Undisciplinarity (essay in book)

The book that resulted from the 'inter_multi_trans_actions: emerging trends in post-disciplinary creative practice' symposium at Napier University in Edinburgh, Scotland on Thursday 26 June, 2008 is nearing publication.

The book 'Digital Blur: Creative Practice at the Boundaries of Architecture, Design and Art' edited by Paul Rodgers and Michael Smyth will now be published by Libri Publishing following Middlesex University’s decision to close Middlesex University Press.

According to Amazon the book is due on 31 March, 2010.

The book contains an essay by Julian Bleecker and myself that is preambled thus:

Marshall and Bleecker, in their essay, propose the term “undisciplinary” for the type of work prevalent in this book. That is, creative practice which straddles ground and relationships between art, architecture, design and technology and where different idioms of distinct and disciplinary practices can be brought together. This is clearly evident in the processes and projects of the practitioners’ work here. Marshall and Bleecker view these kinds of projects and experiences as beyond disciplinary practice resulting in a multitude of disciplines “engaging in a pile-up, a knot of jumbled ideas and perspectives.” To Marshall and Bleecker, “undisciplinarity is as much a way of doing work as it is a departure from ways of doing work.” They claim it is a way of working and an approach to creating and circulating culture that can go its own way, without worrying about working outside of what histories-of-disciplines say is “proper” work. In other words, it is “undisciplined”. In this culture of practice, they continue, one cannot be wrong, nor have practice elders tell you how to do what you want to do and this is a good thing because it means new knowledge is created all at once rather than incremental contributions made to a body of existing knowledge. These new ways of working make necessary new practices, new unexpected processes and projects come to be, almost by definition. This is important because we need more playful and habitable worlds that the old forms of knowledge production are ill-equipped to produce. For Marshall and Bleecker, it is an epistemological shift that offers new ways of fixing the problems the old disciplinary and extra-disciplinary practices created in the first place. The creative practitioners contained within the pages of this book clearly meet the “undisciplinary” criteria suggested by Marshall and Bleecker in that they certainly do not need to be told how or what to do; they do not adhere to conventional disciplinary boundaries nor do they pay heed to procedural steps and rules. However, they know what’s good, and what’s bad and they instinctively know what the boundaries are and where the limits of the disciplines lie.

Design Fiction - Reading Material

Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction by Julian Bleecker.

Excellent! As someone who uses examples from 'The Matrix' and 'The Empire Strikes Back' in my class syllabus, I think this is required reading. Julian will be speaking at the European Academy of Design Conference in Aberdeen.

inter_multi_trans_actions (book)

Inter_multi_trans_actions: Creative Practice at the Boundaries of Architecture, Design and Art (Paperback) by Paul Rodgers (Editor), Michael Smyth (Editor)

Paperback: 264 pages
Publisher: Middlesex University Press (1 Sep 2009)
ISBN-10: 1904750699
ISBN-13: 978-1904750697

Available to pre-order here.

Tête-a-Tête Falls

Tête-a-Tête Falls is a two-part, two-sided sculpture constructed of split-face granite block to be sited in the North lobe of the Goodale Park Lake, Columbus, Ohio, USA. Water pumped to a trough at the top of the form will cascade over weirs on the interior sides of the structure creating twin horseshoe waterfalls. On the backsides, it will flow over and down the two stepped, beehive-shaped forms creating different and variable water displays on all surfaces. Central to this concept is the desire to create a year-round water feature. Tête-a-Tête Falls is designed as much for the winter months, when ice will form in constantly shifting and unpredictable ways, as it is for the other seasons.

For the past year or so I've been working on renderings and models for the artist Malcolm Cochran. The piece was featured in a recent article in The Columbus Dispatch. This project and some of the other work I have been doing for Malcolm features as a case study on the new SimplyRhino website.

I will be talking about this and other projects at the UK launch of Rhino 4.0 at Metropolitan Works in London on 9th November 2006.

LINK

More PBB

There is a review of Perimeters, Boundaries and Borders HERE.

