The most interesting, and problematic, claim made by film-philosophy, for me, is the proposition that film thinks. This claim is interesting because it asserts that film has something philosophical to offer that philosophy itself lacks. It is problematic because we tend to think that where there is thinking, there must be a someone doing that thinking. And whatever film is, it is not a someone. This paper brings Karl Poppers model of objective knowledge what he calls knowledge in the absence (...) of a knowing subject to bear on the proposition that film thinks, in order to sketch out an account of film as a process of objective thinking distinct from that of philosophy or any other merely human mode of thought. (shrink)

Morality and Power offers a compelling critique of orthodox economic analysis and its impacts on public policy. Mike Berry argues that the theoretical underpinning of evaluative tools like cost-benefit analysis rests on an incoherent concept of 'efficiency' derived from Paretian welfare economics. Beginning by reviewing the historical progression of economic thought, Berry argues there has been a lack of crucial development in economic thinking in public policy since the economic crisis of 2008. The ethically unacceptable outcomes of the current public (...) policy approach are exposed: most notably the support for policies that accentuate inequality and social polarization; the outbreak of crises in the financial sector, and the treatment of refugees and migrants. Finally, threats to liberal democracies in an age of rampant populism and rising nationalism are examined, offering noteworthy suggestions for an alternative democratic future. Both students and practitioners of heterodox economics and public policy will find this book a compelling insight into the ethical concerns of neoliberal policies shaped by politicians and policymakers today. (shrink)

Background: Double degrees in nursing and midwifery have evolved in Australia as a proposed solution to possible impending shortages of qualified midwives in the healthcare workforce. The double degree is seen as a more acceptable option in non-metropolitan areas in particular. Concern has been expressed however, about dilution of midwifery philosophy and graduates opportunities in respect of future clinical practice. Aim: This study aimed to provide a better understanding of motivations and intentions of students who undertake the Bachelor of Nursing (...) Science/Bachelor of Midwifery double degree. Methods: A cross-sectional survey design was employed at four universities that offered double degrees in nursing and midwifery in three states of Australia. Students enrolled in first and fourth year of a double degree and graduates of a double degree were invited to complete an online survey comprised of Likertscales and items requiring free text responses. Quantitative data was analysed using SPSS and thematic analysis was used to analyse the qualitative data. Findings: Participants indicated a clear preference for midwifery as a career with this preference increasing for each cohort at each stage of study. Discussion: Primary reasons for selecting a double degree were perceived increased opportunity for employment and use of nursing skills to enhance midwifery practice in a population with growing co-morbidities. A strong identification with midwifery philosophy and identity was also demonstrated.Conclusion: An understanding of motivations and career intentions of students undertaking double degree studies can inform future program development and workforce planning. (shrink)

This book explores corporate environmental discourse by examining a sample of corporate environmental reports through the lens of environmental philosophy. Findings include the predominant use of a dualistic approach towards nature, which highlights the perceived ‘separateness’ of companies from the natural world. Also explored are the corporate articulations of interconnectivity and transcendence, two philosophical approaches that are also in common use in western culture. The expression of these themes reveals the discursive underpinnings of a harmful relationship with nature. Exploring the (...) ways in which discourse informs corporate relationships with nature allows for an in-depth ‘diagnosis’ of current environmental problems. The history of environmental philosophy demonstrates how some powerful philosophical approaches have shaped the western relationship with nature over time, and continue to do so through corporate environmental reporting. Corporate Environmental Reporting: The Western Approach to Nature demonstrates how corporate reporting is used to reduce the perception of the corporate responsibility, and contributes to the erosion of broader cultural restraints against the harmful treatment of nature. As such, discourse is integral to the survival of the world which we – and other members of our biotic community – are utterly reliant on. It shows the latest state of knowledge on the topic and will be of interest both to students at an advanced level, academics and reflective practitioners. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of accounting, management, environmental philosophy and sustainable management. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore two different approaches to the development of a rhizomatic methodology. In a rhizomatic fashion, we map the connections and disconnections between and across these different pathways. Three connections are described: first, writing a rhizomatic text that is non-linear and self-consciously part of the research method; second, using rhizomatic thought to analyse the discourses operating within data; and third, following Deleuzian lines of flight that connect and link disparate forms of data so that plausible readings can (...) connect analysis of writing, artworks, video, and interview transcripts. The various disconnections are provided to illustrate the impossibility of establishing some kind of formulaic methodology that would neatly answer Buchanan's question of 'how does it work?'. Rather, we are aware of the dangers of 'methodolatory' and offer this paper as one particular and specific reading of the contributions that Deleuzian theories can make to educational research methods. (shrink)

This chapter affirm a thinking of time as difference. It does not claim to figure time as such, because whatever time is, time remains essentially in excess of figuration. Instead this chapter elaborates instances of the effort to think time as difference in Aristotle, Henri Bergson, and Luce Irigaray. I suggest that each of these philosophers affirms the fundamentally elusive nature of time while also articulating valuable ideas for thinking time as difference.

My doctoral research investigated the intersubjective aspects of communication design practice through a focus on the other, and the roles that the other takes in practice. It did so in order to better understand the practice of communication design as practiced on a day-to-day basis. Communication design, as a practice, and a field, extends out of graphic design. This extension is due to a change in priorities; from privileging the graphic and artefactual aspects of practice, to prioritising consideration for the (...) broader agency of design within a specific context. This research was accomplished through a practice-led methodology. Communication design projects formed the methods of, and the foundation for, the investigation. Seven individual research projects were designed and carried out. Each project incorporated different participants of communication design practice; new and existing clients, student designers and established practicing designers. This allowed the research to investigate its concerns from a range of roles and viewpoints, incorporating different perspectives into its observations and understandings. The research extends the work of Donald Schön and his investigation into The Reflective Practitioner. It achieved this through a consideration for the roles of the other in professional practice. In order to reflect upon and articulate the results of this shift in focus to the other extensive reference has been made to the thinking of the twentieth century philosophers Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas. The research concluded that the other takes a critical role within the practice of communication of providing ‘provocative disjunction’. This provocative disjunction, as understood by this research, directly contributes to the generative shifts which communication design enables for all the participants involved in the design action; artefacts, clients and designers. The observations and understandings produced during this practice-led research enabled extensive insights into the practice of communication design, which contribute significantly to the broader communication design discourse in professional practice, education and research. This paper presents a project from the author’s practice-led PhD in order to discuss 'the design collaborator as other'. Seen in this light it is the design collaborator who provides the source of 'disjunctive provocation' and consequently has the potential to enable both epistemological and ontological change. (shrink)

Background Psychological practitioners often seek to directly change the form or frequency of clients' maladaptive perfectionist thoughts, because such thoughts predict future depression. Indirect strategies, such as self-compassion interventions, that seek to change clients' relationships to difficult thoughts, rather than trying to change the thoughts directly could be just as effective. This study aimed to investigate whether self-compassion moderated, or weakened, the relationship between high perfectionism and high depression symptoms in both adolescence and adulthood. Methods The present study utilised anonymous (...) self-report questionnaires to assess maladaptive perfectionism, depression, and self-compassion across two samples covering much of the life-span. Questionnaires were administered in a high school setting for the adolescent sample, and advertised through university and widely online to attract a convenience sample of adults. Results Moderation analyses revealed that self-compassion reduced the strength of relationship between maladaptive perfectionism and depression in our adolescent Study 1 and our adult study 2. Limitations Cross-sectional self-reported data restricts the application of causal conclusions and also relies on accurate self-awareness and willingness to respond to questionnaire openly. Conclusions The replication of this finding in two samples and across different age-appropriate measures suggests that self-compassion does moderate the link between perfectionism and depression. Self-compassion interventions may be a useful way to undermine the effects of maladaptive perfectionism, but future experimental or intervention research is needed to fully assess this important possibility. (shrink)

This qualitative study used a deep ecology lens and the New Environmental Paradigm to investigate anthropocentrism and ecocentrism in 30 secondary school environment club students from three schools in Victoria, Australia. The work repositions the deep ecology philosophy as a posthumanist/relational ideology, providing novel perspectives based on kinship with the earth. Open-ended interviews assessed the alignment of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors along a Deep Ecology Spectrum. Key aspects of deep ecology were confirmed through the study findings including biospherical egalitarianism, limits (...) to growth, wildlife preservation, anti-consumerism, environmental activism, and ecological identity. (shrink)

