the experience and value of dancing for people living with the neurodegenerative disorder Parkinson’s disease. Linking aesthetic values to wellbeing, Sara Houston articulates the importance of the dancing experience for those with Parkinson’s, and argues that the benefits of participatory dance are best understood through the experiences, lives, needs and challenges of people living with Parkinson’s who have chosen to dance.
Presenting personal narratives from a study that investigates the experience of people with Parkinson’s who dance, intertwined with the social and political contexts in which the dancers live, this volume examines the personal and systemic issues as well as the attitudes and identities that shape people’s relationship to dance. Taking this new primary research as a starting point, Dancing with Parkinson’s builds an argument for how dance becomes a way of helping people live well with Parkinson’s.
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Performance / Media / Art / Culture
By Jacki AppleExperience the interdisciplinary performance scene of the 1980s and beyond through the eyes of one of its most compelling witnesses. Jacki Apple’s Performance / Media / Art / Culture traces performance art, multimedia theatre, audio arts and dance in the United States from 1983 to the present. Showcasing 35 years of Apple’s critical essays and reviews, the collection explores the rise and diversification of intermedia performance; how new technologies (or rehashed old technologies) influence American culture and contemporary life; the interdependence of pop and performance culture; and the politics of art and the performance of politics.
Apple writes with a journalist’s attention to the immediacy of account and a historian’s attention to structural aesthetic and personal networks, resulting in a volume brimming with big ideas but grounded in concentrated reviews of individual performances. Many of the pieces featured in this collection originally appeared in small press journals and magazines that have now gone out of print. Preserved and republished here for current and future readers, they offer a rich portrait of performance at the end of the millennium.
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Prison Cultures
By Aylwyn WalshPrison Cultures offers the first systematic examination of women in prison and performances in and of the institution. Using a feminist approach to reach beyond tropes of 'bad girls' and simplistic inside vs. outside dynamics, it examines how cultural products can perpetuate or disrupt hegemonic understandings of the world of prisons. The book identifies how and why prison functions as a fixed field and postulates new ways of viewing performances in and of prison that trouble the institution, with a primary focus on the United Kingdom and examples from popular culture. A new contribution to the fields of feminist cultural criticism and prison studies, Aylwyn Walsh explores how the development of a theory of resistance and desire is central to the understanding of women’s incarceration. It problematizes the prevalence of purely literary analysis or case studies that proffer particular models of arts practice as transformative of offending behaviour.
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Raymond Williams
By Jim McGuiganRaymond Williams was a complex figure with various different facets to his activity. Raymond Williams: Cultural Analyst concentrates on the formation and application of his cultural-materialist methodology and its relation to his politics. Surveying Williams’s extensive writings across the fields of cultural studies, sociology and Marxist theory, the overall objective is to rescue Williams from his routine treatment as a literary scholar, and restore him to his rightful place as a leading scholar of the social sciences, not least for his theoretically sophisticated contribution to the field in the form of cultural materialism. Ultimately, this book argues that Williams should be regarded as a cultural analyst in the sociological rather than narrowly literary sense.
The book is replete with examples of Williams’s ideas and concepts that are of direct and illuminating relevance to twenty-first century problems. Throughout, Jim McGuigan displays a remarkable capacity to explain Williams’s sometimes complex ideas in an inviting and intuitively appealing way, making interesting connections across key concepts. For those familiar with Williams’s work, this new book will come as a breath of fresh air, and for readers coming across Williams for the first time, this offers an inspiring and vivid introduction to his work.
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Preston Sturges
Authors: Nick Smedley, Tom Sturges and Peter BogdanovichFew directors of the 1930s and 40s were as distinctive and popular as Preston Sturges, whose whipsmart comedies have entertained audiences for decades. This book offers a new critical appreciation of Sturges' whole oeuvre, incorporating a detailed study of the last ten years of his life from new primary sources. Preston Sturges details the many unfinished projects of Sturges' last decade, including films, plays, TV series and his autobiography. Drawing on diaries, sketchbooks, correspondence, unpublished screenplays and more, Nick Smedley and Tom Sturges present the writer-director's final years in more detail than we've ever seen, showing a master still at work – even if very little of that work ultimately made it to the screen or stage.
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The Punk Reader
Forty years after its inception, punk has gone global. The founding scenes in the United Kingdom and United States now have counterparts all around the world. Most, if not all, cities on the planet now have some variation of punk existing in their respective undergrounds, and long-standing scenes can be found in China, Japan, India, Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Each scene, rather than adopting traditional interpretations of the punk filter, reflects national, regional and local identities.
The first offering in Intellect’s new Global Punk series, The Punk Reader: Research Transmissions from the Local and the Global is the first edited volume to explore and critically interrogate punk culture in relation to contemporary, radicalized globalization. Documenting disparate international punk scenes, including Mexico, China, Malaysia and Iran, The Punk Reader is a long-overdue addition to punk studies and a valuable resource for readers seeking to know more about the global influence of punk beyond the 1970s.
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Fan Phenomena: Harry Potter
Nineteen years later . . .
Even as a new generation embraces the Harry Potter novels for the first time, J.K. Rowling’s world is expanding with Fantastic Beasts, Cursed Child and Pottermore. There are new mobile games, new toys and, of course, the theme parks. Meanwhile, Quidditch and the Harry Potter Alliance stretch from college to college, inspiring each generation. Fans have adapted the series into roleplaying games, parodies, musicals, films, dances, art and published fiction like Tommy Taylor or Carry On. They are also scrambling Potter with new franchises: Game of Thrones, Hunger Games, Percy Jackson, Hamilton. What else is this new generation discovering about loving Potter? Which are the best conventions, the best fanfiction and wizard rock? And, how has Potter aged and what does it still have to teach us? Fan Phenomena: Harry Potter offers Potter fans a taste of the best the fandom has to offer.