And a posting about the show on Generator.x

Other (sometimes unintentionally funny) links at:
Lancaster Today
BBC Lancashire
Lancaster City Council

From Rhizome

Link to article - reblogged here

September 29, 2006
Prototyping the Perimeters
Artists, architects, designers, and other practitioners are constantly fashioning new forms and challenging disciplinary boundaries as they employ techniques such as rapid prototyping and generative processes. In the exhibition 'Perimeters, Boundaries, and Borders,' at Lancaster, UK's Citylab, organizers Fast-uk and folly explore the range of objects, buildings, and products being conceptualized with the aid of digital technologies. Aoife Ludlow's 'Remember to Forget?' is a series of jewelry designs that envisioned accessories incorporating RFID tags that allow the wearer to record information and emotions associated with those special items that we put on daily. Tavs Jorgensen uses a data glove in his 'Motion in Form' project. After gesturing around an object, data collected by the glove is given physical shape using CNC (Computer Numerical Control) milling, creating representations of the movements in materials such as glass or ceramics. Addressing traces of a different sort is Cylcone.soc, a data mapping piece by Gavin Bailey and Tom Corby. These works and many more examples from the frontiers of art and design are on view until October 21st. - Michelle Kasprzak
http://www.fastuk.org.uk/

Device Art (article)

Michelle Kasprzak pointed me to this paper by Machiko Kusahara. Some points of interest:

"Device Art is a concept for re-examining art-science-technology relationships both from a contemporary and historical perspective in order to foreground a new aspect of media art. The term "Device Art" may sound obscure, or even self-contradictory, but it is a conscious choice. The concept is a logical extension of a change in the notion of art that already started in the early 20th century with art movements such as Dada and Surrealism. More recently, interactive art has redefined forms of art and the role of artists. What we call device art is a form of media art that integrates art and technology as well as design, entertainment, and popular culture. Instead of regarding technology as a mere tool serving the art, as it is commonly seen, we propose a model in which technology is at the core of artworks."

"While theoretical analysis is an important part of the Device Art project, producing artworks according to its concept is the key element. The project launched in the fall of 2004 and has been pursued by nine artists and researchers, with a five-year grant from the Japan Science and Technology Agency, since the fall of 2005.[1] The aim of the project is not only to create "device art" but also to develop a working model for producing, exhibiting, and distributing these works, and theoretically frame them. Making these artworks accessible to a wider audience and users outside of the museums and galleries is part of our agenda. Development of hardware and software modules to support the art practice is also planned."

[1] The project members are Hiroo Iwata (Tsukuba University, researcher in engineering), Kazuhiko Hachiya(artist), Masahiko Inami (University of Electro-Communication, researcher in engineering), Sachiko Kodama (University of Electro-Communication, artist), Ryota Kuwakubo (artist), Taro Maeda (NTT Research Laboratories, researcher in engineering), Nobunichi Tosa (Maywa Denki, artist), Hiroaki Yano (Tsukuba University, researcher in engineering), Machiko Kusahara (Waseda University, media art researcher).

Device Art Website (in Japanese).

Wiki Article

I have posted an article to the Designed Objects Wiki. A version of this article has been published previously as: MARSHALL, J., & PENGELLY, J., 2006. Computer technologies and transdisciplinary discourse: critical drivers for hybrid design practice? Co Design, Vol. 2, No. 2. pp. 109-122.

Critical Technical Practice (article)

People derive and create meaning, identity and value through things. Most of these are designed by professional designers and manufactured within a commercial framework. However, some are made by individuals for personal use, and some are made in order to exploit the capacity of objects to provoke reflexivity and convey meaning through their physical attributes as a means of communicating ideas.

Critical technical practice (CTP) is a method for developing value-sensitive design and an approach to identifying and altering philosophical assumptions underlying technical practice. Phil Agre originally proposed CTP as a means of converging technology development (in computer science) with critical reflection (in critical studies and design research) in order to expose and deconstruct hidden values and assumptions in the design of technology.

Link: Critical Technical Practice as a Methodology for Values in Design by Kirsten Boehner, Shay David, Joseph Kaye and Phoebe Sengers.

Also worth a look: Reflective Design by Phoebe Sengers, Kirsten Boehner, Shay David and Joseph Kaye.

Metadisciplinarity? (article)

I found an interesting point in Intelligent Agent vol. 6 no. 1 "Doing Interface Ecology: The Practice of Metadisciplinarity" by Andruid Kerne:

The value that transdisciplinarity places on the practice of disciplinary assemblage is a good start. The problem is that trans- means, "across, to or on the farther side of, beyond, over." [31] Novak's transvergence moves this prescription forward by including an emphasis on connecting, but without theorizing the embodied practice of interface development. [32] While going across, beyond, and over disciplinary boundaries, the denotation of trans- is still lacking not only the structural imperative for assembling disciplines, but also a sense of how processes of disciplinary recombination are a formula for creating new knowledge. Nowotny observes that "Transdisciplinarity... is more than juxtaposition. ... If joint problem solving is the aim, then the means must provide for an integration of perspectives in the identification, formulation and resolution of what has to become a shared problem." [33] But, what are the structures and processes that catalyze this type of integration?

