Border crossings in the African travel narratives of Ibn Battuta, Richard Burton and Paul Theroux

This article compares the representation of African borders in the 14th-century travelogue of Ibn Battuta, the 19th-century travel narrative of Richard Burton and the 21st-century travel writing of Paul Theroux. It examines the mutually constitutive relationship between conceptions of literal territorial boundaries and the figurative boundaries of the subject that ventures across borders in Africa. The border is seen as a liminal zone which paradoxically separates and joins spaces. Accounts of border crossings in travel writing from different periods suggest the historicity and cultural specificity of conceptions of geographical borders, and the way they index the “boundaries” of the subjects who cross them. Tracing the transformations in these conceptions of literal and metaphorical borders allows one to chart the emergence of the dominant contemporary idea of “Africa” as the inscrutable, savage continent

Reception of Space: Inspiring Design without a Designer

5th International Conference on Cross-Cultural Design, CCD 2013, held as part of HCI International 2013, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, July 21-26, 2013Designers nowadays consider themselves as the only experts to have conceptualized the everyday practice of the ordinary. They deal with design at a fantastic pace, with the aim of satisfying “public interest” instead of designing for individual users. For instance, with the reclaimed area of Hong Kong, which has been transformed into a public space dedicated to facilitate the vibrant transformation of Hong Kong into a world city, the government constantly set up strategies assuming a standardized user practice in order to achieve legislative approval for the project. Actually, the processes of conceptualization and standardization may not sufficiently summarize the specifications of everyday life. In other words, current ways of design based on public interest do not always meet what users actually want and need, since these design methods tend to identify all users as “average people” within standard dimensions. Nevertheless, what we are given every day is an everyday life that is not “banal and meaningless.” The acts of city users cannot be defined merely as mechanical or according to a stereotype. Although users’ reactions or responses to their living environments have been changed gradually with the urban transformation, their behaviours are not simply passive reactions or responses to space, but a kind of active reception in the creative acts or art performed by city users in the space. This research mainly elaborates on the “reception of space” in order to inspire design generations without a designer, and bring designers, planners, administrators, and government a perspective of user-oriented design. It includes an empirical study with intensive observations and direct interviews in Wan Chai North and South to review the importance of considering everyday life in design, based on users’ tactical and creative receptions of public living environments. The study then redefines the role of city users in the urban spaces in which they practice and exercise, and argues that users of urban space require that designs be more inclusive.School of DesignRefereed conference pape

Metaphor in the literature of organizational analysis: a preliminary taxonomy and a glimpse at a humanities-based perspective

This paper reviews the writing on metaphor in organizational analysis. It aims to synthesize developments and draw out trends. It argues that the implications of metaphor, as spelt out by poets, philosophers and linguists, do not seem to have been considered as fully as they might have been by many writers in organizational analysis. It explores possible reasons why this might be the case and what this suggests about dominant assumptions in the field. It concludes by looking at some avenues for research that arise from the study of metaphor from a more humanities-based perspective. (Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd from Inns, Dawn (2002) Metaphor in the literature of organizational analysis: a preliminary taxonomy and a glimpse at a humanities-based perspective. © 2002 SAGE Publications)

Ways of interacting: The standardization of communication in medical training

10.1177/0018726707079201Human Relations605769-79