Sustainability in design: now! Challenges and opportunities for design research, education and practice in the XXI century

Copyright @ 2010 Greenleaf PublicationsLeNS project funded by the Asia Link Programme, EuropeAid, European Commission

From corporeality to virtual reality: theorizing literacy, bodies, and technology in the emerging media of virtual, augmented, and mixed realities

This dissertation explores the relationships between literacy, technology, and bodies in the emerging media of Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR). In response to the recent, rapid emergence of new media forms, questions arise as to how and why we should prepare to compose in new digital media. To interrogate the newness accorded to new media composing, I historicize the literacy practices demanded by new media by examining digital texts, such as video games and software applications, alongside analogous “antiquated” media, such as dioramas and museum exhibits. Comparative textual analysis of analogous digital and non-digital VR, AR, and MR texts reveals new media and “antiquated” media utilize common characteristics of dimensionality, layering, and absence/presence, respectively. The establishment of shared traits demonstrates how media operate on a continuum of mutually held textual practices; despite their distinctive forms, new media texts do not represent either a hierarchical or linear progression of maturing development. Such an understanding aids composing in new VR, AR, and MR media by enabling composers to make fuller use of prior knowledge in a rapidly evolving new media environment, a finding significant both for educators and communicators. As these technologies mature, we will continue to compose both traditional and new forms of texts. As such, we need literacy theory that attends to both the traditional and the new and also is comprehensive enough to encompass future acts of composing in media yet to emerge

Playin’ the city : artistic and scientific approaches to playful urban arts

An Theorien und Diskussionen über die Stadt mangelt es nicht, denn Städte dienen uns u.a. als Projektionsfläche zur Auseinandersetzung mit unserer Vergangenheit, der Gegenwart und unserer Zukunft. Diese Ausgabe 1 (2016) der Navigationen untersucht spielerische Formen dieser Auseinandersetzung in und mit der Stadt durch die sogenannten playful urban arts.The city has been discussed and theorized widely, and it continues to serve as a space in which our sense of the present, past, and future is constantly negotiated. This issue 1 (2016) of Navigationen examines new ways of engaging with cities through what are called the playful urban arts. Playful engagements with the urban environment frequently strive to create new ways of imagining and experiencing the city. In and through play, city spaces can become playgrounds that have the potential to transform people’s sense of themselves as human actors in an urban network of spatially bound and socio-economically grounded actions. Emerging from the playin’siegen urban games festival 2015, the essays and panel discussions assembled in this issue provide an interdisciplinary account of the contemporary playful urban arts. Wiht contributions by Miguel Sicart, Andreas Rauscher, Daniel Stein, Judith Ackermann and Martin Reiche, Michael Straeubig and Sebastian Quack, Marianne Halblaub Miranda and Martin Knöll, and Anne Lena Hartman

Being a Queer and/or Trans Person of Colour in the UK: Psychology, Intersectionality and Subjectivity

This research looks at the emergence of queer and trans people of colour (QTPOC) activist groups in the UK, considering the tensions around inclusion and belonging across lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) and of colour communities for these individuals. The research sought to explore what QTPOC activism means in the UK context, how it operates and for what purpose; the ways QTPOC activisms support the negotiation and affirmation of marginalised sexual, gender, racial identities and/or help navigate racism, queerphobia and transphobia; and in what ways personal involvement with QTPOC activisms impact subjectivity. The research was grounded in a critical psychology approach, firmly situating QTPOC within wider social, political and historical contexts to understand how subjectivities were formed and shaped. Drawing on postcolonial and black feminist theory, the research emphasised coloniality and the postcolonial context of the UK as well as utilising an intersectional lens to explore the intersections of race, gender and sexuality at the macro and micro levels. Inspired by Johnson’s (2015) psychosocial manifesto, the research also focused on ontology and the feeling, embodied experience of being-in-the-world. Knitting together postcolonial, black feminist and queer theory alongside critical psychology a novel phenomenological interpretative framework was developed which attended to both the wider contexts and the everyday lived experience of being a queer and trans person of colour involved in QTPOC activism. Utilising interventions into phenomenology by Fanon (1986) and Ahmed (2006) a queerly raced hermeneutic phenomenological analysis was developed. This was used to analyse the data from focus group and photo elicitation interviews with participants from three different QTPOC groups across the UK. The research highlighted QTPOC experiences of exclusion from mainstream LGBTQ communities and of non-belonging as a racialized, gendered, sexualized Other within the postcolonial British context. Participants shared the difficulties of finding the language to understand their own lived experiences within a society orientated around and towards white (hetero)normativity. QTPOC activist groups were experienced as spaces of belonging; in which to disidentify from white heteronormativity; of affirmation; and in which one could begin to decolonise gender and sexuality. The difficulties of activist organising were also considered; the privileging of paranoid reading and how to manage conflict and abuse, the possibilities of reparative reading (Sedgwick, 2003) and how to relate to histories of politically Black struggle. This is the first research of its kind to explore QTPOC activism in the UK. It will be of interest to critical psychology, psychosocial and gender and sexuality scholars to explore intersectionality and coloniality and the postcolonial further. The development of an original and creative phenomenological interpretative framework will be of interest to researchers exploring the lived experiences of those racialized, and of minoritized gender and sexuality. It provides recommendations for further research and interventions into practice for counsellors, third sector organisations and activists