Kerne concludes:

The structure of metadisciplinarity connects theory and practice. ...These modes of practice are inseparable. Metadisciplinarity develops an awareness of the structures of situated disciplines that form relationships in interfaces. Through its practice, and intentional cultivation of these relationships, we can create hybrid forms of representation.

By viewing design as an integrative discipline and the generator of hybrid cultural forms it presents diverse design practitioners with opportunities to rethink design as a cultural driver of enormous magnitude in the conjunction of these other domains. Design, architecture and art may be discrete disciplines, but they have common characteristics that bring them into relation with one another. Practitioners are exploiting this relationship to bring together cultural commentary with aesthetics. In these instances the object isn't what changes – rather it is the audience’s perception of the object and its cultural context that is transformed.

In the anti-authorial literary theory of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault the relationship between discourse and object is separated and articulated as a rupture within Modernism's attempt to produce a thing that would speak for itself. Barthes states that each text comprises multiple layers and plural meanings. Therefore readers of texts must divorce a literary work from its creator in order to liberate it from ‘interpretive tyranny’. In this sense the essential meaning of a work depends not on the impressions of the reader but rather on its audience. For Foucault, a ‘discourse’ is a body of thought and writing that is united by having a common object of study, a common methodology, and/or a set of common terms and ideas. Foucault discusses the idea of a transdiscursive position - those who are initiators of discursive practices, not just of individual texts.

Obviously within academia the boundaries of a discipline are important. However, in practice it seems that the ongoing discourse is more significant. Perhaps instead of speculating about new hybrid domains we should be placing emphasis on what it means to take transdiscursive positions?

CoDesign (article)

The aims of CoDesign are:

• to report new research and scholarship in principles, procedures and techniques relevant to collaboration in design
• to act as an international forum for discussion of collaborative design issues
• to foster communication between academic researchers and industry practitioners concerned with collaborative design
• to encourage a flow of information across the boundaries of the disciplines contributing to collaborative design
• to stimulate ideas and provoke widespread discussion with a forward-looking perspective.

CoDesign is inclusive, encompassing collaborative, co-operative, concurrent, human-centred, participatory, socio-technical and community design among others. Research in any design domain concerned specifically with the nature of collaboration design is of relevance to the Journal.

Space to reflect: combinatory methods for developing student interaction design projects in public spaces
CoDesign, Vol. 2, No. 2. (June 2006), pp. 53-69.
by Lennon M, Bannon L, Ciolfi L

Inuit vernacular design as a community of practice for learning
CoDesign, Vol. 2, No. 2. (June 2006), pp. 71-80.
by Reitan J

Seven Mile Boots: the design process of a wearable art piece
CoDesign, Vol. 2, No. 2. (June 2006), pp. 81-88.
by Pichlmair M

Experience design and artefacts after the fact
CoDesign, Vol. 2, No. 2. (June 2006), pp. 89-96.
by Milligan A, Rogers J

Untangling the culture medium of student designers
CoDesign, Vol. 2, No. 2. (June 2006), pp. 97-107.
by Strickfaden M, Heylighen A, Rodgers P, Neuckermans H

Computer technologies and transdisciplinary discourse: critical drivers for hybrid design practice?
CoDesign, Vol. 2, No. 2. (June 2006), pp. 109-122.
by Marshall J, Pengelly J

***

Computer technologies and transdisciplinary discourse: critical drivers for hybrid design practice?
Authors: Marshall, John; Pengelly, Jon
Source: CoDesign, Volume 2, Number 2, June 2006, pp. 109-122(14)
Publisher: Taylor and Francis Ltd

Abstract:
We report on the findings of an ongoing, practice-based and critically grounded PhD research project. It has been recognised that an increasing number of practitioners are able and willing to negotiate working across the disciplinary domains of architecture, product design and sculpture. It is proposed that computer-aided design and manufacturing technologies can enable new models of practice. This paper positions the notion of transdisciplinarity as a critical driver for design vocabularies and methods towards an indicated new object grammar. Existing exemplary projects are reviewed to critically map how an increased level of sophistication in the implementation of these technologies contributes to design discourse in a cross-disciplinary manner. An existing technology adoption model is referenced to provide examples of integration which are understandable across discourse communities. It is indicated that there is a need for further research to identify and establish the benefits and limitations of this model of practice.

