scholarly journals Validity and Rigour in Soma Design-Sketching with the Soma

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (6) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Anna Ståhl ◽  
Vasiliki Tsaknaki ◽  
Madeline Balaam

We report on the design processes of two ongoing soma design projects: the Pelvic Chair and the Breathing Wings. These projects take a first-person, soma design approach, grounded in a holistic perspective of the mind and body (the soma). We contribute a reflective account of our soma design processes that deepens the field’s understanding of how soma design is achieved through first-person approaches. We show how we use our somas, our first-person experiences, to stimulate a design process, to prototype through and to use as a way of critiquing emerging designs. Grounding our analysis in new materialism, we show how our designs are in essence, “performative intra-actions”. Using our own somas, our designs open up for experiences within certain constraints, allowing for a material-discursive agency of sorts. Many different somas may be intra-acted through our designs, even if it was our somas who started them.

Author(s):  
G. O. Hutchinson

Another novelist provides in some respects a point in between Chariton and Heliodorus. His elaborate expatiation on tears and the lover put rhythm at the service of an intricate treatment of the mind and body, and a shrewd depiction of amorous self-control and manipulation. The first-person narrative adds a further stratum of sophistication to this handling of the speaker’s rival and enemy. Achilles Tatius demonstrates further, in contrast with Chariton, the range of possibilities for the exploitation of rhythm seen already in the difference of Chariton and Plutarch. Comparison with Heliodorus brings out Achilles’ elegance.


Design Issues ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 80-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liesbeth Huybrechts ◽  
Katrien Dreessen ◽  
Ben Hagenaars

Designers are increasingly involved in designing alternative futures for their cities, together with or self-organized by citizens. This article discusses the fact that (groups of) citizens often lack the support or negotiation power to engage in or sustain parts of these complex design processes. Therefore the “capabilities” of these citizens to collectively visualize, reflect, and act in these processes need to be strengthened. We discuss our design process of “democratic dialogues” in Traces of Coal—a project that researches and designs together with the citizens an alternative spatial future for a partially obsolete railway track in the Belgian city of Genk. This process is framed in a Participatory Design approach and, more specifically, in what is called “infrastructuring,” or the process of developing strategies for the long-term involvement of participants in the design of spaces, objects, or systems. Based on this process, we developed a typology of how the three clusters of capabilities (i.e., visualize, reflect, and act) are supported through democratic dialogues in PD processes, linking them to the roles of the designer, activities, and used tools.


Author(s):  
Kazuya Oizumi ◽  
Kazuhiro Aoyama

Management of product design projects becomes increasingly difficult as the complexity of products increases. For better management of such projects, well-considered preliminary coordination of design processes is essential. This paper proposes a method for coordination in the design process, which comprises two phases: 1) division of the design work into smaller tasks and sequencing them and 2) establishment of management activities. To facilitate this coordination, an integrated model of a product, process, and organization is proposed. The division and sequencing of design tasks is based upon analysis of the product model. The method utilizes rational prioritization of design parameters, which means identification of parameters that must be first considered for changes. The resulting design processes can show where coordination among design tasks is needed. This, in turn, implies the necessity of management. It is preferable for a different style of management to be adopted for each part. Here, the importance of management and organizational structure prescribe the style of management that should be adopted. In this paper, two approaches to management are discussed: 1) the formation of a pre-agreement, and 2) integration and after-approval. Throughout the paper, the example of a solar boat design is used to explain how the proposed method works and to demonstrate its feasibility.


