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The editor has gathered together a body of writing in the emerging field of design studies. The contributors argue in different ways for a rethinking of design in the light of its cultural significance and its powerful position in today's society. The collection begins with a discussion of the various expressions of opposition to the modernists' purist approach toward design. Drawing on postmodernist theory and other critical strategies, the writers examine the relations among design, technology, and social organization to show how design has become a complex and multidisciplinary activity. The second section provides examples of new methods of interpreting and analysing design, ranging from rhetoric and semiotics to phenomenology, demonstrating how meaning is created visually. A final section related to design history shifts its emphasis to ideological frameworks such as capitalism and patriarchy that establish boundaries for the production and use of design.
The three volume set LNAI 5177, LNAI 5178, and LNAI 5179, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES 2008, held in Zagreb, Croatia, in September 2008. The 316 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected. The papers present a wealth of original research results from the field of intelligent information processing in the broadest sense; topics covered in the first volume are artificial neural networks and connectionists systems; fuzzy and neuro-fuzzy systems; evolutionary computation; machine learning and classical AI; agent systems; knowledge based and expert systems; intelligent vision and image processing; knowledge management, ontologies, and data mining; Web intelligence, text and multimedia mining and retrieval; and intelligent robotics and control.
Emerging from the world of commercial art and product styling, design has now become completely integrated into human life. Its marks are all around us, from the chairs we sit on to the Web sites on our computer screens. One of the pioneers of design studies and still one of its most distinguished practitioners, Victor Margolin here offers a timely meditation on design and its study at the turn of the millennium and charts new directions for the future development of both fields. Divided into sections on the practice and study of design, the essays in The Politics of the Artificial cover such topics as design history, design research, design as a political tool, sustainable design, and the p...
The idea of this anthology is to explore the relationships between phenomenology and the social sciences.
This volume examines a diverse set of spaces and buildings seen through the lens of popular practice and belief to shed light on the complexities of sacred space in America. Contributors explore how dedication sermons document shifting understandings of the meetinghouse in early 19th-century Connecticut; the changes in evangelical church architecture during the same century and what that tells us about evangelical religious life; the impact of contemporary issues on Catholic church architecture; the impact of globalization on the construction of traditional sacred spaces; the urban practice of Jewish space; nature worship and Central Park in New York; the mezuzah and domestic sacred space; and, finally, the spiritual aspects of African American yard art.
Both Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva have made an enormous impact throughout the humanities with their work on signification, identity and difference, and yet the nature of the relation between their theories seems oddly indeterminate: they have sometimes been regarded as more or less indistinguishable and sometimes as incompatible This book aims at establishing precisely how Kristeva's and Derrida's writings may be articulated, tracing intersections and divergences, parallels and discontinuities between them. But how do you compare two theories of the production of difference? What conception of difference do you use to go about it? Any search for a dividing line between Derrida and Kris...
As the first of a two-volume set on the anthropology of cultural transformation, this book discusses the manifestations of cultural transformation in the modern world and explores the re-establishment of cultural consciousness. Anthropology in the twenty-first century is confronted with a worldview of cultural transformation based on communication, collision, and interaction among cultures around the globe. This two-volume set aims to reorient the role and function of anthropology by focusing on the reconstruction of knowledge and cultural consciousness in order to better imagine and realize the synergetic interaction between different cultures and civilizations. In this first volume, the au...
James S. Coleman was one of a distinguished generation of sociology students who passed through the Columbia Sociology Department in the 1940s and `50s. This book critically debates his work and his contribution to society and the social sciences more generally. It consists of 18 major papers by 20 authors from six countries on a range of themes. The volume is framed by an extended editorial introduction reflecting on the five- year exchange of correspondence between James Coleman and the editor, together with two of Coleman's own works.
This book offers a a way to analyze narrative data in socio-historical research.
Política offers a stunning revisionist understanding of the early political incorporation of Mexican-origin peoples into the U.S. body politic in the nineteenth century. Historical sociologist Phillip B. Gonzales reexamines the fundamental issue in New Mexico's history, namely, the dramatic shift in national identities initiated by Nuevomexicanos when their province became ruled by the United States. Gonzales provides an insightful, rigorous, and controversial interpretation of how Nuevomexicano political competition was woven into the Democratic and Republican two-party system that emerged in the United States between the 1850s and 1912, when New Mexico became a state. Drawing on newly dis...