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Exposing Vulnerability
More LessThis book explores the diversity of perspectives afforded by the emerging body of Scandinavian films produced by women. The author focuses on women filmmakers' use of their own vulnerability in representing Scandinavian experiences with globally relevant contemporary issues such as race, gender, mental illness, bullying and the trauma of migration, and highlights the frictions between the positive and negative manifestations of such vulnerability. Though Scandinavia is reputed for its ambitious and innovative film tradition, film scholarship has largely ignored women’s bold contributions to the canon. Exposing Vulnerability is a cultural and socio-political analysis of contemporary film by Scandinavian women as they use their lives and work to reconfigure the cinematic, the political and the ethical.
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Britpop Cinema
By Matt GlasbyThe Britpop movement of the mid-1990s defined a generation, and the films were just as exciting as the music. Beginning with Shallow Grave, hitting its stride with Trainspotting, and going global with The Full Monty, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Human Traffic, Sexy Beast, Shaun of the Dead and This Is England, Britpop cinema pushed boundaries, paid Hollywood no heed and placed the United Kingdom all too briefly at the centre of the movie universe.
Featuring exclusive interviews with key players such as Simon Pegg, Irvine Welsh, Michael Winterbottom and Edgar Wright, Britpop Cinema combines eyewitness accounts, close analysis and social history to celebrate a golden age for UK film.
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From Méliès to New Media
By Wendy HaslemFrom Méliès to New Media contributes to a dynamic stream of film history that is just beginning to understand that new media forms are not only indebted to but firmly embedded within the traditions and conventions of early film culture. Adopting a media archaeology, this book will present a comparative examination of cinema including early film experiments with light and contemporary music videos, silent film and their digital restorations, German Expressionist film and post-noir cinema, French Gothic film and the contemporary digital remake, Alfred Hitchcock’s films exhibited in the gallery, post medium films as abstracted light forms and interactive digital screens revising experiments in precinema. Media archaeology is an approach that uncovers the potential of intermedial research as a fluid form of history. It envisages the potential of new discoveries that foreground forgotten or marginalised contributions to history. It is also an approach that has been championed by influential new historicists like Thomas Elsaesser as providing the most vibrant and productive new histories (2014).
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Performing Palimpsest Bodies
More LessProposing the innovative concept of palimpsest bodies to interpret provocative theatre and performance experiments that explore issues of cultural memory, bodies of history, archives, repertoires and performing remains, Ruth Hellier-Tinoco offers an in-depth analysis of four postdramatic and transdisciplinary collective creation theatre projects. Combined with ideas of postmemory and rememory, palimpsest bodies are inherently trans-temporal as they perform re-visions of embodied gestures, vocalized calls and sensory experiences.
Focusing on one of Mexico’s most significant contemporary theatre companies, La Máquina de Teatro, directed by renowned artists Juliana Faesler and Clarissa Malheiros, this ground-breaking study documents the playfully rigorous performances of layered, plural and trans identities as collaborative, feminist and queer re-visions of official histories and collective memories.
Illustrated with over one hundred colour photos, Performing Palimpsest Bodies: Postmemory Theatre Experiments in Mexico will appeal to creative artists and scholars interested in contemporary theatre and performance studies, critical dance studies, collective creation and performance-making.
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Spanish Cinema of the New Millennium
More LessSpanish Cinema of the New Millennium provides a new approach to the study of contemporary Spanish cinema between 2000 and 2015, by analysing films that represent both ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture side by side. The two film cultures are represented by Goya-winning films and the biggest box-office successes. By analysing the chronological trajectory of the country’s most important films over this period, Spanish Cinema of the New Millennium examines contemporary Spain’s national identity, culture and film industry.
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Agency
Notoriously difficult to define as a genre, Live Art is commonly positioned as a challenge to received artistic, social and political categories: not theatre, not dance, not visual art... and often wilfully anti-mainstream and anti-establishment. But as it has become an increasingly prevalent category in international festivals, major art galleries, diverse publications and higher education streams, it is time for a reassessment.
This collection of essays, conversations, provocations and archival images takes the twentieth anniversary of the founding of one of the sector’s most committed champions, the Live Art Development Agency (LADA) in London, as an opportunity to consider not only what Live Art has been against, but also what it has been for. Rather than defining the practices in oppositional terms – what they might be seeking to critique, reject or disrupt – this collection reframes these practices in terms of the relations and commitments they might be used to model or advocate. What kinds of care and recovery do they enable? What do they connect as well as reject? What do they make possible as they test the impossible? What ideas of success do they stand for as they risk failure? In this way, the central theme of the collection, and to which all contributors were invited to respond, is the idea of agency: the capacity for new kinds of thoughts, actions and energies as enacted by individual artists and groups. It seems appropriate that this question would be considered in relation to the history of one particular ‘agency’: LADA itself.
These questions are explored in a unique conversational format, bringing together a diverse range of emerging and established practitioners, curators and leading figures in the field, each paired with another practitioner for a live conversation that has been sensitively edited for the page. Curated within a structure of five overlapping themes – Bodies, Spaces, Institutions, Communities and Actions – this format produces unexpected insights and accounts of the development of the field. Each theme also contains two provocative essays by leading scholars, thinkers and makers, exploring the conceptual frames in more detail. The result is a collection that is as heterogeneous, ambitious, contradictory and inspiring as the field of Live Art itself.
