Postphenomenological performance in interactive narrative

This paper addresses the performance of bodies through a postphenomenological framework developed by Don Ihde. Through his theory, I will argue how performance is central to the stories of two recent interactive artworks: Dennis Del Favero’s Scenario (2011) and Blast Theory’s A Machine to See With (2010). Both artworks are distinct interactive narratives that utilize the human body in different ways. In each experience, it is essential for the user’s body to perform with a technology in order to move the story through a sequence of events. In doing so the user as a performing body co-authors the story by interfacing with a technology in a specific way. My readings of the artworks are based on interviews that I have conducted with each of the artists. I pair these accounts with Ihdeian analysis to explain how different types of technologies and different uses of a technology break down into different human-technology relationships. I use these relationships to show how the story in each artwork is mobilized through the body of the participant as a postphenomenological performance

Integrative Learning Toward Social Responsibility in Teaching Engineering: “Sustainable Development Goals: Quality Education”

The Technical University of Madrid, within the Spanish context, has profited from the introduction of a System of Internal Quality Assurance to build a road on the grounds of previous work on the culture of ethics in engineering. This way may drive the students training to incorporate in their curricula, leadership instruments that can be used for the recognition and acquisition of social responsibility. The road is paved with various educational elements, either mandatory, such as the “Mentoring Project” (peer support program), or optional, such as “Monitoring” (peer academic support program), “Ethics and Values in Engineering” (with social entrepreneurship projects) and “Service-Learning” (methodology that combines learning objectives with community service). This strategy, combined with the convergence of the European Higher Education Area, allows selecting those students who are able to integrate in their professional assets the idea and commitment of making the human development more sustainable,since the named experiences work towards the Sustainable Development Goals

The alchemist architect: Towards exploring materials

This chapter focuses on the growing interest of many artists, architects, and designers regarding the exploration of handmade materials. Today, designers focus on gaining experience with new materials. These experimental material investigations for discovering the nature of the material can be placed in the intersection of homo faber, human production, and technology. The transition between alchemists, artisans and technicians has been expressed by Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, and Jose Ortega y Gasset. What kind of transformation can these contemporary quests in design create and what experiences are involved in the practices and theoretical integration of the senses in material encounters and produced by haptic experience? The aim is to figure out the possible outcomes of this inquiry of designers through the act of making and how these experiences might contribute to future design pedagogies in architecture and interior design. Therefore, deriving from experimental approaches in working with unknown materials, this chapter explores the need for these experimental investigations. © 2021, IGI Global