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Volume 1, Issue 2, Guest Editors A guest editorial by T.E. Rosenberg and D. Fairfax The task of a journal editor’s foreword is, to a large extent, to clarify what connects and ultimately collects the writings that constitute the volume. In this instance it is nigh impossible. There is no ‘vinculum substantiale’, no connecting thread of explanation, on which to string the beads of thought that make up this publication. Sure, the term ‘material thinking’ is addressed in each essay; but the term is awkward, defeats an agreeable definition and is conditioned by the different author’s preoccupations. This awkwardness in the compound term is what, in the main, redeems it; recovers it from, and, stops it acting as a bracket that disciplines discourse and practices. Read more...
Volume 1, Issue 2, Contributing Authors Virtual Actual: Hypertext as Material Writing Adrian Miles This essay uses the material thought advocated by Paul Carter to argue for the materiality of writing. It does this by examining hypertext as an academic material writing practice, using ideas from design and hypertext theory. It specifically argues for a crystalline structure in hypertext as the actualisation of virtual possibilities via links and how this is different and novel in relation to existing academic writing.
Knowing by Being-There Making: Explicating the Tacit Post-Subject in Use Cameron Tonkinwise Paul Carter usefully provides the debate about creative research practices with a poetics that captures aspects of the dynamism of the material in the making process. However, Carter does not explicitly reconnect the implications of this poetics with that debate. This essay attempts to articulate those consequences by making explicit the ‘other’ed, beyond-a-self that is necessary to postulate or explain how making can be a source of knowing. It explores i) the animism that underlies crafting materials, ii) the embodied being that harbours skills, and iii) the empathetic projections required in collaborations. It concludes by relating Carter’s rhetorical project to Donald Schon’s slogan, that ‘design is a conversation with material situations.’
Counter-forces in experimental design: H_edge and the Technological Dreams Series #1 (Robots) Katherine Moline By distinguishing avant-garde critique as primarily based on wit, an ethics of scattering and recombination, from reason, Paul Carter infers that "material thinking" is a type of avant-garde critique of institutional norms. Seen through experimental design I dispute Carter's distinction between wit and reason via art theorist Thierry de Duve's refusal to separate intuition and reflection in aesthetic judgment. I transpose De Duve's thesis to the design context to examine two examples of experimental design that connect wit and reason and question the givens of certain functionalist debates in design. While H_edge by the Advanced Geometry Unit refigures the functionalist design opposition between structure and ornament by making ornament instrumental, Technological Dreams Series #1 (Robots) by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby juxtaposes mechanical and moral strands of functionalist design thinking and exhibit a hyper-functionalist reflection on design history and practice.
Laurene Vaughan There are many ways to engage with the term material thinking. Through a discussion of the individual and their role in the construction of place, this essay explores the practice of material thinking, through a particular focus on what it is to be in this practice of material thinking, this practice of the making of the made. This dicussion explores material thinking as an embodied and placed creative practice undertaken by someone, somewhere; what I call an emplaced practice of local invention.
Imperfect In-formation: The Prospect of Material Thinking Nancy de Freitas This paper is an exploration of how we might improve and deepen our scholarly engagements in designing and theorising design so as to embrace design as an unending, dialogic process. The aim is to bring together ideas on design and form making from a number of theorists who have considered design processes in ways that are now recognisable as a material thinking context. Locating the process of design in the domain between the material and the immaterial, allows us to reconsider how theory intersects with practice and how practice builds unique theory through the process of design. As a speculative platform, it encourages designers and design researchers to reorient their way of thinking through adaptive and responsive engagement with a focus on ethical engagement, social responsibility, environmental protection.
Material Thinking: the aesthetic philosophy of Jacques Rancière and the design art of Andrea Zittel Toni Ross This paper puts philosopher Jacques Rancière's paradoxical materialist account of modern aesthetics in dialogue with the combines of art and design produced by contemporary artist Andrea Zittel. Drawing on Rancière's formulations, the paper will explain, in historical and philosophical terms, why Zittel's design art disrupts ontological divisions and hierarchies between different spheres of practice, while also asserting the autonomy of aesthetic experience.
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