Design and the Social Imagination

Design and the Social Imagination PDF Author: Matthew DelSesto
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350242969
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
How can social theory help us all design solutions to address the social, political and ecological challenges that confront us, and build more sustainable communities? Design professions have typically been associated with intervention and action, while social science has long been associated with thought and reflection. Design and social thought are too frequently considered distinct in terms of how theories can be applied in practice. Design and the Social Imagination brings together the creative, action-oriented sensibility of design with the reflective, analytical capacities of the social sciences to offer models, ideas and strategies for shaping the future of the world we live in. In a world of global economic inequality, racism, and environmental degradation, designing with an understanding of our social reality is increasingly crucial to our survival. Matthew DelSesto explores current practices and discourses in areas of urban design, design for social innovation, environmental design, co-design, service design, and more, illustrating how thoughtful design can contribute in a more productive way. Drawing on a range of theory and practice from radical social thinkers C. Wright Mills, Patrick Geddes, Jane Addams and W. E. B. Du Bois, his book shows us how design and the social sciences can interact in order to intervene in the crises we face today.

Design and the Social Imagination

Design and the Social Imagination PDF Author: Matthew DelSesto
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350242950
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
"Matthew DelSesto provides a compelling blueprint for a design practice that enables us to address the social, political and environmental challenges of today. By combining the creative, action-oriented sensibility of design with the reflective, analytical capacities of the social sciences, DelSesto offers models, ideas and strategies for shaping the future. Drawing on the work of C. Wright Mills, Patrick Geddes, Jane Addams and W. E. B. Du Bois, and exploring professional practices and discourses in a wide range of design fields, this book shows us how design and the social sciences can interact in a more productive way"--

Designing in Dark Times

Designing in Dark Times PDF Author: Virginia Tassinari
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350070270
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
The architectural historian and critic Kenneth Frampton 'never recovered' from the force of Hannah Arendt's teaching at The New School in New York. The philosopher Richard J. Bernstein considers her the most perceptive political theorist and observer of 'dark times' (a concept which, drawing from Brecht, she made her own). Building on the revival of interest in Hannah Arendt, and on the increasing turn in design towards the expanded field of the social, this unique book uses insights and quotations drawn from Arendt's major writings (The Human Condition; The Origins of Totalitarianism, Men in Dark Times) to assemble a new kind of lexicon for politics, designing and acting today. Taking 56 terms – from Action, Beginnings and Creativity through Mortality, Natality, and Play to Superfluity, Technology and Violence – and inviting designers and scholars of design world-wide to contribute, Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon, offers up an extraordinary range of short essays that use moments and quotations from Arendt's thought as the starting points for reflection on how these terms can be conceived for contemporary design and political praxis. Neither simply dictionary nor glossary, the lexicon brings together designing and political philosophy to begin to create a new language for acting and designing against dark times.

Design and the Social Imagination

Design and the Social Imagination PDF Author: Matthew DelSesto
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350242969
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
How can social theory help us all design solutions to address the social, political and ecological challenges that confront us, and build more sustainable communities? Design professions have typically been associated with intervention and action, while social science has long been associated with thought and reflection. Design and social thought are too frequently considered distinct in terms of how theories can be applied in practice. Design and the Social Imagination brings together the creative, action-oriented sensibility of design with the reflective, analytical capacities of the social sciences to offer models, ideas and strategies for shaping the future of the world we live in. In a world of global economic inequality, racism, and environmental degradation, designing with an understanding of our social reality is increasingly crucial to our survival. Matthew DelSesto explores current practices and discourses in areas of urban design, design for social innovation, environmental design, co-design, service design, and more, illustrating how thoughtful design can contribute in a more productive way. Drawing on a range of theory and practice from radical social thinkers C. Wright Mills, Patrick Geddes, Jane Addams and W. E. B. Du Bois, his book shows us how design and the social sciences can interact in order to intervene in the crises we face today.

The Sociological Imagination

The Sociological Imagination PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789350027639
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description


Ghostly Matters

Ghostly Matters PDF Author: Avery F. Gordon
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452913862
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
“Avery Gordon’s stunningly original and provocatively imaginative book explores the connections linking horror, history, and haunting. ” —George Lipsitz “The text is of great value to anyone working on issues pertaining to the fantastic and the uncanny.” —American Studies International “Ghostly Matters immediately establishes Avery Gordon as a leader among her generation of social and cultural theorists in all fields. The sheer beauty of her language enhances an intellectual brilliance so daunting that some readers will mark the day they first read this book. One must go back many more years than most of us can remember to find a more important book.” —Charles Lemert Drawing on a range of sources, including the fiction of Toni Morrison and Luisa Valenzuela (He Who Searches), Avery Gordon demonstrates that past or haunting social forces control present life in different and more complicated ways than most social analysts presume. Written with a power to match its subject, Ghostly Matters has advanced the way we look at the complex intersections of race, gender, and class as they traverse our lives in sharp relief and shadowy manifestations. Avery F. Gordon is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Janice Radway is professor of literature at Duke University.

