ICS Materials. Towards a re-Interpretation of material qualities through interactive, connected, and smart materials.

The domain of materials for design is changing under the influence of an increased technological advancement, miniaturization and democratization. Materials are becoming connected, augmented, computational, interactive, active, responsive, and dynamic. These are ICS Materials, an acronym that stands for Interactive, Connected and Smart. While labs around the world are experimenting with these new materials, there is the need to reflect on their potentials and impact on design. This paper is a first step in this direction: to interpret and describe the qualities of ICS materials, considering their experiential pattern, their expressive sensorial dimension, and their aesthetic of interaction. Through case studies, we analyse and classify these emerging ICS Materials and identified common characteristics, and challenges, e.g. the ability to change over time or their programmability by the designers and users. On that basis, we argue there is the need to reframe and redesign existing models to describe ICS materials, making their qualities emerge

Quantities and qualities: Arts and manufactures 1830-1930: A study of the philosophy and ideology of design reform

The best way to introduce this thesis is to begin with a short account of its genesis. "Why have the English no national costume?" I was asked that question in a Balkan village, in a region where every village has a distinctive pattern and its own distinct song and dance. It cjcurred to me then that the English were the only people in Europe without even the notion of a national dress, and that the uniformalising of costume (and other arts) was a phenomenon that deserved to be studied. At the time I gave no adequate answer to the question; but this study here attempts to prepare the ground for such an answer, as part of its general plan. The twin concepts of hegemony and cultural autonomy are employed here with that as one of the questions in mind. A second source arises in teaching, where one is concerned with the interaction of ideas and practices, rather than in their separation. I was concerned to develop an approach to the history of art and design that was neither a history of styles or movements, nor a history of applied technology. For this it seemed necessary to have an inclusive general theory of the material culture, and to treat what is normally called design in terms of material production as a whole, and as part of intellectual production through the embodiment of ideas and beliefs. Thanis to say, design history ( and thereby the history of all material production) could and should be considered as embodied philosophy and expressed ideology. The inclusive general theory that seemed ( and still seems) necessary remains elusive, but in what follows I have drawn usefully upon the writings of George Kubler and Bernard Smith in order to attempt what Smith describes as 'a balanced and adequate account of art and the industrial society.' Smith, following some ideas of Kubler, proposes a tri-partite description of production, through art, craft and industrial 'systems'. Each of these systems of production are logically differentiated by means of the differing role and status of prototypes and models within the production process; industry, for example, being treated as a system for identical replication of a changing sequence of prototypes. They are historically and sociologically distinguished by the social formations and institutions that have developed in and around them. When, in|the succeeding pages, reference is made to art, craft or industrial systems, it is this Smith model that is being employed, as modified by myself in the course of teaching. No attempt, however, is made in the body of the text to develop this idea, and it is treated simply as heuristic. A more detailed discussion is presented in Appendix One, where it is suggested that an important strength of the model is, that it is not reductive; any object of study in its field will always be found to be subject to two 'axes of determination'. Expressed in the simplest terms, the relations between art, craft and industry in the period under discussion (1830-1930) are those of three in a bed - one is always falling out. The question of design reform very largely turned upon the question -which of the three? Thus we witness attempts to twin arts with manufactures, arts with crafts, and crafts with industry: each of these three possible combinations of two represents a particular ideological moment, requiring particular conditions and embodying some philosophical scheme of ideas or metaphor . Such is the theme of this study. Such an approach was not and is not intended as a supersession of style-history or of technological study of design. A profound and informed conn^is^urship - even a connoisseurship of the trivial - is a necessary precondition of any art and design history, since it initially establishes the domain of interest: pressed further into the field of morphology and shape-grammars, the study of style and the evolution of styles is one of the essentail axes of that general history of things, proposed by Kubler. The cassis the same with the history of the applications of technology; it is necessary. But neither is sufficient, since', the first is essentially descriptive and cannot explain without* adducing concepts foreign to itself, or immanentist doctrines such as 'will-to-form'; while the second rapidly becomes a form of restrictive determinism. Through this study I would hope to show that design history can be formed in such a way that it delivers meanings: it must therefore begin with meanings. Thus an attention to theory - to what men believed themselves to be doing, to the words they used to describe what they thought they were doing, the historiography of those ideas and their critical reception must form a central theme in an explaining and interpretive design history. Such an approach is doubly justified when we consider the reality of 'design reform1. The movements for design reform, of whatever kind, had ( and have) only an oblique effect on the mass of things made. The dominant popular-commercial taste of the EuroAmerican world ( now greatly expanded) remains very much what it was in the 1850's over a vast range of products. Though many exceptions may be found - most clearly in architecture or in new classes of objects,-there is no firm connexion between mass commodity production and those movements. But it is not sufficient to consider design reform under such a heading as 'taste formation'. The aim/here is to demonstrate its ideological function and to examine its philosophical foundations : and this is appropriate to its historical reality

The Rhythm-Image: Aesthetic experience in the work of Theo Angelopoulos and Bill Viola