Contributors: Aaron Williamson, Adrian Heathfield, Alan Read, Alastair MacLennan, Alexandrina Hemsley, Amelia Jones, Andrew Mottershead, Andy Field, Anne Bean, Barby Asante, Bryan Biggs, Cassils, Catherine Wood, David A. Bailey, Dominic Johnson, Gary Anderson, George Chakravarthi, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Hayley Newman, Heike Roms, Helen Paris, James Leadbitter, Jamila Johnson-Small, Jane Trowell, Jen Harvie, Johanna Tuukkanen, John Jordan, John McGrath, Jordan McKenzie, Joshua Sofaer, Katherine Araniello, Kira O'Reilly, Lena Šimić, Leslie Hill, Lois Keidan, Lois Weaver, Manuel Vason, Martin O'Brien, Mary Paterson, Rajni Shah, Rebecca French, Richard Dedomenici, Ron Athey, RoseLee Goldberg, Selina Thompson, Simon Casson and Tim Etchells.
Co-published with Live Art Development Agency.
Winner of the 2021 TaPRA Edited Collection Prize
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Revolution in the Echo Chamber
More LessRevolution in the Echo Chamber is a sociohistorical analysis of British and US radio and audio drama from 1919 to the present day. This volume examines the aesthetic, cultural and technical elements of audio drama along with its context within the literary canon. In addition to the form and development of aural drama, Leslie Grace McMurtry provides an exploration of mental imagery generation in relation to its reception and production. Building on historical analysis, Revolution in the Echo Chamber provides contemporary perspective, drawing on trends from the current audio drama environment to analyse how people listen to audio drama, including podcast drama, today – and how they might listen in the future.
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The Anarchist Cinema
By James NewtonThe Anarchist Cinema examines the complex relationships that exist between anarchist theory and film. No longer hidden in obscure corners of cinematic culture, anarchy is a theme that has traversed arthouse, underground and popular film. James Newton explores the notion that cinema is an inherently subversive space, establishes criteria for deeming a film anarchic, and examines the place of underground and DIY filmmaking within the wider context of the category. The author identifies subversive undercurrents in cinema and uses anarchist political theory as an interpretive framework to analyse filmmakers, genres and the notion of cinema as an anarchic space.
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Consumer Identities
This edited collection explores the notion of agency by tracing the role and activities of consumers from the pre-Internet age into the possible future. Using an overview of the historical creation of consumer identity, Consumer Identities demonstrates that active consumption is not merely a product of the digital age; it has always been a means by which a person can develop identity. Grounded in the acknowledgement that identity is a constructed and contested space, the authors analyse emerging dynamics in contemporary consumerism, ongoing tensions of structure and agency in consumer identities and the ways in which identity construction could be influenced in the future. By exploring consumer identity through examples in popular culture, the authors have created a scholarly work that will appeal to industry professionals as well as academics.
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Disability Arts and Culture
This collection offers insight into different study approaches to disability art and culture practices, and asks: what does it mean to approach disability-focused cultural production and consumption as generative sites of meaning-making? International scholars and practitioners use ethnographic and participatory action research approaches; textual and discourse analysis; as well as other methods to discover how disability figures into our contemporary world(s).
Chapters within the collection explore, amongst other topics, deaf theatre productions, representations of disability on-screen, community engagement projects and disabled bodies in dance. Disability Arts and Culture provides a comprehensive overview and a range of case studies benefitting both the practitioner and scholar.
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The Igor Moiseyev Dance Company
By Anthony ShayIn this book Anthony Shay examines the life and works of renowned choreographer Igor Moiseyev and his dance company. Formed in 1937, The Igor Moiseyev Dance Company have performed across the globe and are the first major Soviet dance group to perform in the United States. Through The Igor Moiseyev Dance Company, dance became a vital diplomatic tool, ballerinas replaced atom bombs and helped usher in a new era of cultural exchange, formalized by an agreement signed by the United States and the Soviet Union. Through this book Shay explores the multiple lenses of spectacle, Russian nationalism and the Cultural Cold War, to describe and analyse the history of Moiseyev’s company, and the shock that ‘innocent’ folk dance gave the American government. Blending academic study and personal anecdote, Shay provides a nuanced analysis of Moiseyev’s importance and his place in the world of dance. This is the first English language study of Igor Moiseyev and his dance company.
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Communication and Discourse Theory
This volume gathers the work of the Brussels Discourse Theory Group, a group of critical media and communication scholars that deploy discourse theory as a theoretical backbone and an analytical research perspective. The book seeks to show the value and applicability of discourse-theoretical analysis (DTA) within the field of media and communication studies, through a variety of case studies that highlight both the radical contingent nature and the hegemonic workings of media and communication practices.
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Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art
[Over the past few decades, the Nordic region has witnessed large shifts in its political, social and international outlook. Meanwhile, its art, commonly described as introverted, contemplative and wild, is also undergoing changes. As technology embeds itself further into the contemporary art scene, there is a renewed need to examine the role of art in society and everyday life, and to consider how the digitalization of art has tackled socio-political realities, locally and in the wider world.
Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art includes a collection of testimonials from 78 artists, connected to Nordic art, who employ concepts and/or tools relating to the digital in their practice. Their statements form the basis of the essays in Part 2, penned by leading scholars affiliated with the Nordic art context, which inquire into the digital influences on contemporary art, with particular attention paid to the national and international Nordic socio-political context.
Landscapes, nature, minimalism, melancholia – this book examines how these traditional Nordic tropes hold up in the growing field of digital contemporary art, and asks: to what extent have digital dynamics been adopted into the imaginaries and practices of Nordic artists?
