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March 31, 2008

other writers...

and I am also thinking of the following writers:

Bruno Latour
Re-assembling the social

Although this is for sociologists, there is something in this and in the writing of John Law that speak to communication design.

So also

John Law
Enacting the social
[as I would argue that communication design visualises the social and in doing so enacts the social

and a paper by
Barbara Bolt
in the journal 'Studies in material thinking'. Bolt comes from a fine art perspective, I do tend to continually hark back to fine art research methods and writing... it is where I came from and seems to provide a stronger, less fragile foundation for design research thinking.

somehow I need to go back through all those papers and find a way of systematising them and bringing out their connections, contradictions and overlaps.

also
Donna Haraway
and her cyborg manifesto, definitely because Margolin used it extensively in his Politics of the Artificial essay... and she crops up again in Bolts essay.

March 26, 2008

choice of texts

I am going to choose 5 or so design writers... and critically analyse them. Look at the implications of their writing to Communication Design practice (a lot of them come out of Industrial Design or Architecture, or do not actually practice).

This critical review will form the start of this, my doctoral research project.

I have a list of writers to choose from, my shortlist needs to have certain characteristics:
- writings on communication design (or applicable to comm design)
- fairly recent theory - no, second thoughts, this is not important, and it may be better to go back to first principles
- seminal texts or key texts (OK if this is just for me, not everybody)
- contrasting opinions... will help to define the 'gap' for my own doctoral research
- theoretical writings, or writings which can be applied to design theory and thence back into practice
- by non-practitioners... and by practitioners

list at the moment is:

Buchanon
Margolin
Krippendorf
Dilnot
Schon
Baudrillard
Manzini
Rosenberg
Mason
Virillio
Barthes

and it's just started

next is, why am I looking at these writers and what do I want to get out of them?

Research Blogs

This blog is Neal Haslem's new research blog.

Research Blogs can be excellent. They can be portable recording mechanisms, they can work as an endless jotter, allowing the researcher to 'get everything down', they can help create the connections and aid the memory that allows connections to be made, they can disseminate the research being done, they can start conversations, make connections between researchers who have something to learn from one another....

they can also be a bit of a dead duck; if they are not added to regularly, if they do not seem 'safe' enough to publish to without the threat of public exposure and backlash, if they act as a tool for procrastination, allowing the researcher to spend countless hours designing new interfaces or writing introspective circular memos of use to no-one in particular....

so 'here goes' with this blog, smash the bottle and its into the internet sea... and off it sails, here's hoping....

( and I'm also in the market for a new 'personal productivity tool'... omnigiraffe?)