The prolific Australian author and artist, Paul Carter has made an important contribution to the reconceptualisation of colonial cultures and their postcolonial prospects. As an artist and place-maker, his work is widely published and studied. However, the important Italian engagement underwriting his scholarly and creative production has not been widely studied. This article attempts to rectify the omission. It offers a chronological overview of Carter's forty-year engagement with situations in Italian urbanism, art and philosophy. It also isolates key themes: archipelagic (...) sense of place, echoic mimetic communicational principles, and a migrant epistemology rooted in the notion of 'self-becoming at that place', which can be productively linked to Carter's unfinished return to Italy, a process of repeated encounter that is a biographical equivalent of Giambattista Vico's historical ricorso. (shrink)

Background: Drug detection dogs are increasingly being deployed by policing agencies in Australia and elsewhere to home in on people carrying illicit drugs in a broad range of social contexts including at music festivals, on public transport and in a range of everyday urban spaces. Significant concerns have been raised about their limited deterrence and detection efficacy and tendency to increase drug-related health harms including overdose. Yet the complex ways in which these effects play out, and the broader impacts they (...) have on social and emotional wellbeing, are not yet well documented. This study builds on a growing body of poststructural critical drug studies research to explore the complex social, emotional and health impacts of drug dog use in these broad social contexts. Methods: Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 22 people who had been searched by drug detection dogs at or near music festivals and events, licensed venues and public transport spaces in Australia. Participants were asked about their experiences of being searched, how it impacted upon them in the short and long term, and how it shaped their drug use behaviours, sense of self and social relations, including relations with police. Results: This study supports previous findings that these drug dog operations do not tend to deter people from consuming illicit substances, but instead encourage a range of adaptations that increase the likelihood of health harms including overdose. The rationalities underpinning responses to drug dogs, and the impacts of those responses, are shown to be deeply spatial, temporal, social and embodied. More specifically, drug dog deployment is shown to have significant short and long term impacts on social and emotional wellbeing and can produce deep embodied trauma. Conclusion: These findings suggest that the use of drug dogs in these broad social contexts is based on untenable assumptions about the rationalities of deterrence, is producing substa. (shrink)

The publication of Heidegger's Black Notebooks has provoked a storm of controversy. Much of this has centred on the pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic comments the volumes contain. But these aspects of the Notebooks are perhaps the least surprising and important. This essay offers a summary overview of the issues to which the Notebooks give rise, at the same time as it also aims to provide a preliminary assessment of their overall significance, especially in relation to what they show about the nature (...) and development of Heidegger's thinking from the early 1930s to the late 1940s. (shrink)

The concept of research paradigm is one that many higher degree research students, and even early career researchers, find elusive to articulate, and challenging to apply in their research proposals. Adopting an ethnographic and hermeneutic methodology, the present paper draws upon our experiences as lecturers in Research Methods over many years, and upon pertinent literature to explain the meaning of research paradigm. The paper elucidates the key aspects of research paradigms that researchers should understand well to be able to address (...) this concept adequately in their research proposals. It offers suggestions on how researchers can locate their research into a paradigm and the justification needed for paradigm choice. With the explicit purpose of helping higher degree research students design effective research proposals, the paper also discusses the different research methodologies best suited to conduct research in each of the paradigms discussed. (shrink)

How do we ready ourselves to intervene responsively in the contingent situations that arise in co-designing to make change? How do we attune to group dynamics and respond ethically to unpredictable developments when working with 'community'? Participatory Design can contribute to social transitions, yet its focus is often tightly tuned to technique for designing ICT at the cost of participatory practice. We challenge PD conventions by addressing what happens as we step into a situation to alter it with others, an (...) aspect of practice that cannot be replicated or interchanged. We do so to argue that practices of readiness are constituted by personal histories, experiences, philosophies and culture. We demonstrate this political argument by giving reflexive accounts of our dimensions of preparation. The narratives here are distinct, yet reveal complementary theories and worldviews that shape PD ontologies. We have organized these around the qualities of punctuation and poise as a way to draw out some less easily articulated aspects of PD practice. (shrink)

This PhD blends three practices that are not ordinarily put together: creative writing, acupuncture, and process-oriented philosophy. An important aim of this practice-led research is to re-present notions of body through the writing of a series of essays that demonstrate how creative and critical components can move together within one body, and also within a collection of text-bodies. The PhD explores the relation between `lyric' and `essay' and how this relationship can generate a more-than quality that has the potential to (...) affectively move the [dissertation's] body beyond the sum of its parts. The practice of experimenting with the essay's capacity to carry the force of thought forming can, by extension, make creative practice research a site for the production of knowledge. The project demonstrates how a method of making becomes the methodology. That is, the process of thinking and making, rhizomatically, from the Deleuzian middle, not only activates the practice, but also becomes the outcome. Or, as Whitehead says, "Knowledge is drawn up with the immediacy of its own importance, as fresh as fish.". (shrink)

In Chapter 1, "Irremediability: On the Very Concept of 'Digital Ontol- ogy,'" Justin Clemens and Adam Nash set out by questioning whether there is such a thing as digital ontology at all, and if so, how it is different from 'traditional ontology,' or, at least, from 'non-digital' or 'pre-digital' ontol- ogy. They also probe what the adjective 'digital' actually signifies, includ- ing how it differs from 'data' or 'information.' The authors argue that the digital may in fact overturn the concept (...) of 'ontology' itself, and that digital ontology is a paradoxical, nonsensical or contradictory phenomenon that resists its own consistent formalisation. Clemens and Nash begin with a pre- liminary analysis of some influential recent approaches in digital ontology, showing that they prioritise epistemology over ontology. Next, they re-examine some of the most important twentieth- century ontologies, arguing that digital technologies expose new phenomena that have no precedent in any metaphysical or logical tradition. These comprise not only the extraordi- nary advances in 'positive' knowledge thereby gained, but also new kinds of cogni- tive deadlocks and dilemmas that have emerged. The authors conclude that digital technologies therefore present aporias, or impasses of knowledge, to any attempt to think the ontology of the digital and that it is only on the basis of these aporias that the new lineaments of a properly digital ontology can be discerned. (shrink)

How should a free society protect privacy? Dramatic changes in national security law and surveillance, as well as technological changes from social media to smart cities mean that our ideas about privacy and its protection are being challenged like never before. In this interdisciplinary book, Chris Berg explores what classical liberal approaches to privacy can bring to current debates about surveillance, encryption and new financial technologies. Ultimately, he argues that the principles of classical liberalism the rule of law, individual rights, (...) property and entrepreneurial evolution can help extend as well as critique contemporary philosophical theories of privacy. (shrink)

post-Bourdieu version of field theory can produce nuanced analyses of the relationship between media change, the new citizen movements and ongoing struggles for democratic renewal. Through the case of Spain's indignados movement and its political offshoots, I explore the potential uses of a range of field concepts and propose a conceptual distinction between «field of civic action» and «dispersed civic space». Spain's recent political changes are not a continuous flow of events but rather a series of discrete, ephemeral fields of (...) civic action separated by a long hiatus of dispersed civic space. These complexly mediated fields are socio-political «games» in which civic players with technopolitical and other skills interact with other players in pursuit of specific goals and rewards. As a result, new citizen-led initiatives have bridged the alternative vs. mainstream media divide to great social and political effect. (shrink)

This exegesis questions and explores the types of identities that are emerging as a result of human engagement with contemporary communications and media technology. These identities are communicated, shaped and defined by the way we appropriate and engage with a smorgasbord of communications and media consumption technologies which merge in our imaginations to form a technosocial mediascape. As artist and teacher, consumer and prosumer, I participate in the technosocial mediascape, along with colleagues, students, artists, friends and family members. As we (...) produce, communicate and ultimately co-create that technosocial environment, how are we changed by this experience? We contribute to a diverse and globally circulating, but paradoxically transient parade of data and media that apparatuses and humans together bring into existence. How does this mediascape impact on human ontology and sociology? What are the different ‘positions’—relationships with the mediascape—that emerge? My method derives from analysis of my own experience as an engaged and flexible ‘position-taker’ within the technosocial mediascape. I analyse my own creative practice with reference to a range of modernist, postmodernist and media theories. The technosocial enshrines the idea that technology and human behaviour are not separable, and draws on many theoretical sources, including phenomenology, the philosophy of language, design theory and digital media theory. All media, and mediums, are technosocial, because they impact on the praxis of identity. However, a range of contemporary media and mediums are more explicitly technosocial, and that is where my focus lies. I will suggest that the role of language in technosocial contexts is peculiar, important and under-theorised. Our ‘linguistic apparatuses’ offer an alternate concept of technology to the ‘heavy modernism’ of Martin Heidegger. I will explore ways in which technosocial engagement privileges fluid identities which drift in and out of different but co-existing realities. Various types of ‘immersion’—some neo-baroque and some neo-romantic—contribute to technosocially-engaged identity construction. Thus, our engagement with the technosocial mediascape challenges received ideas about personal identity, and indeed, the nature of the real. (shrink)