Author(s):  
Martin Davies

Descartes's ontological dualism of mind and body made it difficult for him to describe the phenomenology of embodiment, the way we experience our own body. Contemporary theories of the mind–brain relation are predominantly physicalist, rather than dualist, in their ontology. But the duality of objective and subjective conceptions still presents a challenge for the sciences of the mind. Persons understood as such, partly from the first-person perspective—persons conceived as subjects and agents, with their experiences, thoughts, plans and actions—will not be visible in a purely objective, scientific story of the physical world.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-123
Author(s):  
Pelin Ozturk ◽  
Cem Avci ◽  
Cigdem Kaya

At the beginning of 2020, the virus called "COVID-19" spread rapidly all over the world. One of the measures taken to prevent the spread of the virus was social distance rules. Hence, employees and students had to work remotely using communication tools. In the design field, professionals and students working remotely during the pandemic, were limited to the possibilities of the communication tools they used while developing the design process, and they found ways to use these facilities in line with their practice routines in the physical environment. In this article, the tools used during the collaborative design processes conducted remotely during the pandemic were examined with a questionnaire study. Even though designers worked digitally due to the necessity to continue their work in this period, it was observed that they had positive experiences with the special tools they used. However, the transfer of tacit knowledge to design projects in the collaborative design process has been restricted in the collaborative design process due to limited spatial communication. While many designers were discovering the tailored tools for this purpose they could already use, many improvements were suggested through the unaware needs became explicit ones.


Author(s):  
Rens G.A. BRANKAERT ◽  
M.C. WINTERMANS ◽  
Yuana LU

Dementia is increasingly becoming a societal challenge worldwide. In order to address the needs of people living with dementia through design, it is important to develop products and services in collaboration with them. For this study, a co-design approach was used to involve people with dementia throughout the design process. With them we aim to find a solution for social inclusion. This resulted in ‘Stay Tuned!’, an easy-to-use messaging radio for people with dementia, that allowed them to stay up to date with the lives of their loved ones. In this study, we used a mixed method approach including a group session, probes and an in-context evaluation. With this study, we contribute on how to involve cognitively impaired participants in co-design processes.


2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sreeja Gangadharan P ◽  
S P K Jena

Mind is a subject widely studied under various discipline, yet, failed to come up with a definition which we could comprehend. These studies had unravelled a number of questions regarding the nature of the mind and leads to serious debates on its composition, i.e., whether it consists only of higher intellectual functions such as memory and reasoning, its activities i.e.; what is the relationship of mind and body, is dualism or monism?, is it accessible to study or only an endeavour of first person and finally, who possess a mind?; do all beings have a mind or only human beings could possess it?, and so on. With two simple models, ‘the Epistemological dualism’ and the model of ‘Mind-Spirit; dichotomy Vs coexistence’ based on the concepts in Indian Psychology, the paper throws more light in to the subject mind and its faculty.


2016 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 187-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark H. White ◽  
Ludwin E. Molina

Abstract. Five studies demonstrate that athletic praise can ironically lead to infrahumanization. College athletes were seen as less agentic than college debaters (Studies 1 and 2). College athletes praised for their bodies were also seen as less agentic than college athletes praised for their minds (Study 3), and this effect was driven by bodily admiration (Study 4). These effects occurred equally for White and Black athletes (Study 1) and did not depend on dualistic beliefs about the mind and body (Study 2), failing to provide support for assumptions in the literature. Participants perceived mind and body descriptions of both athletes and debaters as equally high in praise (Study 5), demonstrating that infrahumanization may be induced even if descriptions of targets are positively valenced. Additionally, decreased perceptions of agency led to decreased support for college athletes’ rights (Study 3).


Author(s):  
Camilo POTOCNJAK-OXMAN

Stir was a crowd-voted grants platform aimed at supporting creative youth in the early stages of an entrepreneurial journey. Developed through an in-depth, collaborative design process, between 2015 and 2018 it received close to two hundred projects and distributed over fifty grants to emerging creatives and became one of the most impactful programs aimed at increasing entrepreneurial activity in Canberra, Australia. The following case study will provide an overview of the methodology and process used by the design team in conceiving and developing this platform, highlighting how the community’s interests and competencies were embedded in the project itself. The case provides insights for people leading collaborative design processes, with specific emphasis on some of the characteristics on programs targeting creative youth


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