89172 Engaging Texts: Cross-Disciplinary Conversations

Warning: The information on this page is indicative. The subject outline for a particular semester, location and mode of offering is the authoritative source of all information about the subject for that offering. Required texts, recommended texts and references in particular are likely to change. Students will be provided with a subject outline once they enrol in the subject.

Subject level:

Postgraduate

Handbook description

This subject introduces students to texts, conversations and viewpoints drawn from diverse disciplinary contexts that are of relevance to design, including philosophy, sociology, anthropology, science and technology studies, history, literature and film. It highlights the richness of understanding that can arise when texts move across disciplinary boundaries and populate other disciplinary spaces. This in one of a pair of subjects that focus specifically on 'engaging texts' as a stimulus to design understanding. In these subjects students engage with texts that are or have been influential in shaping ways in which designers think about the worlds that designed things enter into and redefine. Different kinds of text, including theoretical, literary and designed texts, and texts utilising different media, are introduced.

Subject objectives/outcomes

Participants who actively participate in and successfully complete all aspects of this subject will have demonstrated that they:

1. Understand the importance to design, of rich and critically informed accounts of human ways of being in the world, and of the human-non-human dynamics in which designed things participate.

2. Are able to engage with, and understand the significance of, the central ideas within relevant philosophical and theoretical texts.

3. Are able to appreciate the role of creative texts in communicating human experience of the world.

4. Are able to effectively communicate, actively share, and dialogically develop ideas arising through an engagement with philosophical, theoretical and creative texts.

5. Are able to relate the understandings they have gained from philosophical, theoretical and creative texts, to their designing.

Contribution to course aims and graduate attributes

This subject contributes to the development of graduate skills in the areas of: a) communication and interpersonal skills; by fostering: - an ability to engage with global trans-disciplinary networks; - group leadership skills and appreciation of team dynamics; and - professional levels of written communication. b) attitudes and values; by encouraging: - a reflective approach to design practice; and - a reflective approach to cultural context. c) critical thinking and research skills; especially: - an ability to analyse and synthesise complex ideas; - an ability to develop well supported arguments and rationales; and - an engagement with relevant trans-disciplinary academic research.

Teaching and learning strategies

Face-to-face classes will incorporate a range of teaching and learning strategies including short presentations, workshops, student group-work, film viewing and discussion of films and readings. These activities will be complemented by independent student reading and idea development.

Content

Themes and arguments relevant to design, drawn from philosophy, sociology, anthropology, cultural theory, design theory and creative texts. Specific discussions may be oriented by the following (and/or other) groups of terms: • Embodiment / experience; • World / doing; • Politics / ethics / judgment; • Production / urban life; • Power / resistance; • Subjectivity / desire; • Image / affect; • Practices / interpretive worlds / metaphor; • Technology / hybridity / assemblage.

References

Adorno, T.W. & Horkeimer, M. 1979, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming, Verso, London.
Barad, K. 2003, 'Posthumanist Performativity: Towards and Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 801-831.
Barthes, R. 1970, Mythologies, Noonday Press, New York.
Bennett, J. 2010, Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things, Duke University Press, Durham and London.
Birchall, C. 2011, 'Introduction to 'Secrecy and Transparency': The Politics of Opacity and Openness', Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 28, no. 7, pp. 7-25.
Certeau, M.d. 1984, The practice of everyday life, University of California Press, Berkeley, Ca.
Connolly, W.E. 2010, 'Materiality, Experience and Surveillance', in B. Braun & S. Whatmore (eds), Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy and Public Life, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Ermath, E.D. 2001, 'Agency in the Discursive Tradition', History and Theory, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 34-58. Foucault, M. 1977, Discipline and Punish, Allen Lane & Pantheon, Vintage, London & New York.
Harvey, J. 2007, 'Showing and Hiding: Equivocation in the Relations of Body and Dress', Fashion Theory, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 65-94.
Kimbell, L. 2013, 'The Object Strikes Back: An Interview with Graham Harman', Design and Culture, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 103-117.
Latour, B. 1996, Aramis, or The love of technology, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Latour, B. 2008, 'A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Towards a Philosophy of Design (with special attention to Peter Sloterdijk)', paper presented to the Networks of Design: meeting of the Design History Society, Falmouth, Cornwall, 3rd September 2008. Lefebvre, H. 1991, The production of space, Blackwell, Oxford, England & Cambridge, Mass.
Mackenzie, A. 2005, 'Problematising the technological object as event?', Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 381-399.
Michael, M. 2006, Technoscience and everyday life: the complex simplicities of the mundane, Open University Press, Maidenhead.
Nietzsche, F.W. 1990, Beyond good and evil, Penguin, London & New York.
Rubin, B. 2005, 'Dark Source: Public Trust and the Secret at the Heart of the New Voting Machines', in B. Latour & P. Weibel (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ZKM & MIT Press, Karlsruhe, Germany & Cambridae, MA, pp. 828-833.
Scarry, E. 1985, The body in pain: the making and unmaking of the world, Oxford University Press, New York.
Schatzki, T. 2010, The timespace of human activity: on performance, society and history as indeterminate teleological events, Lexington Books, Lanham, Md.
Sommerlund, J. 2008, 'Mediations in Fashion', Journal of Cultural Economy, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 165-180. Tanizaki, J.c. 1977, 2001, In praise of shadows, Vintage Press, London.
Terreehorst, P. & de Vries, G. 2005, 'The Parliament of Fashion', in B. Latour & P. Weibel (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ZKM & MIT Press, Karlsruhe, Germany & Cambridae, MA, pp. 662-669.
Verbeek, P.-P. 2011, Moralizing technology: understanding and designing the morality of things, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London.