This thesis addresses fundamental issues in sustainability thinking, especially in relation to its epistemological and methodological bases. The sustainability crisis has invoked multiple schools of thought cross-cutting wide range of human activities/ scholarships. The resultant diversity of perspectives has imparted a high degree of ambiguity, and an intellectual ‘looseness’, potentially obfuscating many sustainability issues, which in consequence deepened social confusion and political inaction. Despite this, sustainability has taken on a certain moral tone as a normative goal of society, which is (...) based upon implicit assumptions about the constituent forms of knowledge and the methods by which this knowledge is legitimated. It is out of these normative bases of sustainability that ‘sustainability science’ has emerged as an overt attempt aiming to champion pluralistic and integrated forms of knowledge and research in addressing the sustainability crisis. Chapter 1 analyzes the intellectual standing of sustainability. This reveals the necessity for an intellectual perspective to replace the normative essence associated with the notion, and a necessary pluralistic orientation and avenue of knowledge. This intellectual perspective—formed in Chapter 2—stipulates that sustainability scholarship needs to operate both across and within disciplines, albeit cognizant of a more integrated reality. The reductionist mode of enquiry is unable to do this. Thus, the sustainability crisis requires a new mode of enquiry, which can enable the production of ‘bricks of knowledge while looking at the whole building’, in contrary to the production of ‘specialized bricks of knowledge at the expense of not seeing the whole building’ as characteristic of the reductionist mode. This new mode of enquiry necessitates a fundamental intellectual process, capable of enabling the pluralistic orientation and avenue of knowledge. Accordingly, based on fundamental research the thesis aims to analyze the sustainability science discourse and, through both deductive and inductive methods, develop a fundamental intellectual process to inform on the dimensions and structure of a pluralistic knowledge avenue, leading to the laying of an intellectual foundation for the scholarship of sustainability. This is corresponded to three key research questions : KRQ-1: How can an intellectual process fundamentally be framed in order to study the pluralistic knowledge and research structures regarding sustainability? KRQ-2: What are the basic structures of the discourse of sustainability science and how are they structured? KRQ-3: How might a pluralistic knowledge avenue and the layout of an intellectual foundation for the scholarship of sustainability be elicited based on the rationale, framing and application of the fundamental intellectual process? The thesis takes the first decade’s ‘body of work’ of sustainability science as a dataset for analysis in answering these questions through heuristic fundamental research. Chapters 1-3 reflect fundamental research, while Chapters 4-6 and Chapter 7 present the results of heuristic deductive analysis and inductive analysis, respectively. The rationale for the KRQs is formed in Chapters 1-2, besides forming the intellectual perspective of sustainability. KRQ-1 is addressed in Chapter 3 in empirically framing a fundamental intellectual process. The analysis of the first decade’s ‘body of work’ of sustainability science is presented in Chapters 4-6, elucidating the discursive, integrative and contextual structures of its discourse, thus, addressing KRQ-2. These together form a continuous thread of inquiry on the intellectual treatment of sustainability, leading to addressing KRQ-3 in Chapter 7. In framing the fundamental intellectual process the Chapter 3 produces a fundamental literature organization process resulting in a structure of five cross-connected layers of organizations within the literature archive, while a discourse analysis mechanism produces an analytical process based on a system of five stages of discourse analysis. These together construct a fundamental scheme for analyzing the basic structures of pluralistic knowledge/ research. There are four key findings arising from Chapters 4-6. KF-1 reveals an overall lack of precision in characterizing the concept of ‘human-environment system’ in sustainability science along with an extremely open-ended representation. KF-2, revealing the overall contribution of sustainability science as consistent across its three different basic structures demonstrates mere structural contributions while lacking in intellectual capacities to provide the functional aspects to the intellectual treatment of sustainability. Based on conceptualization and extensive exemplification of a theoretical framework on the language of conversation in sustainability research KF-3 produces a new intellectual lens for approaching effective trans-disciplinary sustainability research through facilitating knowledge co-production. KF-4 reveals a strong correlation between the dominant ‘original nature’ and the characters of ‘literature survey’ and ‘literature archive analysis’ of sustainability science research, together with a dominance of these characters across the other empirical classes. This reveals the significance of fundamental literature organization and analysis process in brokering common language and understanding for the enabling of sustainability scholarship, besides breaking the impasse of the conventional incompatibility between original research and literature analysis processes. In Chapter 7, the KF 1-4 are analyzed in terms of different dimensions of the pluralistic knowledge avenue. The chapter also produces the structure of this avenue through inductively projecting on the characteristics of an integration expertise in light of the new mode of enquiry. Besides, Chapter 7 also extracts nine latent elements/ characters of an intellectual foundation of the scholarship of sustainability from the rationale, framing and application of the fundamental intellectual process as well as the inductive framing of the pluralistic knowledge avenue. These together produce the basis for an integrated theory on the intellectual foundation of sustainability. In summary, new knowledge components are pertinent to KF 1-4 and the inductive framing of the pluralistic knowledge avenue. Through fundamentally analyzing the prevailing scholastic reality of sustainability that is based on normative assumption-based works, the thesis produces a structure of sustainability scholarship based on fundamental intellectual justification. Its implications for sustainability science include: the possibility of overcoming reductionist methods—constraining the contribution of the practice—through active intellectual orientation of the new mode of enquiry, prospects for innovation in the practice stem from the integrative structure of its discourse and in developing functional-intellectual capabilities, and a fundamental intellectual process is a means to overcome its normative impulse. (shrink)

Ideas and knowledge of ethical leadership as something accomplished between the leader and the led, are becoming increasingly valuable. We propose a view from process philosophy in which relations determine individual leaders and followers, not the reverse. Each individual is a locus, in which a plurality of relational determinations interacts; the ethics of leadership is situated within this. The process perspective views leadership as an occasion we experience subjectively within ourselves, instead of simply looking at it objectively from the outside. (...) Such a process perspective, grasping leadership as an internally complex occasion of experience, has implications for our understanding of what it means to be an ethical leader. (shrink)

The purpose of this review is to critique the social and environmental psychology literature on spaces and places with a focus on consumer culture and neoliberalism. By drawing on social theory and the Continental philosophical literature, the review argues that an alternative approach to knowledge production is required. To this end, recommendations are provided for what a psychogeographical approach in social and environmental psychology could look like. It argues that such work could be of benefit to academic and local communities (...) by exposing the social costs and consequences associated with consumer culture and neoliberalism. (shrink)

In this article we propose an approach to digital health tracking technologies that draws on design anthropology. This entails re-thinking the pedagogical importance of personal data as lying in how they participate in the constitution of new possibilities that enable people to learn about, and configure, their everyday health in new ways. There have been two dominant strands in traditional debates in the field of pedagogy: one that refers to processes of teaching people to do things in particular ways; and (...) another that seeks to enable learning. The first of these corresponds with existing understandings of self-tracking technologies as either unsuccessful behavioural change devices, or as providing solutions to problems that do not necessarily exist. When seen as such, self-tracking technologies inevitably fail as forms of intervention towards better health. In this article we investigate what happens when we take the second strand-the notion of enabling learning as an incremental and emergent process-seriously as a mode of intervention towards health through self-tracking technologies. We show how such a shift in pedagogical understanding of the routes to knowing these technologies offer creates opportunities to move beyond simplistic ideas of behavioural change as the main application of digital body monitoring in everyday life. In what follows, we first demonstrate how the disjunctures that arise from this context emerge. We then outline a critical response to how learning through life-tracking has been conceptualised in research in health and human-computer interaction research. We offer an alternative response by drawing on a processual theory of learning and recent and emerging research in sociology, media studies, anthropology, and cognate disciplines. Then, drawing on ethnographic research, we argue for understanding learning through the production of personal data as involving emplaced and non-representational routes to knowing. This. (shrink)