,Affected by technology and globalization, the Nordic region is experiencing large shifts in its socio-political conditions and international outlook today. As digital dynamics affect life worlds, contemporary artists are making new inquiries in response to the changing Nordic context. As a result of these ever-evolving circumstances, conditions and motivations for making art change as well. As technology and digital culture become more deeply embedded in the contemporary art scene, there is a renewed need to examine the role of art in society and everyday life, and to consider how the digital inspires artists to evolve and tackle socio-political realities, locally and in the wider world.
]
The first section of Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art features a collection of testimonials from 78 artists connected to Nordic art who employ concepts and tools relating to the digital in their practice. These testimonials form the basis of essays in the book’s second section, penned by leading scholars and curators of Nordic art. They investigate the digital influences on contemporary art, with particular attention paid to the national and international Nordic socio-political context.
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World-Wide-Walks
[This book presents Peter d'Agostino's World-Wide-Walks project, providing a unique perspective on walking practices across time and place considered through the framework of evolving technologies and changes in climate. Performed on six continents during the past five decades, d'Agostino's work lays a groundwork for considering walks as portals for crossing natural, cultural and virtual frontiers.
Broad in scope, it addresses topics ranging from historical concerns including traditional Australian Aboriginal rites of passage and the exploits of explorers such as John Ledyard, to artists' walks and related themes covered in the mass media in recent years. D'Agostino's work shows that the act of walking places the individual within a world of empirical awareness, statistical knowledge, expectation and surprise through phenomena like anticipating unknown encounters around the bend. In mediating the frontiers of human knowledge, walking and other forms of exploration remain a critical means of engaging global challenges, especially notable now as environmental boundaries are undergoing radical and potential cataclysmic change.
, This book presents Peter d'Agostino's World-Wide-Walks project, providing a unique perspective on walking practices across time and place considered through the framework of evolving technologies and changes in climate. Performed on six continents during the past five decades, d’Agostino’s work lays a groundwork for considering walks as portals for crossing natural, cultural and virtual frontiers. Broad in scope, it addresses topics ranging from historical concerns including traditional Australian Aboriginal rites of passage and the exploits of explorers such as John Ledyard, to artists’ walks and related themes covered in the mass media in recent years. D’Agostino’s work shows that the act of walking places the individual within a world of empirical awareness, statistical knowledge, expectation and surprise through phenomena like anticipating unknown encounters around the bend. In mediating the frontiers of human knowledge, walking and other forms of exploration remain a critical means of engaging global challenges, especially notable now as environmental boundaries are undergoing radical and potential cataclysmic change.]
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Planet Cosplay
Authors: Paul Mountfort, Anne Peirson-Smith and Adam GeczyThis book examines cosplay from a set of groundbreaking disciplinary approaches, highlighting the latest and emerging discourses around this popular cultural practice. Planet Cosplay is authored by widely published scholars in this field, examining the central aspects of cosplay ranging from sources and sites to performance and play, from sex and gender to production and consumption. Topics discussed include the rise of cosplay as a cultural phenomenon and its role in personal, cultural and global identities. Planet Cosplay provides a unique, multifaceted examination of the practice from theoretical bases including popular cultural studies, performance studies, gender studies and transmedia studies. As the title suggests, the book’s purview is global, encompassing some of the main centres of cosplay throughout the United States, Asia, Europe and Australasia. Each of the chapters offers not only a set of entry points into its subject matter, but also a narrative of the development of cosplay and scholarly approaches to it.
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The Music of Antônio Carlos Jobim
More Less[Antônio Carlos Jobim has been called the greatest of all contemporary Brazilian songwriters. He wrote both popular and serious music and was a gifted piano, guitar and flute player. One of the key figures in the creation of the bossa nova style, Jobim’s music made a lasting impression worldwide, and many of his songs are now standards of the popular music repertoire.
, Antônio Carlos Jobim has been called the greatest of all contemporary Brazilian songwriters. He wrote both popular and serious music and was a gifted piano, guitar and flute player. One of the key figures in the creation of the bossa nova style, Jobim’s music made a lasting impression worldwide, and many of his songs are now standards of the popular music repertoire.
In The Music of Antônio Carlos Jobim, one of the first extensive musicological analyses of the Brazilian composer, Peter Freeman examines the music, philosophy and circumstances surrounding the creation of Jobim’s popular songs, instrumental compositions and symphonic works. Freeman attempts to elucidate not only the many musical influences that formed Jobim’s musical output, but also the stylistic peculiarities that were as much the product of a gifted composer as the rich musical environment and heritage that surrounded him.
In The Music of Antônio Carlos Jobim, one of the first extensive musicological analyses of the Brazilian composer, Peter Freeman examines the music, philosophy and circumstances surrounding the creation of Jobim’s popular songs, instrumental compositions and symphonic works. Freeman attempts to elucidate not only the many musical influences that formed Jobim’s musical output, but also the stylistic peculiarities that were as much the product of a gifted composer as the rich musical environment and heritage that surrounded him.]
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The Future of Humanity
By Zhouying Jin[The Future of Humanity seeks to answer the question: “What kind of global civilization should human beings pursue and what do we have to do collectively?,” one a question that has preoccupied scholars, philosophers and politicians for centuries. In doing so, the book tackles concepts as monumental as the keys to happiness, alien nonconventional intelligence, immortality, morality and China’s possible role in bringing about a better worldjoining this global discussion.,
To navigate these many and complex topics, Jin combines the spiritual insights of ancient Chinese thinkers with a deep respect for the accomplishments and discoveries of modern Western science, exploring and explaining her distinct vision for a what a better, global future civilization could be.The Future of Humanity seeks to answer the question: “What kind of global civilization should human beings pursue and what do we have to do collectively?,” one a question that has preoccupied scholars, philosophers and politicians for centuries. In doing so, the book tackles concepts as monumental as the keys to happiness, alien nonconventional intelligence, immortality, morality and China’s possible role in bringing about a better worldjoining this global discussion.