Keywords: Architecture; CAD/CAM; Objects; Product design; Sculpture
Document Type: Research article DOI: 10.1080/15710880600645521
Affiliations: Gray's School of Art, The Robert Gordon University, Garthdee Road, Aberdeen, AB10 7QD, UK

Things + Open Source (event)

Beehive Inn (18-20 Grassmarket), Edinburgh, Wednesday 24 May, 2006, 6 PM Usman Haque (artist/architect) and Julian Bleecker (technologist/artist/think tank leader) discuss the "internet of things" and "open source architecture". Hosted by New Media Scotland.

Haque Design + Research specialises in the design and research of interactive architecture systems. Architecture is no longer considered something static and immutable; instead it is seen as dynamic, responsive and conversant. Our projects explore some of this territory.
Usman Haque has created responsive environments, interactive installations, digital interface devices and choreographed performances. His skills include the design of both physical spaces and the software and systems that bring them to life. He has been an invited researcher at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Italy, artist-in-residence at the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences, Japan and has also worked in USA, UK and Malaysia. As well as directing the work of Haque Design + Research he was until 2005 a teacher in the Interactive Architecture Workshop at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London.
He is a recipient of a Wellcome Trust Sciart Award, a grant from the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, the Swiss Creation Prize, Belluard Bollwerk International, the Japan Media Arts Festival Excellence prize and the Asia Digital Art Award Grand Prize. His work has been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Ars Electronica, Transmediale, Hillside Gallery (Tokyo), The National Maritime Museum Greenwich and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. His work has also been presented at international conferences including Siggraph, VSMM (International Society on Virtual Systems and Multimedia) and Doors of Perception.

Julian Bleecker heads the Mobile and Pervasive Lab, a near-future think tank and research and development lab at the School of Cinema-TV and the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California. Bleecker is an expert technologist with over 20 years of hands-on experience. He is fluent in many modern programming languages and best-practices development approaches for distributed networked systems, desktops and mobile devices. He is Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California in the School of Cinema-TV’s Interactive Media Division and is a researcher at USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy. Since 1988 he has been involved in a wide variety of technologies from virtual reality to mobile experience design and location-based media applications. His past and current clients include MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, Scholastic, Sun Microsystems, Volvo Cars, Barnes & Noble, MCI, The National Building Museum, Continental Airlines, The New York Sun and TheStreet.com. Bleecker’s proficiencies include emerging technology design, research and development, implementation, concept innovation, and strategy consulting. His areas of expertise include media and entertainment, mobile designed experiences, location-based media, and social software. His background in electrical engineering and computer science, coupled with his work on emerging technology design allows him to provide a unique perspective on the near-future possibilities of technology-based mobile, location-based, social and networked applications, products and services.

Bleecker wrote the Manifesto for Networked Objects — Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things that I posted about previously.

Should be a good one.

Spime: A Theory Object

The link to Bruce Sterling's speech at Emerging Technology 2006 is online at:
http://www.viridiandesign.org/2006/03/viridian-note-00459-emerging.html

"In the Internet of Things debate, people are still trying to find the loose
verbal grab-bag just to put the concepts into. So I would argue that this work
is basically a literary endeavour. When it comes to remote technical
eventualities, you don't want to freeze the language too early. Instead, you
need some empirical evidence on the ground, some working prototypes, something
commercial, governmental, academic or military.... Otherwise you are trying to
freeze an emergent technology into the shape of today's verbal descriptions.
This prejudices people. It is bad attention economics. It limits their ability
to find and understand the intrinsic advantages of the technology."

"It's turning into what Julian Bleecker calls a "Theory Object," which is an idea
which is not just a mental idea or a word, but a cloud of associated commentary
and data, that can be passed around from mouse to mouse, and linked-to. Every
time I go to an event like this, the word "spime" grows as a Theory Object. A
Theory Object is a concept that's accreting attention, and generating visible,
searchable, rankable, trackable trails of attention."

Julian Bleeker's 'Manifesto for Networked Objects' is here: http://research.techkwondo.com/files/WhyThingsMatter.pdf

Shaping Things

ISBN: 0262693267

Picks up where Sterling's Siggraph keynote of 2004 leaves off. That is available at: http://www.boingboing.net/images/blobjects.htm

Excellent stuff. Crammed with ideas. Sometimes his terminology and neologisms are a bit dodgy - he also forgets to explain that a SPIME is a 'speculative imaginary' object.