In this article, I consider financial economics as an artistic science in which interpretation plays a key role. After having reminded the importance of the Efficient Market Hypothesis [EMH] in the development of institutional frameworks, we present EMH as a work of art-we illustrate this point by considering EMH as an ironic and a non-representative art in which the theoretical picture tends to replace the reality. This process leads to the creation of a 'hyper-reality' that is paradoxically unable to predict (...) or to explain the financial reality. In line with a postmodernist perspective of science, I claim here that financial economics and technology are used not to describe or to better understand the financial reality but rather to invent it. (shrink)

Finance is well known to be a very mathematical area of knowledge. However, a specific financial practice called technical analysis mainly uses visual patterns in order to take a position on the market. Through financial graphs, tables, charts, etc, technical analysts give a meaning to the evolution of financial prices. All these visual metaphors imply a real interpretative process in which analysts form 'feelings' and judgements concerning 'bad shapes' or 'good trends'. While technical analysis is usually associated with the recognition (...) of visual patterns, this article rather deals with the way of recognizing these patterns. More precisely, we show that this recognition is based on a creative and interpretative process. This interpretative dimension of technical analysis combined with its popularization can then be looked on as a source of liquidity in the market. (shrink)

This paper is a complementary comment to the article recently published in IRFA by Thomas Lagoarde-Segot on the necessity of diversification of modelling in finance. In his claim, the author explained that financial concepts used by the mainstream are not neutral because they refer to a particular ethical judgement mainly focused on the shareholders' interest. In this comment, I explain that this ethical judgement historically results from the role playing by the Gaussian distribution in finance: while this statistical framework gave (...) the first scientific foundations to finance in the 1960s, its symmetrical configuration implies that negative changes occur with the same probability than positive ones. In this context, all potential intervention could only interfere this "ethically fair situation" within the only perturbing element is the shareholder whose behaviours are likely to influence the market. After having explained that this reasoning is based on an a priori statement about observational facts, I present this situation as an opportunity for current researchers in finance to clarify their implicit assumptions; which would open the door to a diversification of modelling in finance as Lagoarde-Segot promoted it in his IRFA article. Copyright. (shrink)

In this article, I ask the question: what might a feminist approach to the popular philosophy genre look like? I note some of the seminal texts in the genre of popular philosophy in recent years - particularly the work of A.C. Grayling and Alain de Botton - and demonstrate how these celebrated works fail to embody feminist principles. I then posit three recent works as possible exhibits of feminist popular philosophy: Sarah Bakewell's biography of Montaigne titled How to Live, Laura (...) Kipnis's polemical creative non-fiction work, Against Love and Siri Hustvedt's post September 11 novel, The Sorrows of an American. (shrink)

Technology is fundamental to and embedded in the way practice is conceptualized and institutionalized in social service work. Many scholars assume and expect that good practices of care are achieved with the correct application of theory produced by rigorous scientific research. However, there are significant critiques of this viewpoint. We examine the work of Donald Schön and Martin Heidegger and agree with these authors' suggestions that technical rationality and modern technology are not the way to achieve good practice in the (...) human services. At the same time, we are not convinced that the alternatives offered by Schön and Heidegger provide what good practice requires. We draw on Aristotle's account of the intellectual virtues and make the case for phronesis and praxis as other possibilities for inspiring new kinds of social welfare practice in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This research investigates the intersubjective aspects of communication design practice through a focus on the other, and the roles that the other takes in practice. It does so in order to better understand the practice of communication design as practiced on a day-to-day basis. Communication design, as a practice, and a field, extends out of graphic design. This extension is due to a change in priorities; from privileging the graphic and artefactual aspects of practice, to prioritising the consideration of the (...) broader agency of design within a specific context. This research has been accomplished through a practice-led methodology. Communication design projects form the methods of, and the foundation for, the investigation. Seven individual research projects have been designed and carried out. These projects have each incorporated members of the different participants of communication design practice; new and existing clients, student designers and established practicing designers. This has allowed the research to investigate its concerns from a range of roles and viewpoints, incorporating different perspectives into its observations and understandings. This research extends the work of Donald Schön and his investigation into The Reflective Practitioner. It achieves this through a consideration for the roles of the other in professional practice. In order to articulate this move extensive reference is made to the thinking of the twentieth century philosophers Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas. This research has found that the other plays critical roles in the practice of communication design. These roles are ones of providing provocative disjunction. Provocative disjunction, as understood by this research, contributes directly to the generative action communication design offers artefacts, clients and designers. The observations and understandings of this practice-led research have enabled extensive insights into the practice of communication design. These insights contribute significantly to the broader communication design discourse in professional practice, education and research. (shrink)

This paper is the first of two that seek to propose the establishment of a new singularity for the arts defined as a Post-neomodernism by examining the first five points of the ​Post Neomodernist Manifesto. As the micro movements of Post-postmodernism, Neomodernism, and Metamodernism have established their own positions in an after Postmodernist context, therein lies an absence of a greater contextualisation to which a Post-neomodernism can establish and by this, approach a singularity in more holistic terms. Discussion will examine (...) the context of a new absolute, the role of multiplicity in new relativism, the rise of post truth and the disruption of such instances through digital media. (shrink)

Social theories of ignorance try to grapple with ignorance, or even denial, across society. This paper examines the current predicament that society faces from the end of cheap oil, why it hasn't been more widely debated, and why it is generally not considered as a cause for broad-scale concern. It is conjectured that dementia is a useful metaphor for reframing our thinking and understanding of peak oil. In particular, it helps illuminate why this major force, which is likely to shape (...) society for the next few decades, is being largely ignored. The metaphor provides some possibilities for understanding the ways in which the coming energy descent will be experienced by modern societies. Finally, the metaphor highlights some useful beginnings for dealing with our peak oil predicament. (shrink)

Some decades ago, Heidi Hartmann lamented that “[t]he ‘marriage’ between marxism and feminism has been like the marriage of husband and wife depicted in English common law: marxism and feminism are one, and that one is marxism.”[1] By this, she meant that attempts at a feminist theory had ultimately collapsed into marxism, and so succeeded only in rendering sex inequality derivative of, hence, secondary to class inequality, and as such to be overcome only by ending class inequality. These attempts were (...) in a sense self-defeating, negating the need from which they had emerged, the need for feminism as such. In 1982, Catharine MacKinnon confronted and attempted to remedy this. She developed a theory of sexuality as to feminism what work is to marxism, and thereby elevated feminism to a theory of the kind that marxism is, parallel rather than subordinate to it. She thus made sex inequality finally the issue. But, paradoxically, at the very same time, MacKinnon paralysed feminism, for she revealed men’s oppression of women as unknowable. If men’s oppression of women is unknowable, then feminism, as the movement to end that oppression, is impossible. Susan Bernick recognised this, saying, “MacKinnon’s legacy to feminism is the impossibility of any future feminism. Her account makes feminism theoretically impossible.”[2] This makes the most urgent task for feminism that of explaining how women can know men’s oppression of them. In this thesis, I attempt such an explanation. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to offer a conceptual analysis of the space created by the Willing Workers on Organic Farms host as a part of the organic farming movement and how that space now collides with the idea of tourism heterotopias as the changing market sees WWOOFers who may be less motivated by organic farming and more by a cheaper form of holiday. The resulting contested space is explored looking at the role and delicate balance of WWOOFing as (...) a form of sustainable tourism in the context of socially constructed understandings of space. Poststructural concepts of space suggest that it is impermanent, fragile and under constant threat of change. Space is constantly produced and reproduced in the process, spaces become sites where struggle and contestation occur, in this instance as one discourse or discursive practice, namely WWOOFing, intersects with and is influenced by the more dominant capital centric discourse of mass tourism. (shrink)

This article is concerned with developing a philosophical approach to a number of significant changes to academic publishing, and specifically the global journal knowledge system wrought by a range of new digital technologies that herald the third age of the journal as an electronic, interactive and mixed-media form of scientific communication. The paper emerges from an Editors' Collective, a small New Zealand-based organisation comprised of editors and reviewers of academic journals mostly in the fields of education and philosophy. The paper (...) is the result of a collective writing process. (shrink)

