An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

The relationship between analogy and categorisation in cognition

This central topic of this thesis is the relationship between categorisation and analogy in cognition. Questions of what a straightforward representation of a concept or category is, and following from that how extra-categorical associations such as analogy and metaphor are possible are central to our understanding of human reasoning and comprehension. However, despite the intimate linkage between the two, the trend in cognitive science has been to treat analogy and categorisation as separable, distinctive phenomena that can be studied in isolation from one another. This strategy has proved remarkably effective when it comes to the cognitive modelling of extracategorical associations. A number of compelling and detailed models of analogy process exist, and there is widespread agreement amongst researchers studying analogy as to what the key cognitive processes that determine analogies are.However, these models of analogy tend to assume some kind of fully specified category processing module which governs and determines ordinary, straightforward conceptual mappings. Indeed, this assumption is required in order to talk about analogy and metaphor in the first place: few theorists actually define analogy and metaphor per se, but all agree that analogical and metaphoric judgements can be defined in contrast to ordinary categorisation judgements.This thesis reviews these models of analogy, and evidence for them, before conducting a detailed exploration of categorisation in relation to analogy. A theoretical and empirical review is presented in order to show that the straightforward notion of categorisation that underpins the distinctive phenomena approach to the study of analogy and categorisation is more apparent than real. Whilst intuitively, analogy and categorisation might feel like different things which can be contrasted with one another, from a cognitive processing point of view, this thesis argues that such a distinction may not survive a detailed scientific examination.A series of empirical studies are presented in order to further explore the 'no distinction' hypothesis. Following from these, further studies examine the question of whether models of analogical processing have progressed as far as they can in artificial isolation from categorisation, a process in which the processes that are normally deemed 'analogical' appear to play a vital role.The conclusion drawn in this thesis is that the analogy / categorisation division, as currently formulated, cannot survive detailed scientific examination. It is argued that despite the benefits that the previous study of these phenomena in isolation have brought in the past, future progress, especially in the development of cognitive models of analogy, is dependent on a more unified approach

Metaphors we teach by : representations of disciplinary and teacherly identity.

This dissertation is a theoretical examination and textual analysis of the metaphors used to describe the act of writing and the teaching of writing. Within Rhetoric and Composition, there are specific conceptual metaphors that are instrumental to how teachers and compositionists describe the how writing development occurs, and what role teachers have in encouraging that development. This dissertation excavates the metaphoric interaction that has helped to shape the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition. I argue that the metaphors of writing run the risk of becoming black-boxed, uncritically accepted (or resisted), which can lead to an unbalanced interactive relationship between members of Rhetoric and Composition and the metaphors they use to teach writing. In this dissertation, I use a synthesis of metaphor theory to understand the interactive potential of the conceptual metaphors used to describe and teach writing, in a progressively narrowed perspective that addresses the identities metaphorically available to both the discipline at large as well as the individual teachers within Rhetoric and Composition. This dissertation is divided into four chapters. Chapter I reviews the theoretical views of metaphor that guide this project. This chapter also provides insight into how metaphors become morally defined, as well as (dangerously) disregarded when deemed dead. Chapter II examines the conceptual metaphor of WRITING-IS-PROCESS. This chapter charts the 40-year lifespan of PROCESS, providing snapshots representing the many shifts and reinvigorations that characterize the continued vitality and power of the metaphor as part of the identities available to teachers and scholars of writing. Chapter III narrows the focus further to examine the metaphors dominant within the genre of the teacher narrative. In such narratives, the teacherly experience is metaphorized through three key conceptual metaphors: TEACHING-IS-S TORY, TEACHING-IS-COMMUNITY, and TEACHING-IS-CONVERSATION. These metaphors can characterize teacherly experience in productive ways, but they can also, when not fully attended to, create a narrative trajectory that depicts the teacherly identity unproductively. Chapter IV focuses localized teacherly identity within statements of teaching philosophy. This chapter draws from collected teaching statements to identify the metaphoric trends in identity construction as engaged by both novice and more experienced members of Rhetoric and Composition

M. H. Abrams at Cornell University

This portrait of the legendary Mike Abrams consists of a collection of news stories and photographs over the years that describe his interests - including his devotion to both teaching and scholarship and his role as citizen-at-large at Cornell University and internationally

Keywords in Creative Writing

Wendy Bishop and David Starkey have created a remarkable resource volume for creative writing students and other writers just getting started. In two- to ten-page discussions, these authors introduce forty-one central concepts in the fields of creative writing and writing instruction, with discussions that are accessible yet grounded in scholarship and years of experience. Keywords in Creative Writing provides a brief but comprehensive introduction to the field of creative writing through its landmark terms, exploring concerns as abstract as postmodernism and identity politics alongside very practical interests of beginning writers, like contests, agents, and royalties. This approach makes the book ideal for the college classroom, and unique in the field, combining the pragmatic accessibility of popular writer\u27s handbooks, with a wider, more scholarly vision of theory and research.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1157/thumbnail.jp

Towards understanding symbolic forms : comparative critique of the Jefferson Memorial Arch, St. Louis and La Grande Arche, Paris

Department: Architecture

Realigning the attention: fascination, spatial experience and stage magic

The thesis claims that modernity has developed an increased sensibility to spatial experience: we have learned to attend to it in new ways. It suggests, however, that the pre-conditions for this existed in the changing spatial concepts of the 19th century and can be traced, as well as in that century’s new perceptual sciences, in its popular entertainments, and in particular, in the novel spatial manipulations that became characteristic of magical entertainments during the period of the study (1850-1930). These, which harnessed natural phenomena for their effects, made no claim to supernatural agencies to explain them and yet created a sense of wonder in their time. Today the manipulation of fascinating visual and visceral experience forms part of art and design practice. Spatial experience, which can be delightful, or make us laugh, or make us fall into a meditative silence, has become a medium through which something more can be said. The ways in which such experiences may be felt today as poetic, significant, joyful or moving still draw on many of the spatial concepts that informed the imagination of the later 19th century. The thesis identifies some of the factors that shaped these concepts, traces how their connotations shifted and regrouped during the years of the study, and discusses some of the different ways in which they are received today. The spatial concepts are considered in relation to today's discipline of interior design; a discipline which today is differentiated from interior decoration or from architecture by being a discipline of performance and experience, rather than of composition or style. Performance and experience, in this context, refer to the nuanced totality of the entanglement of these things in this place with these people at this moment in time, rather than any designed 'experience' or spectacular event. The project focuses on the years 1850-1930, since these were both the 'golden age' of stage magic, and also the period from which interior design emerged as a distinct profession. The thesis examines the proposition that the practice of interior design could be described as 'the practice of natural magic, an attempt to arrange life for maximum emotional and practical power'. Since the 19th century stage illusionist was also a practitioner of natural magic, I compare examples from both disciplines, suggesting that when these examples are considered as 'spatial entertainments', they offer insights into both the practical mechanisms that made them work, and also into the ideas, desires, pleasures and uneasinesses of a spatial nature that made them potent and fascinating to their contemporary audiences. By opening a different set of histories from the ones that are more usually considered relevant to design students or scholars today, the thesis offers other ways in which 'interiors' - their histories, their construction, their existence - may be considered, and suggests different antecedents and different futures for interior design, beyond current popular understandings of it as a discipline that is primarily para-architectural