Ben Cullen

On the anniversary of the untimely and sudden death of Ben Cullen in 1995. [Link] [Link] [Link] I dedicated my book, The Archaeological Imagination [Link], published in April, to Ben. It is seventeen years today since he died. Uncanny. I wonder what I would say to him about the book, that might reveal how much…

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…

chorography – then and now

Chorography – a workshop at Durham University July 10 2012 – [Link] Summer fieldwork. I am less focused on the excavations at Binchester this year [Link]. I am pulling together my long-running research into the region – the English Scottish borders. How do you tell of such a place? All that is there, and has…

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…

prehistory and performance – an experiment in site specifics

In Göteborg this week I have been returning to the work of arts company Brith Gof – site specific performance. And theatre/archaeology – the rearticulation of fragments of the past as real time event. The context is my argument that the heritage industry is just that – work performed on what is left of the…

human centered design?

More thoughts arising from our class in the d.school on Transformative Design. I have always liked Don Norman’s ideas and attitude. A couple of weeks ago at Core 77 he questioned the feasibility of human-centered design – [Link] In today’s connected world and global market, he argues, culture matters little to design. Designers should center their…