In order to explain some of the paradoxes and mysteries of the artist's cross cultural experience in Kiribati, he constructed an Artist's Book depicting through visuality, anecdote and reflection, his research process, engaging with current visual perceptions through negotiation with the past. In Kiribati previous encounters with Europeans and Islanders was dominated by English and I Kiribati with significant contributions by French missionaries. Each viewed the other through cultural filters of identity, which were informed by concepts of myth-historical, often heroic (...) pasts, modified by contemporary purpose such as power, trade, evangelism or personal gain. The method of transmission of beliefs about the past differed fundamentally as the Europeans were predominately informed by writing and the I-Kiribati by orality and performance. The non-literary epistemology of the I Kiribati contributed to a cosmology of non-iconic symbols that defined belief systems and social structures. These symbols connected place and space with time, self and group identities. The research found that the all surrounding visual symbol system of sacred meeting house, dwelling and canoe ) could be partly understood as an ongoing struggle since Deep Time, between the forces of the Ocea n represented by Bakoa, The Shark, and that of the triumph of the coming onto the Land and its people represented by Tabakea, The Turtle. The performative outcome of this triumph and the spirit of identity it engenders is expressed primarily in the ubiquitous I Kiribati Dance. The Artists Book is inspired by the creative classic I Kiribati form of oratory known as Te Kuna, using a structure analogous to the symbolic forms of narrative of Oceanic Voyaging traditionally employed by the I Kiribati. Differences in visual perceptions across cultural interface are understood not only as having the potential for conflict but also as providing positive dynamic force by the interchange of understood differences. The project contributes specifically to the ethnography of English and I Kiribati, semiotic systems and visual epistemologies, indicating directions towards positive outcomes in cross-cultural encounters. (shrink)

The fact that social welfare professions including social work, youth work and community work deal with the lives and relationships of human beings is far from controversial. What is contentious is that in light of increasing intellectual work on the nature of social practices there is a failure in the human services literature to adequately examine the interdependencies and entanglements between conceptualisations of the stuff that the helping professions deals with and understandings of practice. This article examines the nexus and (...) mediations between the phenomena and practice of social service work. The case is made that human services and the human beings they deal with are often imagined and represented in one-dimensional, unambiguous, calculable and orderable ways that align with neo-liberal inspired and technical approaches to practice. I argue that these accounts are inadequate and I suggest that practices of care and the people engaged in such practices should be constituted as complex, unpredictable, wicked and emergent. A key to good practice in the people professions is acknowledging and attending to this complexity and aporia. (shrink)

Urban soundscape installations applying ecosophical approaches challenge homogeneity by creating diverse acoustic ecologies, where acoustic ecologies are understood as the subjective experiences of listeners immersed in variable sound environments. In environmental ecology homogeneity threatens diversity through the spread of destructive agents ; similarly, homogenising agents in urban soundscapes threaten the diversity of social ecologies and mental ecologies. This paper describes two public soundscape installations that challenge homogenisation by creating multiplicities of acoustic ecologies through transformations of everyday sounds for the diversification (...) of social ecologies and mental ecologies. (shrink)

This paper is part of a project to rescue fashion from the social sciences and restore it to philosophy. In Kawamura's Fashion-ology, power is understood solely as legal or institutional power. The work's strictly sociological approach means that, though the two are rightly distinguished, clothing continues to haunt the logic of fashion, and there is little reflection as to why the system of clothing and not some other commodity lends its name to cultural neomania in general. What is lacking is (...) an analysis of the specific nature of fashion's empowerment and disempowerment of subjectivity. For this we need to enlist Foucault's genealogy of power, which also has the advantage of explaining strategic resistance to institutional power. However, Foucault's account is itself unsatisfying, because it avoids offering a theory of power while nevertheless assuming one. Foucault's critique of power quietly assumes Nietzsche's metaphysic of power, the incessant, embodied movement of self-empowering and self-overpowering. The corporeal subject of this self-production is nothing but surface, one that extends to the surrounds of its world, and the ceaseless rhythm of its embodied self-presentation is fashion. Barthes insightfully observes that, were its rhythm to be disrupted by cultural developments, the intense jostling that resulted would be the beginning of a new history of fashion. Yet there is incoherence to this claim, for if the rhythm of fashion were to turn into the chaos of arrhythmia, then we might instead conclude that fashion was at an end. Barthes' uncertain prospect of a new beginning points to what I call, following Heidegger, the powerlessness of fashion. This is not intended as criticism, since this powerlessness is nothing negative but rather that which exceeds the limits of fashion while giving rise to it. But on questions concerning the historicality of its beginning and the finality of its self-understanding, the sociology of fashion can have nothing to say. (shrink)

This chapter takes a fresh approach to some persistent issues facing action research as a philosophy of science by drawing on an expanded framework that integrates insights from systems thinking, psychology and sociology in a new way. The familiar shared range of human 'inquiry capabilities' are firstly described and identified as corresponding with the processes of living systems to achieve dynamic stability - the conditions for life - through repeated cycles of inquiring. I then articulate the new concepts of 'inquiry (...) preferences' and their 'reach' around the action research inquiry cycle to encompass the diversity of capabilities within human populations for achieving inquiry more effectively collectively, and particularly under conditions of crisis. The skills outlined offer to enable working more reflexively with our own and others' inquiry capabilities and preferences, and resource those using action research with a sequence of questions to ensure more effectively traversing 'full cycle', drawing on all preferences and avoiding the systemic risks of exclusion or dominance of any particular preferences. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze tells us that philosophical problems ‘compelled’ him to look to the cinema for answers, but he doesn’t tell us what those problems are. In this thesis I argue that the problems in question turn on the foundational role that Henri Bergson’s critique of the cinematographic illusion plays in the development of Deleuze’s ontological conception of difference – specifically in his 1956 essay “Bergson’s Conception of Difference.” The consequence of Bergson’s characterisation of human thought, perception and language as cinematographic (...) in their orientation is that any philosophy that seeks to grasp being in its own terms must overcome or surpass the human to do so. This necessity plays itself out across the Deleuzian oeuvre in diverse formulations in relation to the Nietzschean themes therein. In doing so, however, the human is ‘left behind,’ such that Peter Hallward is able to contend that the human and properly human concerns have no place in Deleuzian philosophy. My argument is that Deleuze turns to the cinema to think through the question of the human relation to being, on the basis of difference as such. Deleuze argues that the essence of the cinema is to be free of the cinematographic illusion - it ‘thinks’ in terms of real difference first of all. On that basis, it is able deduce the genesis of that illusion, and of the cinematographic orientation of human being and thought. The classical cinema dramatises the history of philosophy insofar as it remains subject to the cinematographic illusion and subordinates time to movement, but the modern cinema reverses this subordination in terms that do not ‘overcome’ or ‘surpass’ the human, but rather constitute its exposure to being as real difference. The modern cinema dramatises in turn the experience of what Kant calls the “fractured I,” which experiences its own thought not as spontaneity or power, but as time as the form of change. Deleuze’s Cinema books can thus be read as a response to the demands laid out in Solomon Maimon’s critique of Kant, locating the Cinema books and their treatment of the history of philosophy firmly in the context of Deleuze’s post-Kantian project. At the same time, the Cinema books thereby map out the relation of the human and properly human concerns to the difference of being as a creative and productive force that bears on those concerns without being reduced to them – the thought of being as the event of thought. (shrink)

In the style of a polemic discursive essay, Antiusability is introduced as a radical design paradigm to reawaken dedicated awareness of the user-system interface through challenge. A philosophical work in flux, it is described as a kind of science of difficulty with an underpinning that promotes the generic greater good in usability per se.