"Rapid prototyping is a form of brainstorming with materials. It's not simply a faster way to plunge through older methods of production, but a novel way to manage design and production. By previous standards, it looks as if it is profligate, that it "throws a lot away"- but with better data retention, "mistakes" become a source of wealth. Rapid prototyping seen in depth is an "exhaustion of the phase of the problem" - it isn't reasonable, thrifty or rational, but it has the brutal potency of a chess-playing computer." pp. 48.

There is some great stuff on the evolution of human engagement with objects: artifacts, machines, products, gizmos, spimes and biots. A nice diagram on the mirrored S-curve of technological adaption, too.

Sterling, B., Shaping things. 2005 (The MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts).

Multimodal Interaction

"In Ten myths of multimodal interaction (Communications of the ACM, Vol. 42 , No. 11, pp. 74 - 81, 1999), Sharon Oviatt describes common myths about multimodal interaction (i.e. interacting with a computer using more different input/outputs, like mouse/voice/keyboards or more recent technologies). The myths she is describing are quite relevant to lots of HCI research:

Myth #1: If you build a multimodal system, users will interact multimodally.
Myth#2: Speech and pointing is the dominant multimodal integration pattern.
Myth #3: Multimodal input involves simultaneous signals.
Myth #4: Speech is the primary input mode in any multimodal system that includes it.
Myth #5: Multimodal language does not differ linguistically from unimodal language.
Myth #6: Multimodal integration involves redundancy of content between modes.
Myth #7: Individual error-prone recognition technologies combine multimodally to produce even greater unreliability.
Myth #8: All users’ multimodal commands are integrated in a uniform way
Myth #9: Different input modes are capable of transmitting comparable content.during periods of blank staring.
Myth #10: Enhanced efficiency is the main advantage of multimodal systems"

From a post by Nicolas Nova at Pasta & Vinegar
http://tecfa.unige.ch/perso/staf/nova/blog/2005/12/29/myths-of-multimodal-interaction/

Big, thick & now downloadable.

"Applications of Digital Techniques in Industrial Design Engineering - CAID&CD 2005" published by International Academic Publishers/World Publishing Corporation, Beijing, PRC. (ISBN is: 7-5062-7444-2.) is now available online.

http://www.io.tudelft.nl/caidcd2005/

My paper is on pages 308-313.
Also available at: Download marshallpengellyfinal_ebook_caidcd_05.pdf

Design Definitions

“Design is an interdisciplinary and integrative process constituting a professional field and an intellectual discipline.”

“Despite differences, ten challenges face the making disciplines. Common concerns and challenges are building bridges among design fields. These challenges bind the making disciplines together as a common research field.
The three performance challenges of making disciplines are that they:

1. Act on the physical world.


2. Address human needs.


3. Generate the built environment

Changes in the larger world cause design scholars, practitioners, and students to converge on common challenges. These challenges require frameworks of theory and research to address problem areas and solve cases.

These problem areas involve four substantive challenges:

1. Ambiguous boundaries between artefact, structure, and process.


2. Large-scale social, economic, and industrial frames.


3. A complex environment of needs, requirements, and constraints.


4. Information content that often exceeds the value of physical substance.

They also involve three contextual challenges:

1. A complex environment in which many projects or products cross the boundaries of several organizations, stakeholder, producer, and user groups.


2. Projects or products that must meet the expectations of many organizations, stakeholders, producers, and users.


3. Different – and sometimes conflicting – demands at every level of production, distribution, reception, and control.”

“Professional design practice today involves advanced knowledge. This knowledge isn’t a higher level of professional practice. It is a qualitatively different form of professional practice. It is emerging in response to the demands of the information society and the knowledge economy.”

Friedman, Ken, in Durling, David, ed. 2000. Doctoral education in design: foundations for the future. Stoke-on-Trent: Staffordshire University Press.

DESIGN – FUNCTION ≠ ART?

Why would engaging with the discourse happening across a conventional boundary between domains (art and design) prove an effective strategy to transcend the pathologies and conventions of individual axiomatic domains?

Of the axiomatic domains, ‘design’ is distinctive in that the term itself is used as both a noun and a verb, placing emphasis on what practitioners do, rather than what they produce (Flusser, 1999 and Fairs, 2004.) ‘Art’ and ‘architecture’ are products - whereas ‘design’ is a process. Rather than being a weakness - as has been discussed elsewhere (Krippendorff, 1995.) this condition can be seen as a strength. Indeed, the impetus behind the call to ‘redesign design’ is the defence of the discipline from colonisation from ‘harder’ disciplines such as engineering, marketing, and business. Arguably from this point of view, design is now also under threat from the ‘softer’ discipline of art. This study proposes that this situation can be viewed as a strategic advantage – it affords practitioners the opportunity to engage with a wider (transdisciplinary) discourse; a second-order understanding of theory; and the ability to engage with a range of new aesthetic, cultural, psychological, economic and social conditions.

