the culture of the Academy – lessons from design thinking

Across on archaeology.org Chris (Witmore) has taken issue with a comment  Tim Ingold has made about the notion of a symmetrical archaeology.[Link] Symmetrical Archaeology? Like many others, Archaeologists regularly  do all they can to separate what they do from what they study, their work in the present from the past, past artifacts from the stories…

the culture of archaeology

Highway 128 Boonville California Since I moved to the United States a dozen years ago, I have spent a good deal of time in Northern California in a small back woods town called Boonville in the Anderson Valley on Route 128 as it makes its way to the Mendocino Coast. Always an agricultural community, logging,…

d.school studio-based learning – feedback

It’s the end of our class in the d.school – Transformative Design. We held the presentations on Monday. Today we shared feedback – it amounts to a great concise commentary on the strengths of the d.school process and design thinking, and more generally on studio-based/project-based interdisciplinary learning. What we like: listening to others, leaving oneself…

heritage design – aspiration and redemption

Tuesday July 19, Westminster, London (This is the report on our previously noted visit – [Link]) Bianca Carpeneti and Michael Shanks visiting Alan Campbell MP at the House of Commons Our current work on the archaeological project at Binchester UK includes a major focus on cultural resource management (CRM), as it gets called in the…

human centered design – the "T" character

This post is in a series of commentaries on a class running at Stanford, Winter Quarter 2010 – “Transformative Design” ENGR 231 – [Link] Real world problems don’t fit into neat disciplinary categories. We hear much about the importance of interdisciplinary or even transdisciplinary work. (Multidisciplinary implies keeping the disciplinary distinctions we need to bridge?)…

artereality

“Artereality: rethinking art as craft in a knowledge economy” – a manifesto for arts and humanities pedagogy, and indeed research, was published today in a collection of essays about the future of arts education in the US, edited by Steven Madoff for MIT Press. I wrote it with Jeffrey Schnapp, drawing on our experience of…