In this text, Jane Burry explains a specific contemporary application of computation to design - one in which the foci of design stems from serial definitions of dynamic spatial constructs. Burry proposes that the conception of such a design space lays critical bearing on the understanding of geometry and the mathematical means by which it is presented. While it is geometry which provides a particular depiction, it is the mathematical relationships which define the 'state space' - the range of morphological (...) potentials. As Burry delineates, it is in the history by which the theoretical relations of space, geometry and mat hematics have evolved that one can find the means where computational spatial design can be established. This also unfolds a surprisingly synchronous relationship between the mathematician's pursuit of a solution and the designer's computational deduction of a specific spatial construct. Seemingly defined by precision, it is more appropriately in the progression from abstraction and initial supposition to proven functionality where computational design can be seen as acting in the mathematician's nature. Burry utilises this intersection to succinctly interject the notion of intuition as both a fundamental and critically involved aspect of the mentality and practice of computational design. (shrink)

This PhD by dissertation and project is an exploration of whether the epiphenomena that occurs when the ephemera of nature and the building align can be the basis for architectural design. This can produce transient events that enhance our secular being. Also another premise of this PhD is whether, as a fine artist, my aesthetic propensities can be modulated onto architectural practice.

Co-designing is an activity based on emergence where constituents are mutually changing towards purposeful outcomes. Here, I draw on the Japanese philosophy of Ma as 'between-ness' to explore how we are transforming and becoming together among this heterogeneity. Yet, if emergence of potentiality is hard to articulate, it is even harder to understand. As we design, we are embedded within and inscripted by conditions that we cannot quite touch or see visibly, yet manifests through its evolu- tion. Awakening to this (...) in-between presence is a necessary start because co-designing is performed and emerges from relational sensitivity. Here, I entangle Ma with actor-network theory to orient our senses towards that which have yet assembled or actioned. Latour describes these as empty spaces of a network, void and 'plasma' that also has agency. If ANT primarily helps us see the flow of actions among being and non-beings, Ma as between-ness can re-situate us in emergence and contingency. Seen this way, co-designing can be ways to bring others along on this journey of uncertainty in a pursuit to create 'empty' in-betweens within and among ourselves as we mutually become together through inter-relatedness. (shrink)

Animation has often involved some degree of drawing, but 'boiling' and animated sketching are two unique forms of drawn animation that overtly foreground the process of drawing. In this article, the author looks at these two specific approaches to drawn animation, paying special attention to the history, process, and evolutionary qualities of animated sketching; he focuses on the processes and material essence of the 'boiling' image. Both of these approaches produce forms that are at once immobile and mobile and, within (...) this dichotomy of movement, the process of drawing is further accentuated. These will be discussed in light of broader discussions of the theory and process of animation and drawing. Additionally, these discussions will be set against a backdrop of process philosophy in an effort to further underscore the importance of the drawing process in the production and presentation of these two methods of animation. (shrink)

The exhibition Contemporary Australian Drawing 1 was organised for the first Drawing Out conference in Melbourne 20101 at RMIT. CAD1, as it became known, presented the work of 34 Australian artists at the RMIT University Gallery.

The ubiquity of the term CSR threatens its carrying any distinctive meaning. Despite its long history no consensus has been developed among the industry participants, academics or other interested parties. After a careful review of the complications and complexities of the CSR debate and distinct disciplinary definitions, the article turns to approach the problem of definition using the philosophy of science. It applies a scientific definitional approach of genus, differentia and species to arrive at a definition of CSR as international (...) private business self-regulation. The article provides an overview of the implications of this definition on CSR as a field of study, a management practice and an approach to improving the dialogue concerning the social contribution of business. (shrink)

The act of slowness is by its very nature an implied reduction of physical engagement that one might argue has as much to do with impairment as it does with temporal devaluation. Yet when placed in a twenty-first century context there are a growing number of arguments that position slowness as a mediator of resistance to fast-paced communication transactions thus impacting on the ways in which human interaction coexists between digital technology and cultural immediacy. While it may be suggestive to (...) position this new emergence as a collective of technoanthropological treaties as found, for example, in the Slow Media Manifesto , there is an under-valued relation that I will discuss throughout this paper when considering the role that slow motion plays out as a condition rather than an effect of lens based practice. Discussion will integrate the ideas of Proust, Mearleu Ponty, and Murch with review of contributions from Wes Anderson, The Wachowski Siblings, Bill Viola, and Adam Magyar. These perspectives will align with discussion of my own lens-based practice with regards to a slow motion experimental called The 51 Paintings Suite. (shrink)

Neither moral philosophy nor history provides a satisfactory explanation for Oskar Schindler's extraordinary rescue of more than 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust. Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark does. Although Schindler's Ark is technically a work of fiction, that generic label obscures its contribution as a fictionalised account of true events. By using a novelist's tools to tell an historical story, Keneally allows us to make inferences as to the motives of his protagonist and thereby helps us to understand what propelled the (...) moral behaviour of Oskar Schindler. (shrink)

This PhD will examine a method of inventing in the present a practice concomitant to the realisation of an architecture grounded in an immutable unknown; an architecture that departs from the finite architectural object, the imposition of an architect or the illusory status of a fictional community. This PhD argues that by fostering an architecture without foreclosure and of unforeseeable effect, a community in the present could minister to the practices of an unknowable constituent entrusting the unknowable with a share (...) in our contemporary condition, without appropriating the practices with which an unknowable life might imagine its own life, or indeed the lives’ of others. By asking after a community that is dispossessed of a presence that is accountable, this research attempts to ascertain the degree to which one can act on behalf of the unknowable. In establishing the ethical dimensions that the fundamental question of an unaccountable life proposes, this research engages with an aoristical sense of the question of a life in the univocity of a propositional space that assumes the surfeit of excess: exhaustion. The difficulty posed by a community without omission appeals to the indelible space of the Clinic, a space that confronts in excess of any particular place or any particular person, the no-where that is particular to no-one. The research submits that the task of those who claim the specularity of the Clinic, that is an audience from whom no-one is exempt, lies in extending the practice and the procedures that the irreducible question of a life harbors. Thus, the realisation of an architecture that claims the question of a life must also claim the dimensions of the Clinic, a scale that cannot overlook the unevidenced. The PhD will propagate the momentum of a single encounter between two architects - a letter from Howard Raggatt to Peter Corrigan - displacing the field of thought that gave rise to it in such a way that the interminable persistence of an unevidenced event - a building that takes flight in the image of an ocean liner - can never be held to account. Typifying this attempt to admit the unknowable will be an arsenal of lucid moves, uncanny conjunctions and casual assertions that will continuously avow the effusiveness by which the research sets out to meet the unmeetable. This method offers more than an alleged impractical epistemic impasse, a claim which would fail to realise that the very suggestion of unassailable proof; a demand to explain, excuse or account for instances of interpretive indecipherability remains untenable and is conditional on withdrawing from the question of a life. It is via the felicitous incisiveness of the prose, drawings and images that compose this research that an atemporal experience of an unaccountable experience will be perpetuated. A Clinic for the Exhausted is offered as an exemplary architecture amidst the mass of existence, an enveloping reticence that evokes the relations of those who remain nameless. (shrink)

Ethics deals with moral behavior in a professional context; ideally, it leads to a set of governing principles through which the appropriateness of any activity may be determined or assessed. Environmental ethics specifically deals with how humans interact with the biosphere. It is clear, however, that, as a species, we are failing in our duty of environmental stewardship. The encroachment of human activity into the natural environment is inexorable, and almost always deleterious. Any response to mitigate loss of taxa or (...) ecosystems will have economic implications, and these are often considerable. In finding effective solutions, a process soon becomes political. In light of this we must reflect upon the leadership role that biologists have, especially our impact on policy development that pertains to natural resource management. Although our track record is no worse than any other professional group, biologists by way of training usually have a greater understanding of natural processes and must be prepared to articulate these publically. We have an ethical mandate to question decisions, policies and legislation that impact negatively upon biological systems: a mandate guided through logic, grounded in empirical science, and hopefully coupled with a deep understanding of the true value of both the living world and the physical world which sustains it. This paper uses Australian examples to demonstrate the frequent clashes between economics and biology, in anticipation that we should strive to achieve the underlying principles of sustainability, environmental stewardship and resource management in both daily decision-making and in longterm planning. (shrink)

One thing an examination of the literature on youth work makes clear is a lack of clarity on youth work's purpose. This study investigated the value of using the concept of telos as an analytical tool to orient youth work towards the right ends. Relevant literature was systematically reviewed. The value of telos in understanding youth work was examined. Common aims of youth work were described. The merits of different goals were assessed to figure out which, if any, is youth (...) work's proper purpose. A telos would provide youth work a clear and cohesive definition, act as a useful guide for good practice, and distinguish youth work from other interventions into young people's lives. The case was made for the telos of youth work to be 'enabling young people to live the good life'. (shrink)

