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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...
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...
The idea of this anthology is to explore the relationships between phenomenology and the social sciences.
This book offers a a way to analyze narrative data in socio-historical research.
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.
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...
"The story of Turin's transformation is well told. . . . Pollak's account of the financial machinations of the Dukes in their efforts to acquire properties, and to pay for fortifications by taxing betterment on enclosed land, is one of the best parts of the book."—Simon Pepper, Times Literary Supplement
his anthology compiled from volumes 3-10 of Design Issues, includes material from areas seldom discussed in existing surveys and will facilitate the general discourse within the design community on a wide range of conceptual and methodological issues of contemporary design history. Design history has emerged in recent years as a significant field of scholarly research and critical reflection. With their interest in the conceptualization, production, and consumption of objects (large and small, unique or multiple, anonymous or signed) and environments (ephemeral or enduring, public or private), design historians investigate the multiple ways in which intentionally produced objects, environmen...