]
To navigate these many and complex topics, Jin combines the spiritual insights of ancient Chinese thinkers with a deep respect for the accomplishments and discoveries of modern Western science, exploring and explaining her distinct vision for a what a better, global future civilization could be.
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Superman: The Movie
More LessAt a moment when superheroes dominate pop culture, Gary Bettinson takes us back to the first comic book blockbuster. Superman: The Movie – The 40th Anniversary Interviews is a revealing behind-the-scenes portrait of the personalities and expertise that went into making this landmark of Hollywood cinema.
Marking 40 years since the film’s release, this book presents all-new interviews with the cast and crew, including Richard Donner (director), Ilya Salkind (producer), Pierre Spengler (producer), Margot Kidder (actor), Marc McClure (actor), Jeff East (actor), Sarah Douglas (actor) and Jack O’Halloran (actor).
The book serves as a rare insider account of an acclaimed blockbuster that was steeped in controversy throughout production. With refreshing candour, the interviewees cast light on the making and legacy of Superman: The Movie.
Charting the film’s inception through to its runaway release, this book provides a valuable insight into the practical logistics and day-to-day realities of mounting a big-budget production at a time when high-concept Hollywood blockbusters were only just emerging as a genre.
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Dancing Bahia
[Dancing Bahia is an edited collection that draws together the work of leading scholars, artists and dance activists from Brazil, Canada and the United States to examine the particular ways in which dance has responded to sociopolitical notions of race and community, resisting stereotypes and redefining African Diaspora and Afro-Brazilian traditions.
,Dancing Bahia is an edited collection that draws together the work of leading scholars, artists and dance activists from Brazil, Canada and the United States to examine the particular ways in which dance has responded to sociopolitical notions of race and community, resisting stereotypes, and redefining African Diaspora and Afro-Brazilian traditions.
Using the Brazilian city of Salvador da Bahia as its focal point, this volume brings to the fore questions of citizenship, human rights and community building. The essays within are informed by both theory and practice, as well as black activism that inspires and grounds the research, teaching and creative output of dance professionals from, or deeply connected to, Bahia.
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Transglobal Fashion Narratives
[Everywhere we look, people are using fashion to communicate self and society – who they are, and where they belong. Transglobal Fashion Narratives presents an international, interdisciplinary analysis of those narratives. Moving from sweatshop to runway, page to screen, camera to blog and artist to audience, the book examines fashion as a mediated form of content in branding, as a literary and filmic device, and as a personal form of expression by industry professionals, journalists and bloggers.
, Everywhere we look, people are using fashion to communicate self and society – who they are, and where they belong. Transglobal Fashion Narratives presents an international, interdisciplinary analysis of those narratives. Moving from sweatshop to runway, page to screen, camera to blog and artist to audience, the book examines fashion as a mediated form of content in branding, as a literary and filmic device, and as a personal form of expression by industry professionals, journalists and bloggers.]
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Singing for Our Lives
More LessThe Campaign Choirs Network is a loose affiliation of like-minded choirs across the UK sharing a belief in a better world for all and dedicated to taking action by singing about it; the Campaign Choirs Writing Collective is a part of that network.
The book intends to inspire the reader to engage with this world: to find out more, to join a choir in their community, to enlist their local street choir to support campaigns for social change and, more generally, to mobilize artistic creativity in progressive social movements.
It is an introduction to street choirs and their history, exploring origins in and connections with other social movements, for example the Workers Education Association, the Clarion movement, Big Flame and the Social Forum movement. The book identifies the political nodes where choir histories intersect, notably Greenham Common, the Miners’ Strike, anti-apartheid and Palestinian struggles. The title of the book is taken from a song by the respected American musician and activist Holly Near, and is popular in the repertoire of many street choirs. Exploring the role of street choirs in political culture, Singing For Our Lives introduces this neglected world to a wider public, including activists and academics.
Signing for Our Lives also elaborates the personal stories and experiences of people who participate in street choirs, and the unique social practices created within them. The book tells the important, if often overlooked, story of how making music can contribute to non-violent, just and sustainable social transitions.
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Landscape and the Science Fiction Imaginary
More LessThere has been plenty of scholarship on science fiction over the decades, but it has left one crucial aspect of the genre all but unanalysed: the visual. Ambitious and original, Landscape and the Science Fiction Imaginary corrects that oversight, making a powerful argument for science fiction as a visual cultural discourse. Taking influential historical works of visual art as starting points, along with illustrations, movie matte paintings, documentaries, artist’s impressions and digital environments, John Timberlake focuses on the notion of science fiction as an “imaginary topos,” one that draws principally on the intersection between landscape and historical/prehistorical time. Richly illustrated, this book will appeal to scholars, students and fans of science fiction and the remarkable visual culture that surrounds it.
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The Importance of Elsewhere
More LessWhy do we travel? What are we doing – and what do we imagine we are doing – when we leave the house, get on a plane and thereby step into globalism? The Importance of Elsewhere is a collection of essays, rooted in Randy Malamud’s own lifetime of travel, that addresses those questions and more. Setting today’s tourism in the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century experiences of travel and travel writing, he uncovers motives and appreciations of movement, difference and novelty that are deeply woven into the imperial enterprise – and that remain key drivers of our interest in and enjoyment of travel today. Marrying concrete case studies and lively personal anecdotes, The Importance of Elsewhere will be of interest to any global traveler who has ever stopped to wonder what it is that draws her to faraway places.
