This post is in a series of commentaries on a class running at Stanford, Winter Quarter 2010 – “Transformative Design” ENGR 231 – [Link] Anthropometrics – part of human factors design. Its roots lie in nineteenth century anthropological science, and forensics. Measuring the distances between eyebrows for evidence of criminality, correlating shapes of skulls with…
Month: January 2010
elements of a theory of ruin
A wonderful talk this evening from Alain Schnapp in our Archaeology Center. It was about “ruin” as an intellectual artifact. Through a kaleidoscope of quotes and vignettes about ruin from antiquity to modernity, Alain reflected upon broad human experiences at the heart of our sense of history, memory practices, collection, temporality. Goethe among the ruins…
archaeology – design
This post is in a series of commentaries on a class running at Stanford, Winter Quarter 2010 – “Transformative Design” ENGR 231 – [Link] Everyday detritus – Roman – the indeterminate quotidian Today I ran a session about archaeology and design. (A tighter focus than my recent case for pragmatology and pragmatogony – [Link]) I…
haunted media
Some years ago Sam (Schillace) put me onto a Russian photographer, Sergey Larenkov, who combines old and new photographs of Leningrad/St Petersburg, then – WWII, and now. They have haunted me ever since. It’s not difficult to find the photos on the web; it only took me a few moments to find them again –…
fields not objects
This post is in a series of commentaries on a class running at Stanford, Winter Quarter 2010 – “Transformative Design” ENGR 231 – [Link] Pragmatology [Link] – the (non-existent) discipline of things – doesn’t deal in objects. Things are not discrete, but nodes, gatherings of otherwise distributed flows, relations – fields of connection, not objects…
archaeology > design
This post is in a series of commentaries on a class running at Stanford, Winter Quarter 2010 – “Transformative Design” ENGR 231 – [Link] Pragmatology and Pragmatogony I like to say that archaeologists deal in the history of people’s relationships with stuff, with things. And this covers a lot – basically 150,000 years of human…
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