Collectivism After Modernism

Collectivism After Modernism PDF Author: Blake Stimson
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452909202
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
“Don’t start an art collective until you read this book.” —Guerrilla Girls “Ever since Web 2.0 with its wikis, blogs and social networks the art of collaboration is back on the agenda. Collectivism after Modernism convincingly proves that art collectives did not stop after the proclaimed death of the historical avant-gardes. Like never before technology reinvents the social and artists claim the steering wheel!” —Geert Lovink, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam “This examination of the succession of post-war avant-gardes and collectives is new, important, and engaged.” — Stephen F. Eisenman, author of The Abu Ghraib Effect “Collectivism after Modernism crucially helps us understand what artists and others can do in mushy, stinky times like ours. What can the seemingly powerless do in the face of mighty forces that seem to have their act really together? Here, Stimson and Sholette put forth many good answers.” —Yes Men Spanning the globe from Europe, Japan, and the United States to Africa, Cuba, and Mexico, Collectivism after Modernism explores the ways in which collectives function within cultural norms, social conventions, and corporate or state-sanctioned art. Together, these essays demonstrate that collectivism survives as an influential artistic practice despite the art world’s star system of individuality. Collectivism after Modernism provides the historical understanding necessary for thinking through postmodern collective practice, now and into the future. Contributors: Irina Aristarkhova, Jesse Drew, Okwui Enwezor, Rubn Gallo, Chris Gilbert, Brian Holmes, Alan Moore, Jelena Stojanovi´c, Reiko Tomii, Rachel Weiss. Blake Stimson is associate professor of art history at the University of California Davis, the author of The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation, and coeditor of Visual Worlds and Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. Gregory Sholette is an artist, writer, and cofounder of collectives Political Art Documentation/Distribution and REPOhistory. He is coeditor of The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life. “To understand the various forms of postwar collectivism as historically determined phenomena and to articulate the possibilities for contemporary collectivist art production is the aim of Collectivism after Modernism. The essays assembled in this anthology argue that to make truly collective art means to reconsider the relation between art and public; examples from the Situationist International and Group Material to Paper Tiger Television and the Congolese collective Le Groupe Amos make the point. To construct an art of shared experience means to go beyond projecting what Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette call the “imagined community”: a collective has to be more than an ideal, and more than communal craft; it has to be a truly social enterprise. Not only does it use unconventional forms and media to communicate the issues and experiences usually excluded from artistic representation, but it gives voice to a multiplicity of perspectives. At its best it relies on the participation of the audience to actively contribute to the work, carrying forth the dialogue it inspires.” —BOMB

Making Trouble

Making Trouble PDF Author: Otto Von Busch
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350162574
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Making hacks into reality. It engages matter in ways that trespass the boundaries between the civic realm and the state-assigned laws. Even with primitive tools and skills, designing and making can break open and repurpose arrangements of power. The proof is that some crafts are so controversial-lock-picking, moonshining, shoplifting, smuggling, sabotage-that they need to be controlled or even outlawed. When designers and makers touch on these contested realms, they run into trouble. This highly original book explores how the material power of design and making can challenge arrangements of agency and domination. Unpacking a series of conflicting cases-from illegal making to the strategic and civic use of crafts to manifest radical alternatives to the current order-it shows how designers and makers can use even basic tools to work towards more.

Design as Future-Making

Design as Future-Making PDF Author: Susan Yelavich
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472574729
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Design as Future-Making brings together leading international designers, scholars, and critics to address ways in which design is shaping the future. The contributors share an understanding of design as a practice that, with its focus on innovation and newness, is a natural ally of futurity. Ultimately, the choices made by designers are understood here as choices about the kind of world we want to live in. Design as Future-Making locates design in a space of creative and critical reflection, examining the expanding nature of practice in fields such as biomedicine, sustainability, digital crafting, fashion, architecture, urbanism, and design activism. The authors contextualize design and its affects within issues of social justice, environmental health, political agency, education, and the right to pleasure and play. Collectively, they make the case that, as an integrated mode of thought and action, design is intrinsically social and deeply political.

A Guide to Socially-Informed Research for Architects and Designers

A Guide to Socially-Informed Research for Architects and Designers PDF Author: Michelle Janning
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000796493
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
This book offers an efficient set of step-by-step tips and overarching lessons about how to gather useful, meaningful, and socially-informed data about clients’ and other stakeholders' experiences in architecture and interior design professions. In this guide, author Michelle Janning helps the design professional conduct ongoing evaluation of design projects, create useful pre- and post-design evaluations, frame effective questions for improved future design, involve various stakeholders in the research process, and focus on responsible and evidence-based human-centered design to improve the relationship between design and people’s experiences. Examining a variety of both large- and small-scale project examples from different institutional realms, including healthcare sites, schools, residences, eating establishments, museums, and theaters, this book highlights not only the overlap in these types of projects but also the differences between project sizes that may impact the methods used in any given project. It also offers tools for how to communicate design success to audiences that include potential clients, occupants, and other designers. A Guide to Socially-Informed Research for Architects and Designers is a go-to reference for design professionals interested in using accessible social scientific methods to gather essential and practical information from people who occupy the spaces they design and to do so in an ethical, inclusive, and socially-informed way in order to enhance social sustainability in the built environment.

Designing for Interdependence

Designing for Interdependence PDF Author: Martín Ávila
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135018375X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Challenging the dominant design paradigm that centres humanity in its practice, Designing for Interdependence puts forward an ecocentric mode of designing that privileges a harmonious relationship between all life forms that share our planet. This book is about the practice of designing and design's capacity to relate (or not) to beings of all kinds, human and others, in ways that are life-affirming. Sensitive to power differentials and the responsibility that this entails, Martín Ávila develops the notion of alter-natives, a concept that exposes the alterity of artificial things and the potential of these things to participate in the sustainment of natural environments. He proposes a design practice that encompasses humans, artificial things and other-than-human species in a 'poetics of relating', and provides methods that support the rewilding necessary for maintaining cultural and biological diversity and the stabilization of planetary dynamics. The book features real-life project case studies that illustrate some of the political-ecological implications of an ecocentric paradigm, which can help us to imagine alternative modes of relating to local environments and alternative modes of inter-species cohabitation. Avoiding dualistic thinking and the dichotomies harmful-benefit, construction-destruction, natural-artificial and life-death, Ávila pursues the work of caring for how our mattering through design can become constructive in creating more-than-human ecologies.