This paper takes the position of plurality and 'betweenness' in designing, to sharpen our perception for things that emerge in-between that cannot be grasped and thus, falls outside of consciousness. Attuning to this presence is important because designing is an exploration and articulation of concerns and understanding among people, and specifically in PD, involved in mediating sociomaterial relations. In order to articulate this 'between-ness', the paper borrows the notion of Ma in Japanese philosophy to attune into a way of sensing (...) the relational, processual and atmospheric. This notion is shared with the design community as a way to situate that we are, more often than not, working and designing 'between-ness'. (shrink)

This paper brings together two bodies of literature around knowledge management as enterprise integration and organisational ontology and epistemology as philosophy, in order to develop an extended KM approach to the development of bushfire preparedness material in the Australian context. Knowledge Management in enterprise integration practice manifests as process-centric electronic document and records management solutions. Knowledge creation and organisational epistemology is viewed as a social process, but this is often left unrepresented by KM processes. The body of literature on KM (...) tends to focus on organisational functionality and organisational KM that is based on EI ontology tends to be restricted by organisational functionality and process models. We argue that developing the KM-Model using subjectivist epistemology has a significant role in KM and organisational studies for emergency and disaster agencies. As part of the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre 'Effective Communication and Communities' project, bushfire communication materials were collected from all Australian States and Territories and analysed using NVivo, representing a knowledge base. Data sources including semi-structured interviews with bushfire agency staff and residents in bushfire-prone localities. Interview data was analysed using thematic analysis, and emergent themes were represented using UML as a platform independent representation of the extended knowledge domain that is capable of representation in a digital space. This work unites organisational ontology, organisational epistemology and EI; the different manifestations of KM. We theorise about how organisational epistemology itself forms as part of the knowledge, where currently there is a lacking of a satisfactory end-to-end framework. (shrink)

De Coubertin developed the sport philosophy of Olympism and the Olympic Games as a response to social and political crisis to promote peace, fair play, and the development of Christian masculinity. The purpose of this paper is to examine how crisis discourse functions as an important shaper of contemporary understandings of Olympism and how conflicting discourses have mobilized crisis discourse to produce competing 'truths' in which to rationalize and understand the Olympic Games. In drawing from Foucault's work and de Certeau's (...) text, Heterologies: Discourse on the other, I argue that 'crisis' as the rationalization for Olympism and the Olympic Games has proven an unsuccessful venture for de Coubertin; as the Olympic Games have produced conservative outcomes based on a neoliberal agenda focused on elitism, professionalism, nationalism, and commercialism. This historical case raises important questions about the role of Olympism and its power to act as a catalyst for change. (shrink)

Purpose : The purpose of this paper is to bring the concept of a 'hierarchy of action', as it is currently being used in other fields, into library and information science . Design/methodology/approach Hierarchy theory is adopted to describe three hierarchies of action, which include the human processes of semantic and social innovation, as well as a system of biological interpretence, from which human processes are thought to have evolved as a development of biosemiosis in nature. By way of example, (...) it is argued that a text is a complex achievement, and hierarchy theory shows how to account for this complexity; the everyday definition of text is augmented with accounts from different levels of observation. Findings: The concept of a hierarchy of action enables a person to account for a text as a meaning/symbolic product; include in that account the processes whereby texts are produced and used; and say why these processes are important to the health of the biosphere that is called home. Originality/value Hierarchy of action has been developed as a concept in biology and ecology; it belongs to a way of thinking whereby human reality, like nature, is construed as dynamical processes operating in symbiotic relationship with each other; it has not yet been adopted in LIS with reference to hierarchy theory and its potential is yet to be explored. Keywords Hierarchy theory, Complexity theory, Process philosophy, Natural philosophy, Hierarchies of action, Complex systems, Libraries, Information science Paper type Conceptual paper. (shrink)

This CD-ROM provides an advanced, state-of-the-art, international overview of, and springboard into, futures studies, and applied foresight. It is a resource for all who seek to understand and deal with a global outlook of unprecedented complexity and risk at every level.

The globalisation of engineering education and the mobility of today's graduates have led to a need to correlate engineering qualifications in different educational systems. Some effective benchmarking is achieved at annual engineering educators' conferences, which provide invaluable for the sharing of pedagogic methodologies and ideas. This sharing may result in fine (or coarse) tuning of existing degree programmes and, where necessary, bring them in line with successful overseas programmes. However, in most situations, there are few opportunities to demonstrate the success (...) of international benchmarking; this paper addresses this and provides an overview of a course on professional engineering ethics that is taught in three different countries, namely: New Zealand, Australia and Germany. The course has also been given exposure in China and has the potential to form the basis for a new programme there. The rationale for an ethics course in engineering is provided. Further, an outline of the way in which it is taught, including the use of a dedicated text, is discussed. Importantly (and unlike almost all other engineering courses), this course provides an opportunity for students to reach quite different, but nonetheless appropriate, conclusions about problem solving in engineering. Even more significant is the evaluation of outcomes, which, although potentially radically different, may not necessarily be incorrect. (shrink)

This paper points to some limitations of the narrow version of integral futures as represented in the recent special issue of Futures. I also propose several ways that the IF brand could be refreshed through a broader and deeper approach to integral futures by way of a scholarly engagement with other kindred discourses. The main focus of this paper is to open out beyond the 'myth-of-the-given' in relation to the notion of integral and in this way broaden and deepen possibilities (...) for integral futures. (shrink)

Professional engineering degrees that are endorsed through independent protocols,, must ensure that students are given sufficient background to enable them to practise in an ethically professional manner. Graduates are expected to have a full understanding of the pertinent code of ethics under which they can be expected to function as engineers. Further, they need to be able to appreciate the nuances involved in issues such as 'conflict of interest', sustainability, resource use, quadruple bottom line as well as 'good practice'. This (...) paper provides a review of the course Ethics and the Professional, currently being offered in four universities in three countries, that was established to directly address the need for professional ethics education. Over the last few years, student satisfaction surveys of this course have been undertaken in Australia, New Zealand and Germany; the results of these are provided herein. In addition to these assessments a further, novel approach, devised to assess the overall effectiveness of the professional ethics course is presented. This assessment provides a valuable tool through which we may monitor any apparent change in student attitudes that developed during the course. (shrink)

Therapeutic cloning is debated as a cure for a host of diseases in the developed world. The likely source for the materials for therapeutic cloning, human ova, would be poor women and women from the developing world. The ethics and potential social consequences inherent in this technology are fraught and encourage the com modification and abstraction of one of the fundamental conditions of human life.

This research explores the making of physical models as a design process where that act of making 'models for'1 design intention is itself a rich field of speculation. These models for design intention are different to the models of design intention as they are less a finished and singular object, and more an instrument for thinking. The aim of this research is to explore the qualities of models for design intention through an engagement with the landscape in order to understand (...) making as a transformative and emergent process of space, time, material, technique, and the role of the observer. Making for design, the model as idea, seeks to both test and provide opportunities for the convergence of forces and relationships to be created and emergent. Fundamental to this notion is an understanding that the act of making is itself a continual re-making process. The reciprocity invoked by this action engages a rich field of criteria which are potent because of their schizophrenic nature. This paper will discuss my research through a number of projects and esquisses that have been explored during the course of this research which demonstrate the development of my position of making as a continual re-making of space. (shrink)

I believe it is possible to tell stories through architecture. Indeed, it is my practice to create buildings that tell stories. It is important to build and elaborate connections between past and present, to tease out memories and discover meanings. These define and strengthen a sense of community - in this instance the very community of which I am a part. My oeuvre springs from cultural - even anecdotal - reference points, more than from the work of my architectural forebears (...) and compatriots. Other architects design through a creative interaction with their unconscious: they develop doodles and lines, and resolve them into ordered spatial environments. Instead, when I claim to design buildings that tell stories, I mean that I create a spatial identity that resonates with memories and unconscious associations. This entails the very deliberate ordering of spaces - external and internal - where cultural considerations and their associated meanings are developed from the outset, informing the whole design process. My materials are the traditional fabric of contemporary architecture. I use them to modify buildings and shape spaces to visual symbols, objects by association. My early work evolved in such a way that projects could be read as a illustrated story. I have more recently begun to engage in a more psychological 'place making' to conceive a building's form. The functional aspect of layout is always overlaid with visual imagery designed to evoke memories among the ordinary, mostly architecturally-illiterate people who use the buildings. I am continually challenged to create architectural forms that more effectively engage with the culture and traditions of people and place. But neither my architectural practice nor my designs can be termed 'traditional'. Here I seek to describe story-telling as an architectural form. Stories are my contextual framework for thinking. And story-telling is my way to connect buildings with people. (shrink)

