Towards a better integration of modelers and black box constraint solvers within the Product Design Process

This paper presents a new way of interaction between modelers and solvers to support the Product Development Process (PDP). The proposed approach extends the functionalities and the power of the solvers by taking into account procedural constraints. A procedural constraint requires calling a procedure or a function of the modeler. This procedure performs a series of actions and geometric computations in a certain order. The modeler calls the solver for solving a main problem, the solver calls the modeler’s procedures, and similarly procedures of the modeler can call the solver for solving sub-problems. The features, specificities, advantages and drawbacks of the proposed approach are presented and discussed. Several examples are also provided to illustrate this approach

Archiving the \u2780s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture

Archiving the \u2780s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture locates a shared genealogy of feminism and queer theory in the visual culture of 1980s American feminism. Gathering primary sources from grant-funded research in a dozen archives, I analyze an array of image-text media of women, ranging from well known creators like Gloria Anzaldúa, Alison Bechdel, and Nan Goldin, to little known ones like Roberta Gregory and Lee Marrs. In each chapter, I examine how each woman develops movement politics in her visual production, and I study the reception of their works in their communities of influence. Through studying hybrid visual rather than merely literary output, I explore the overlooked role of visual culture in feminist and LGBT social justice movements. In the first chapter, I review the transition period from the 1970s through the comics work of Roberta Gregory and Lee Marrs. Their early comics demonstrate the limitations of 1970s feminism, and I analyze how they develop their critiques in the 1980s in newly created comics series like Gay Comix (1980-1998). In the second chapter, I reconfigure the legacy of cartoonist Alison Bechdel as a grassroots activist through analyzing her participation as production coordinator of multiple grassroots periodicals across the 1980s. The third chapter resituates Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa as a visual thinker and examines how she fuses race and sexuality in drawings that she would use to illustrate her own talks. I consider the importance of visual discourse to women of color feminism by evaluating the changing visual material in each version of her famed anthology, This Bridge Called My Back (1981, 1983, 2002, 2015). In the fourth chapter, I scrutinize the evolving politics of photographer Nan Goldin in her well-known The Ballad of Sexual Dependency slideshow and in her little-discussed curation of the controversial AIDS exhibit, Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (1989). Through these artists’ visual production, I argue that the visual offers a more capacious form of feminism that embraces diversity, especially around issues of sexuality

Metaphysical detectives and postmodern spaces, or the case of the missing boundaries

Taking as its point of departure Henri Lefebvre\u27s contention that (Social) space is a (social) product, my dissertation explores the contemporary American novels of Pynchon, Acker, Reed, Auster, DeLillo, and McElroy as well as the two recent films Dark City and The Thirteenth Floor and their dramatization of the production of twentieth-century social space. I approach these works as metaphysical detective stories which evoke the classic detective figure only to frustrate his impulse to solve and contain. Following Foucault\u27s contention that space is fundamental to any exercise of power, I suggest that the detective figure is significant to an understanding of the history of spatial production in that the detective both relies upon the striating logic of Western science as well as---particularly in his surveillance of the city---perpetuates that logic by rationally ordering the spaces he observes. The metaphysical detective, however, confronts the reconstituted space of postmodern culture, resulting largely from the globalization of capitalism and expanding technologies, which resists former logic-driven methods of delimiting social spaces and subjects in space. Through their appropriation of the classic detective, these metaphysical detective stories embody, then, a competing history of spatial logic that once exposed causes us to rethink the ideology of social space(s) in the West, while also shedding light on the ways in which gender, race, and class are both constructed within and act as formants in the production of space