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One Hundred Years of Futurism
More than one hundred years after Futurism exploded onto the European stage with its unique brand of art and literature, there is a need to reassess the whole movement, from its Italian roots to its international ramifications. In wide-ranging essays based on fresh research, the contributors to this collection examine both the original context and the cultural legacy of Futurism. Chapters touch on topics such as Futurism and Fascism, the geopolitics of Futurism, the Futurist woman, and translating Futurist texts. A large portion of the book is devoted to the practical aspects of performing Futurist theatrical ideas in the twenty-first century.
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Food Democracy
In a world where privatisation and capitalism dominate the global economy, the essays in this book ask how to make socially responsive communication, design and art that counters the role of the food industry as a machine of consumption. Food Democracy brings together contributions from leading international scholars and activists, critical case studies of emancipatory food practices and reflections on possible models for responsive communication design and art. A section of visual communication works, creative writings and accounts of participatory art for social and environmental change – curated by the Memefest Festival of Socially Responsive Communication and Art on the theme of "Food Democracy" – are also included here. The beautifully designed book also includes a unique and delicious compilation of socially engaged recipes by the academic, artist and activist community. Aiming not just to advance scholarship, but to push ahead real change in the world, Food Democracy is essential reading for scholars and citizens alike.
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Personal Style Blogs
More LessFrom Style Rookie to Style Bubble, personal style blogs exploded onto the scene in the mid-2000s giving voice to young and stylish writers who had their own unique take on the seasonal fashion cycle and how to curate an individual style within the shifting swirl of trends. Personal Style Blogs examines the history and rise of style blogging and looks closely at the relationship between bloggers and their (often anonymous) readers as well as the response of the fashion industry to style bloggers’ amateur and often unauthorized fashion reportage.
The book charts the development of the style blogosphere and its transformation from an alternative, experimental space to one dominated by the fashion industry. Complete with examples of several famous fashion bloggers, such as Susie Lau, Rumi Neely and Tavi Gevinson, the author explores notions of individuality, aesthetics and performance on both sides of the digital platform. Findlay asks: what can style blogging teach us about women’s writing and the performance of a private self online? And what drives style bloggers to carve a space for themselves online?
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Picturing the Cosmos
By Iina Kohonen[Picturing the Cosmos elucidates the complex relationship between visual propaganda and censorship in the Soviet Union in the Cold War period, focusing on the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing from a comprehensive corpus of rarely seen photographs and other visual phenomena narrating the Soviet Union’s 1957 victory in the ‘Race for Space’, the author illustrates the media’s role in cementing the way for Communism whilst retaining top-secret information. Each photo is examined as a deliberate, functioning part of a specific political, ideological and historical situation that helped to anchor the otherwise abstract political and intellectual concepts of the future and modernization.
,Space is the ultimate canvas for the imagination, and in the 1950s and ’60s, as part of the space race with the United States, the solar system was the blank page upon which the Soviet Union etched a narrative of exploration and conquest. In Picturing the Cosmos, drawing on a comprehensive corpus of rarely seen photographs and other visual phenomena, Iina Kohonen maps the complex relationship between visual propaganda and censorship during the Cold War.]
Kohonen ably examines each image, elucidating how visual media helped to anchor otherwise abstract political and intellectual concepts of the future and modernization within the Soviet Union. The USSR mapped and named the cosmos, using new media to stake a claim to this new territory and incorporating it into the daily lives of its citizens. Soviet cosmonauts, meanwhile, were depicted as prototypes of the perfect Communist man, representing modernity, good taste, and the aesthetics of the everyday. Across five heavily illustrated chapters, Picturing the Cosmos navigates and critically examines these utopian narratives, highlighting the rhetorical tension between propaganda, censorship, art, and politics.
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The Imaginary Geography of Hollywood Cinema 1960-2000
More Less[The Imaginary Geography of Hollywood Cinema 1960–2000 combines digital cartography with close readings of representative films from 1960 to 2000. Christian B. Long offers a unique history of twentieth-century Hollywood narrative cinema, one that is focused on the intersection of the geographies of narrative location, production, consumption and taste in the era before the rise of digital cinema. Long redraws the boundaries of film history, both literally and figuratively, by cataloging films’ narrative locations on digital maps in order to illustrate where Hollywood actually locates its narratives over time.
A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform:The Imaginary Geography of Hollywood Cinema. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License and is part of Knowledge Unlatched.
,The Imaginary Geography of Hollywood Cinema 1960–2000 combines digital cartography with close readings of representative films from 1960 to 2000. Christian B. Long offers a unique history of twentieth-century Hollywood narrative cinema, one that is focused on the intersection of the geographies of narrative location, production, consumption and taste in the era before the rise of digital cinema. Long redraws the boundaries of film history, both literally and figuratively, by cataloging films’ narrative locations on digital maps in order to illustrate where Hollywood actually locates its narratives over time.A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform:The Imaginary Geography of Hollywood Cinema. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License and is part of Knowledge Unlatched.]
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Towards a Praxis-based Media and Journalism Research
This volume weaves together ongoing scholarly debates around how to bridge the gap between theory and practice in media and journalism research. It relies heavily on articles media scholars and media practitioners have written on how the sides can work together for the good of society. The contributions to this volume represent the first effort to look at praxis in terms of the dual dynamic of communication and how its two pillars can work together to address relations and interactions from critical perspectives of media and journalism practice and research. The result will lay important groundwork for scholarship on this new and increasingly important phenomenon.