Following the secularization of the world in modernity, art's concomitant fate was the separation of form and content, which has founded art on a split that has entailed the inheritance of an abyss of incommunicability. Secularization, however, has not liberated art from the model of representation, which has now assumed the form of the identification of a self-referential beauty. Moreover, the modernist doctrine of autonomy has deprived art of the possibility of infusing the vital powers of being and society, subsuming it to the demands of the institution and the art market. Nevertheless, twentieth-century art is driven by the will to overcome the schism (form/content, art/society), to touch the viewer, and to become an experience rather than merely an object of vision. Responding to this problem, this thesis explores the notion of rhythm, drawn from Bergson's concept of la duree and Deleuze's rethinking of immanence as difference and repetition. Rhythm, which grants the communicability of the work of art, emphasizes that art can only live in the experience; to conceive it solely in-itself as modernism has done unavoidably leads to its reification. Rhythm considers art in terms of intensity of the work and of the encounter, rather than in identifying art's spatial qualities. It tests the work of art and the encounter, but immanently in the life generated for the body. For this latter is also a rhythm, that is an affective surface which creates itself and reflects the world. Art then lives in the body but it also infuses life to the body. Aspects of the work of a film-maker (Theo Angelopoulos) and a video-artist (Bill Viola) are also elaborated, in order to show how their singular implementation of time in images takes them beyond their representational content and opens them to rhythm as an affective, embodied experience

Le développement de la personnalité de l'homme de l'adolescence au milieu de la vie : approches centrées sur les variables et sur les personnes

Thèse diffusée initialement dans le cadre d'un projet pilote des Presses de l'Université de Montréal/Centre d'édition numérique UdeM (1997-2008) avec l'autorisation de l'auteur

Material-based design computation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 306-328).The institutionalized separation between form, structure and material, deeply embedded in modernist design theory, paralleled by a methodological partitioning between modeling, analysis and fabrication, resulted in geometric-driven form generation. Such prioritization of form over material was carried into the development and design logic of CAD. Today, under the imperatives and growing recognition of the failures and environmental liabilities of this approach, modern design culture is experiencing a shift to material aware design. Inspired by Nature's strategies where form generation is driven by maximal performance with minimal resources through local material property variation, the research reviews, proposes and develops models and processes for a material-based approach in computationally enabled form-generation. Material-based Design Computation is developed and proposed as a set of computational strategies supporting the integration of form, material and structure by incorporating physical form-finding strategies with digital analysis and fabrication. In this approach, material precedes shape, and it is the structuring of material properties as a function of structural and environmental performance that generates design form. The thesis proposes a unique approach to computationally-enabled form-finding procedures, and experimentally investigates how such processes contribute to novel ways of creating, distributing and depositing material forms. Variable Property Design is investigated as a theoretical and technical framework by which to model, analyze and fabricate objects with graduated properties designed to correspond to multiple and continuously varied functional constraints. The following methods were developed as the enabling mechanisms of Material Computation: Tiling Behavior & Digital Anisotropy, Finite Element Synthesis, and Material Pixels. In order to implement this approach as a fabrication process, a novel fabrication technology, termed Variable Property Rapid Prototyping has been developed, designed and patented. Among the potential contributions is the achievement of a high degree of customization through material heterogeneity as compared to conventional design of components and assemblies. Experimental designs employing suggested theoretical and technical frameworks, methods and techniques are presented, discussed and demonstrated. They support product customization, rapid augmentation and variable property fabrication. Developed as approximations of natural formation processes, these design experiments demonstrate the contribution and the potential future of a new design and research field.by Neri Oxman.Ph.D

Body, Subject, Self: The Art of Piero Manzoni

Piero Manzoni (1933-1963) is one of the best-known and under-theorized artists in all of postwar Europe. His body of work includes a range of practices from monochrome painting to readymade objects, from participatory sculpture to designs for architecture. More than simply innovative in its form and media, however, Manzoni's practice articulates a politics of the body and of the self that departs radically from the belief systems at stake in the work of his contemporaries in both Europe and America. If other postwar artists still claimed access to transcendence, to nature, or to autonomous subjectivity, Manzoni responds with works that reveal the body and the self as material and discursive effects of power relations.History of Art and Architectur

Tartu Ülikooli toimetised. Tööd semiootika alalt. 1964-1992. 0259-4668

http://www.ester.ee/record=b1331700*es

Fabricate 2014

FABRICATE is an international peer reviewed conference that takes place every three years with a supporting publication on the theme of Digital Fabrication. Discussing the progressive integration of digital design with manufacturing processes, and its impact on design and making in the 21st century, FABRICATE brings together pioneers in design and making within architecture, construction, engineering, manufacturing, materials technology and computation. Discussion on key themes includes: how digital fabrication technologies are enabling new creative and construction opportunities from component to building scales, the difficult gap that exists between digital modelling and its realisation, material performance and manipulation, off-site and on-site construction, interdisciplinary education, economic and sustainable contexts. FABRICATE features cutting-edge built work from both academia and practice, making it a unique event that attracts delegates from all over the worl