»You will Shape the Digital Society with Your Knowledge – Make It Happen!« : Conference on Communications – A Common Playground for Social and Telecommunications Scientists ; 2010, May 26th – 28th

INTRODUCTION Bernd Eylert “You will Shape the Digital Society with Your Knowledge – Make It Happen!” Introduction to the conference by the conference chairman Johannes Meier Seven types of ambiguity – The role of communications in our modern media society THE ROLL OF COMMUNICATIONS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN THE MEDIA SOCIETY Joachim R. Höflich Living in a Mediated World. Communication Technologies and the Change of a Media Ecology Jane Vincent Body to Body Interaction in Broadband Society Julian Gebhardt Media & Communication Studies – How they (can) inform Design Richard H. R. Harper Combined Imaginations. The Workings of Sociology and Computer Science in Communications Technologies Research Laboratories Bernd Wiemann Future Challenges for the Telecommunication Industry Regarding the International Delphi Study 2030 Jochen Viehoff Claude Shannon – Juggler of science Christian Rauch Ethics & sustainability – necessary crosssectional skills for scientists and engineers THE INFLUENCE OF INDUSTRIAL ASSOCIATIONS ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODERN MEDIA SOCIETY Vincent Chan Introduction Alan Hadden Perspectives of the Global mobile suppliers association (GSA) ABSTRACTS & POSTERS Karoline Bergmann, Frank Ziarno Internet glasses and the informational right of self-determination; Are we allowed to do everything we’re capable of? Sven Bathke, Dennis Dornbusch, Timo Schmidt Project Google Street View Martin Eras Customer integration as an opportunity to market success in the telecommunications sector Martin Eras, Thomas Zeh LTE – The real mobile Broadband? Tony Goldmann Symad-mobile Nele Heise Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI): Perspectives of communication science: appropriation and technological change Daniel Schmohl-Linsenbarth, Matthias Rumpf, Christoffer Groß, Martin Schern, Mathias Pape, Wolfgang Price , Tim Raschmann CrashAlerter Fabian Hemmert Digital Resistance: Making Computers Stiff, Scratchy and Stubbor

Mutability, mobility, worlding: appropriate infrastructure and urban sociotechnical change in Ahmedabad, Gujarat

This thesis investigates the relationship between urban infrastructure and sociotechnical change. Drawing on 10 months of field research in the city of Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, the study provides an account of relations between infrastructural undertakings and their contexts, and how these shape subsequent patterns of continuity and change. This connection, I argue, is particularly apparent in the urban milieu, where planners have to contend with existing infrastructure as part of the built environment. Supplementing this interpretive account, the study draws on post-war writings on appropriate technology, working to update and evaluate the utility of ‘appropriateness’ as a criterion for evaluating infrastructure projects, particularly those implemented in an urban or postcolonial setting. Identifying infrastructure as a slippery, opaque, and often invisible research subject—something exceeding representational writing and the single, clearly-bounded field site—the study adopts a research methodology inspired by practices of flânerie, deploying observational techniques, practices of urban walking, and performative modes of writing to trace the configuration of specific infrastructure projects and processes of urban change. Drawing on recent work on infrastructure from anthropology, STS, urban geography, and policy studies, the study mobilises a range of concepts to further illuminate the status of objects and events encountered in the city, and situating them in relation to broader processes of change and transformation. In developing this account, and moving from description to theory, the thesis addresses three sets of relational dynamics—mutability, mobility, and worlding. The first of these dynamics looks at the mutability of a given system or artefact, its capacity for adaptive modification, or, conversely, its resistance to change. The second addresses how infrastructures are transferred from one setting to another, paying attention to the pressures of new or unforeseen contexts of use. The third examines how understandings of context are enacted through the ‘worlding’ of infrastructure and urban technology—exploring situations where different actors’ worldings compete or exist in tension with one another. As observed in Ahmedabad, a postcolonial ‘mega-city’ and home to a new, emerging urban middle class, these dynamics complicate the relationship between infrastructure and its contexts—interactions shaped by crosscutting obdurate and fluid materialities (‘mutability’), enmeshed in global circuits of transport and exchange (‘mobility’), and materialising various forms of identity and affiliation (‘worlding’). Mobilising ‘appropriateness’ as a norm and evaluative criteria, and reflecting on the likely characteristics of ‘appropriate infrastructure’, is, I conclude, an effective way to foreground these neglected dimensions, and, in doing so, contribute to future work on urban transformations and infrastructural change