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Transformations
Critically challenging the notion of cities as hegemonic spaces, Transformations: Art and the City explores interactions between the human subject and their urban surroundings through site-specific art and creative practices, tracing the ways in which Chapters include case-studies raging from corporate- and public-funded art in Sydney; creative exchanges in Cambodia; politically-engaged enterprise art in the USA; affordable housing models in Australia; street-art under surveillance in Melbourne; and community memorial in post-disaster New Zealand, amongst others. People live, imagine and shape their cities. Drawing on the work of artists globally, from Cambodia to Australia, New Zealand to the USA, this edited collection investigates the politics and democratization of space through an examination of art, education, justice, and the role of the citizen in the city. The writers critically and poetically engage with the temporality and genealogies of public spaces, and ask: how do we reconcile artistic practices with an urbanism driven by globalization and capital? And is there room for aesthetic practices in urban discourse? This collection explores how creative practices can work in tandem with ever-changing urban technologies and ecologies to both disrupt and shape urban public spaces, democratization of space through an examination of art, education, justice and the role of the citizen in the city.
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Celebrity Culture and the Entertainment Industry in Asia
Offering a rare insight into the world of celebrity and media in China and beyond, Celebrity Culture and the Entertainment Industry in Asia deconstructs the dynamics of “stardom” and celebrity endorsement in East Asia, and examines its impact on marketing communications and media. Through first-hand interviews with celebrities and entertainment industry practitioners, the book discusses the social, cultural and economic influences of celebrity through topics such as self-identity, celebrity-driven consumer behaviour, gender and race stereotypes, idol worship, etc. Interviews with celebrities such as Kai-Wah Kwok, Bob Lam, Denise Ho, Hilary Tsui and Francis Mak present the reader with insider accounts of celebrity formation, management and marketing in Hong Kong and Mainland China, as well as South Korea and Taiwan. These untold inside stories of celebrity endorsement and advocacy will stimulate both academic and general readers’ interest in rethinking the economic and cultural implications of the phenomenon of stardom.
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Lexicon for an Affective Archive
To study an archive or archival materials is to encounter an affective and critical practice involved in the construction of memory. Lexicon for an Affective Archive, edited by Giulia Palladini and Marco Pustianaz, is an international collection of these encounters, offering glimpses into the intimate relations inherent in finding, remembering (or imagining) and creating an archive. Bringing together voices from a variety of fields across the humanities, performance studies and contemporary art, and engaging in a multidisciplinary analysis, this beautifully designed and fully illustrated volume advances the idea of an “affective archive” as a useful conceptual tool – a tool which contributes to an understanding of an expanded notion of an archive and its central role in contemporary visual and performing arts.
A co-publication with NInA and Live Art Development Agency.
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Culture War
More LessThe culture wars – intertwining art, culture and politics – have sparked prominent political debates across the globe for many years, but particularly in Europe and America since 2001. Focusing specifically on the experience of Denmark during this period, Culture War aims to analyse and understand the rise of right-wing nationalism in Europe as part of the globalisation and mediatisation of the modern nation state and the culture war and affective politics arising from it. This culture war provides an example of an affective cultural politics in which institutional structures become entwined with media representations, events and patterns of belonging.
Employing a detailed and critically reflective argument covering social media, television, political campaigns, advertising and 'artivism,' Camilla Møhring Reestorff refuses the traditional distinction between the world of visual culture and the political domain, and she provides multiple tools for understanding the dynamics of contemporary affective cultural politics in a highly mediatised environment.
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Europe Faces Europe
How is Europe identified in narratives from its eastern periphery? This is the core question of this volume. Its chapters map narratives of Europe rooted in East Europe, as they circulate in phenomenological philosophy, news journalism, social movements, literary texts, visual art and popular music. Whereas debate and research on European identity is normally conducted in self-congratulatory terms by core institutions in the centre, the focus here is on how Europeanness is narrated in one of its most dynamic regions: Eastern Europe. A closer scrutiny of how such East European narratives critically rework inherited conceptions reveals a range of strategies for interpreting European identity in this transitory phase of history.
Open Access PDF of this title is available from OAPEN, at this link Europe Faces Europe.
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Broadcasting and National Imagination in Post-Communist Latvia
More LessThis book uses the case study of public television in post-communist Latvia to explore the question of how audiences respond to TV offerings, and how their choices can be seen as an act of agency. Jānis Juzefovičs builds his book around Albert O. Hirschman’s classic concepts of exit, voice and loyalty – the options available to a person within any system. He uses Hirschman’s ideas, along with tools from social constructionism, to assess how the publics of both the Latvian-speaking majority and the large Russian-speaking minority have responded to the role of public television in the nation-building efforts of the new Latvian state. Along the way, he develops our understanding of public broadcasting more generally, and the way it can be used to define a national 'we'.
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Fan Phenomena: Game of Thrones
[Winter is coming. Every Sunday night, millions of fans gather around their televisions to take in the spectacle that is a new episode of Game of Thrones. Much is made of who will be gruesomely murdered each week on the hit show, though sometimes the question really is who won’t die a fiery death. The show, based on the Song of Fire and Ice series written by George R. R. Martin, is a truly global phenomenon.
, Winter is coming. Every Sunday night, millions of fans gather around their televisions to take in the spectacle that is a new episode of Game of Thrones. Much is made of who will be gruesomely murdered each week on the hit show, though sometimes the question really is who won’t die a fiery death. The show, based on the Song of Ice and Fire series written by George R. R. Martin, is a truly global phenomenon.
With the seventh season of the HBO series in production, Game of Thrones has been nominated for multiple awards, its cast has been catapulted to celebrity and references to it proliferate throughout popular culture. Often positioned as the grittier antithesis to J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Martin’s narrative focuses on the darker side of chivalry and heroism, stripping away these higher ideals to reveal the greed, amorality and lust for power underpinning them.