Design is an interdisciplinary, integrative process comprising both a professional field and an intellectual discipline (Friedman, 2000.) However, currently within the field there are strongly contested arguments as to what this constitutes. This is most easily indicated by the disagreement at London’s Design Museum between ex-Chairman, James Dyson and Director, Alice Rawsthorn (Fairs, 2004.) This collision of ideologies appears to have emerged out of a tacit, redefinition of what design can be; from an expanded perspective and in light of the impact of a transition to an information-based economy. This high-profile and much publicised difference of opinion serves to indicate a need for new frameworks of theory and research to address this problem.

Etymologically, the root of the word “design” is connected to “art” and “technology” (Flusser, 1999.) Historically, art and technology have been increasingly culturally segregated with design forming a sort of bridge between the two (ibid.) This can be traced from the time of the Renaissance onwards, culminating in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century with the Arts and Crafts Movement’s critical stance on industrialisation giving rise to the unified aesthetic of Art Nouveau in opposition to undesigned everyday existence (Tomes & Armstrong, 2003.) and conversely Constructivism, De Stijl and the Bauhaus’s mass availability and a unified machine aesthetic (ibid.)

In this sense, design has been caught in a cultural tug-o-war between Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic expressionism (Storkerson, 1997.) This is the case more so now than at any time previously in history. The professional field of design depends on the predictability of results to maintain the confidence of its client base. Yet, the transition to an information-based economy means that designed objects are consumed more widely and in many new ways than ever before. Contemporary design is something distinct from function (Fairs, 2004.) The functionalist philosophy of design as espoused in the Bauhaus dictum “form follows function” no longer applies when the principle aim of consumer product development specifications is to present users with the attractiveness, behaviour, and emotional qualities of designed objects. The diversity of the resulting distinct traditions, methods, vocabularies and job descriptions (Friedman, 2000.) threaten the coherence of the field as a unified discipline.

However, by viewing design as an integrative discipline and the generator of hybrid cultural forms presents the profession with the opportunity to rethink design as a cultural driver of enormous magnitude in the conjunction of the domains of art and technology. Indeed, this conception of design has been put forward as a role that is fundamental to the continual reinvigoration of the arts (Coles, 2005.) In the context of the current study, this perspective makes sense of the ascendant position of design as forged by the use of 3D computer technologies in the production of works of art.

Coles, Alex, 2005. On art’s romance with design. Design Issues: Volume 21, Number 3. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Fairs, Marcus, 2004. What is design? Icon 018. December. [online] Available from: http://www.icon-magazine.co.uk/issues/018/whatisdesign.htm

Flusser, Vilém, 1999. The shape of things – A philosophy of design. London: Reaktion Books Ltd.

Friedman, Ken, in Durling, David, ed. 2000. Doctoral education in design: foundations for the future. Stoke-on-Trent: Staffordshire University Press.

Krippendorff, Klaus, 1995. Redesigning design: an invitation to a responsible future. [online] Available from: http://www.asc.upenn.edu/USR/krippendorff/REDESGN.htm

Tomes, Anne & Armstrong, Peter, 2003. Dialectics of design: how ideas of 'good design' change. [online] Available from: http://www.ub.es/5ead/PDF/6/TomesArmstrong.pdf

Storkerson, Peter, 1997. Defining design: a new perspective to help specify the field. [online] Available from: http://www.communicationcognition.com/Publications/ConstructivistDesign.pdf

EPDE 05

Back in September, I presented a paper at the 3rd Engineering & Product Design Education International Conference organised by the School of Design and Media Arts at Napier University, Edinburgh in participation with the Design Education Special Interest Group (DESIG) of the Design Society, and the Institute of Engineering Designers, UK (IED). The proceedings for the conference are published as: Crossing Design Boundaries, Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds.) Taylor & Francis Group, London, 2005. ISBN 0415391180. The paper was co-authored with my Supervisor, Jon Pengelly and sets out some initial ideas from beginning the research. If anyone is particularly interested, the paper is here:
Download EPDE05_marshallpengelly_ebook_final.pdf