Lectures
Key Point
Future life (as all life) will depend on successful representation
What is at Stake?
Collapse of current life
Brief history of the universe (planet, life, humans)
What is Design?
Innovation in the face of change.
But also:
Production of recipes for change.
Supervision of compliance with group norms.
What is Representation?
Transmission of meaning between agents
What is There to Represent?
Ontology, what does the world consist of?
Processes or substances
The notion of scale (organisational, spatial, temporal)
Uses of Representation
- Search (improvisation, pattern finding)
- Communication with self (ideation, graphical thinking)
- Communication with others (explaining, promoting, soliciting, requesting support)
- Communication between others (collaboration, scenario testing, game playing)
- Communication with the future
- Verification (distillation and logic testing (math))
- Instructions to others
Knowledge, Culture, and Craft of Representation
Surviving traditions and skills plus their state and prospects
Limits of Current Practices
Brief environmental history of representation
- biosemiotics story
- animism (hunter gathering practices, links to the place but also ages of movement, overhunting, etc.)
- settler agriguclure and monotheism
- humanism
- enlightenment
- back to the body
- back to nonhuman and traditional knowledge
The Promise of More-than-Human Design
Forms of Representation
Representation in Design
Designed patterns and designing agents