Fan Phenomena: Game of Thrones is an exciting new addition to the Intellect series, bringing together academics and fans of Martin’s universe to consider not just the content of the books and HBO series, but fan responses to both. From trivia nights dedicated to minutiae to forums speculating on plot twists to academics trying to make sense of the bizarre climate of Westeros, everyone is talking about Game of Thrones. Edited by Kavita Mudan Finn, the book focuses on the communities created by the books and television series and how these communities envision themselves as consumers, critics and even creators of fanworks in a wide variety of media, including fiction, art, fancasting and cosplay.
With the seventh season of the HBO series in production, Game of Thrones has been nominated for multiple awards, its cast has been catapulted to celebrity and references to it proliferate throughout popular culture. Often positioned as the grittier antithesis to J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Martin’s narrative focuses on the darker side of chivalry and heroism, stripping away these higher ideals to reveal the greed, amorality and lust for power underpinning them.
Fan Phenomena: Game of Thrones is an exciting new addition to the Intellect series, bringing together academics and fans of Martin’s universe to consider not just the content of the books and HBO series, but fan responses to both. From trivia nights dedicated to minutiae to forums speculating on plot twists to academics trying to make sense of the bizarre climate of Westeros, everyone is talking about Game of Thrones. Edited by Kavita Mudan Finn, the book focuses on the communities created by the books and television series and how these communities envision themselves as consumers, critics, and even creators of fanworks in a wide variety of media, including fiction, art, fancasting and cosplay.]
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Taking Up McLuhan's Cause
[This book brings together a number of prominent scholars to explore a relatively under-studied area of Marshall McLuhan’s thought: his idea of formal cause and the role that formal cause plays in the emergence of new technologies and in structuring societal relations. Aiming to open a new way of understanding McLuhan’s thought in this area, and to provide methodological grounding for future media ecology research, the book runs the gamut, from contributions that directly support McLuhan’s arguments to those that see in them the germs of future developments in emergent dynamics and complexity theory.
, This book brings together a number of prominent scholars to explore a relatively under-studied area of Marshall McLuhan’s thought: his idea of formal cause and the role that formal cause plays in the emergence of new technologies and in structuring societal relations. Aiming to open a new way of understanding McLuhan’s thought in this area, and to provide methodological grounding for future media ecology research, the book runs the gamut, from contributions that directly support McLuhan’s arguments to those that see in them the germs of future developments in emergent dynamics and complexity theory.]
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Ghostbodies
[How is illness represented in today’s cultural texts? In Ghostbodies, Maia Dolphin-Krute argues that the illusive sick body is often made invisible – a ghost – because it does not always fit society’s definition of disability. In these pages, she reflectively engages in a philosophical discussion of the lived experience of illness alongside an examination of how language and cultural constructions influence and represent this experience in a variety of forms. The book provides a linguistic mirror through which the reader may see his or her own specific invalidity reflected, enabling an examination of what it is like to live within a ghostbody. In the end, Dolphin-Krute asks – if illness is not what it seems, what then is health?
,How is illness represented in today’s cultural texts? In Ghostbodies, Maia Dolphin-Krute argues that the illusive sick body is often made invisible – a ghost – because it does not always fit society’s definition of disability. In these pages, she reflectively engages in a philosophical discussion of the lived experience of illness alongside an examination of how language and cultural constructions influence and represent this experience in a variety of forms. The book provides a linguistic mirror through which the reader may see his or her own specific invalidity reflected, enabling an examination of what it is like to live within a ghostbody. In the end, Dolphin-Krute asks – if illness is not what it seems, what then is health?]
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Kiosk Literature of Silver Age Spain
The so-called 'Silver Age' of Spain ran from 1898 to the rise of Franco in 1939 and was characterized by intense urbanization, widespread class struggle and mobility and a boom in mass culture. This book offers a close look at one manifestation of that mass culture: weekly collections of short, often pocket-sized books sold in urban kiosks at low prices. These series published a wide range of literature in a variety of genres and formats, but their role as disseminators of erotic and anarchist fiction led them to be censored by the Franco dictatorship. This book offers the most detailed scholarly analysis of kiosk literature to date, examining the kiosk phenomenon through the lens of contemporary interdisciplinary theories of urban space, visuality, celebrity, gender and sexuality, and the digital humanities.
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Television Antiheroines
With a foreword by Diane Negra and Jorie Lagerway
As television has finally started to create more leading roles for women, the female antiheroine has emerged as a compelling and dynamic character type. Television Antiheroines looks closely at this recent development, exploring the emergence of women characters in roles typically reserved for men, particularly in the male-dominated genre of the crime and prison drama.
The essays collected in Television Antiheroines are divided into four sections or types of characters: mafia women, drug dealers and aberrant mothers, women in prison, and villainesses. Looking specifically at shows such as Gomorrah, Mafiosa, The Wire, The Sopranos, Sons of Anarchy, Orange is the New Black, and Antimafia Squad, the contributors explore the role of race and sexuality and focus on how many of the characters transgress traditional ideas about femininity and female identity, such as motherhood. They examine the ways in which bad women are portrayed and how these characters undermine gender expectations and reveal the current challenges by women to social and economic norms. Television Antiheroines will be essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in crime and prison drama and the rising prominence of women in nontraditional roles.
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Life at the End of Life
More LessArtist and scholar Marcia Brennan serves as Artist in Residence at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and the experience of seeing, close-up, the transitional states and transformational visions involved in the approaching end of life raised countless questions about the intersection of life, death and art. Those questions are at the heart of this unique book. Bridging disparate fields, including art history, medical humanities, and religious studies, Life at the End of Life explores the ways in which art can provide a means for rendering otherwise abstract, deeply personal and spiritual experiences vividly concrete and communicable, even as they remain open-ended and transcendent. In the face of death, suffering and uncertainty, Brennan shows how artistic expression can offer valuable aesthetic and metaphysical avenues for understanding and for making meaning.
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