Our three-year engagement with the RMIT Masters program has been an exploration in what we "do" and what our state of mind and operation is, to lead to a continued mastery in an expanding and evolving practice. Greater understanding of our strengths and weaknesses has allowed us to distance ourselves further from new projects and reflect upon the space these projects occupy within our framework of ideas and explorations. The platform we have built for moving forward is structured upon that (...) which already exists - primarily the collaboration between Gerard Reinmuth and Scott Balmforth - with a greater awareness of practice operative procedures to deal with "new" issues that we were confronted with during the Masters program, including; working outside collectives that encourage mastery with our exposure to new clients and managing practice scale which grew from a team of 15 to 25. Current office projects were used as exemplars of the presentation of our ideas and methodology and to seek critical comment on "what we do" and propositions to assist us in using our "state of mind" as a platform to further innovation. The projections on future practice that conclude our Masters program are of course therefore also projections as to how our collaboration can further yield new developments with the sharpness offered by the vision acquired during this Masters process. Any further "conclusions" would be anathema to the whole process we have undertaken - this document is the history of the practice and its projection. (shrink)

The PhD is concerned with the construction of site knowledge and how this is transformed into knowing where and how to intervene in a river system close to ecological collapse. It involves three overlapping topics: • Site knowledge and its impact upon the design process • Development of tools and techniques appropriate for working on a particular type of site condition: the threshold between land and water • Transitory: the impact of dynamic processes and events on inhabitation Site knowledge emerges (...) from a process of investigating a location. It is generated by on-site and off-site operations. This involves the architect in a dynamic set of relationships - between encounters on the ground in the here and now, with more remote encounters with the site from the studio and archive. This mode of site study amplifies the impact of scale shift and it exposes the variable and provisional status of a location, while also providing a way of operating in environments that can be considered dynamic. The PhD is premised upon the need for a work to relate to its surrounding environment. The hinged meaning between the terms a site and to site have relevance to the design process. A site, as a noun, suggests a specific place, such as a plot of land, whereas the verb to site, suggests that a work will be placed in relation to other things. Site knowledge is thus generated through the act of describing a place, through the act of making drawings and other descriptions of that place. It generates ways of conceptualising a site and leads to action: knowing how and where to intervene in a location. The River Murray provided a context for the project work of the PhD. Research led to tools for recording and interpreting the impacts of flood events on the settlements on the riverbanks that were protected by levees that worked against the natural forces of the system. The research culminated in a range of designs that demonstrated how to integrate town and tourist developments into the re-established cyclical flows necessary for the health of the system. (shrink)

The masters by research project was titled Inn Housing: The Delights of the Private Sector. It was a space for exploring my practice with the development of a conceptual piece about the shifting condition of the community housing produced in inner cities. The research aim was to develop an argument that inquired into the productive meaning of the application of glass walls on the city's housing façades; being these elements that represented a mode of living unknown to my experience and (...) that challenged the way I perceive the relation between the interior intimate and private space of the house with the public city. A confrontation with a different proposal of housing that gave me enough room to speculate about a significant change that may influence the treatment of the private-intimate space of the housing with the public realm. Since the importance acquired by the glass surface seems to encourage (or put emphasis) on the visual experience by way these hermetic façades visually link the interior space of the house with the exterior, exposing views of either one side or the other of the glass skin. Thus the central research questions raised by this research were: what might be the conception that has shaped this housing where the interior appears connected to the exterior through the glass façade? And significantly, does the visual relation with the glass potentially influences individual behaviour and therefore constitutes different modes for dwelling? The method involved in the development of my argument was primary based on a theoretical framework in conjunction with a practice: the construction of visual material that respond to the stimuli generated by the readings. Whereas the selection of theory and readings was based on the obvious need for material that could help me understand and develop certain aspects of my research, images were used to explore my own thinking responses in states of uncertainty, as these offer me a more clear access to my own thinking material once are projected outside my mind. (shrink)

This thesis examines the relationship between the practice of architectural design and the media through which it is represented. It makes a consistent critical appraisal of the philosophical presumptions under which architectural theory is made, in particular, the relationship between theories of expression and representation. The thesis presents seven distinct projects by the author which developmentally explore the degree to which architecture is able to represent the sublime - in particular through the concept of horror. In this instance horror emerges (...) as a category of excess that supervenes the uses of the term in the genres of film and literary studies. Within the thesis horror describes an objective for representation The thesis argues that the environment within which these philosophical questions of 'effect' may most resonantly be explored is, ultimately, digital media. The author draws on contemporary commentary by Jacques Derrida and Georges Bataille, in particular Derrida's discussion of the Parergon and contemporary discussion of l'informe, the informal to support these arguments. It is within the apparently 'real' environments of virtual reality that the presentation of the mise-en-scene of horror may be explored. Immersive digital environments, it is argued, provide an appropriate level of freedom and direction for the exploration of the spatial experience of the abyss. The thesis concludes by presenting observations on the antinomy of aspirations that any materialist theory of architectural practice must attend to when working within digital media. (shrink)

Our three-year engagement with the RMIT Masters program has been an exploration in what we "do" and what our state of mind and operation is, to lead to a continued mastery in an expanding and evolving practice. Greater understanding of our strengths and weaknesses has allowed us to distance ourselves further from new projects and reflect upon the space these projects occupy within our framework of ideas and explorations. The platform we have built for moving forward is structured upon that (...) which already exists - primarily the collaboration between Gerard Reinmuth and Scott Balmforth - with a greater awareness of practice operative procedures to deal with "new" issues that we were confronted with during the Masters program, including; working outside collectives that encourage mastery with our exposure to new clients and managing practice scale which grew from a team of 15 to 25. Current office projects were used as exemplars of the presentation of our ideas and methodology and to seek critical comment on "what we do" and propositions to assist us in using our "state of mind" as a platform to further innovation. The projections on future practice that conclude our Masters program are of course therefore also projections as to how our collaboration can further yield new developments with the sharpness offered by the vision acquired during this Masters process. Any further "conclusions" would be anathema to the whole process we have undertaken - this document is the history of the practice and its projection. (shrink)

This article is essentially a brief reflection on time in the context of Donna Haraway's recent work When Species Meet (2008), and in particular her rejection of Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'becoming animal' in their A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987). The exception Haraway takes to Deleuze and Guattari's approach to human-animal relations is considered as indicative of wider fissures in contemporary critical theory that have failed to respond to the global crisis of the sixth earth extinction event. (...) Yet there are also points of confluence in their respective positions that provide the potential for a more coherent politics of eco-critique. (shrink)

This article reports on a phenomenological study undertaken to explore the meaning of spiritual care as described by a group of palliative care professionals. The research process was informed by van Manen's (1990) hermeneutic phenomenological approach. Eight palliative care professionals (nurses, complementary therapists and pastoral carers) were recruited from a community palliative care agency in Melbourne, Victoria, which provided home-based palliative care. All participants were female and came from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Data were collected by in-depth conversational interviews and were (...) analyzed thematically. Two themes emerged: 'a living nexus between spiritual care, spirituality and holism' and 'a world of relationships'. The findings of the study point to the need for healthcare professionals to incorporate spiritual care guidelines into practice in order for palliative care to be truly representative of holistic health care. (shrink)

This paper acts as an introduction to the individual presentations in this collection and to their discourses of new possibilities for the humanities. The theme of communications and philosophy is a way of bringing together diverse reflections on disciplinary practices and their potential interrelations in a global world of radical pluralism. What I am seeking is the formation of a critical pedagogy of difference, which may find purchase in learning environments in the academy, but also has applications to wider domains (...) of the life-world with its political and personal exigencies, violences, needs, necessities, and possibilities. A key focus is the work of twentieth century continental philosophers and their textual encounters in the spaces between literature and philosophy, and ways of siting the as-yet-unseen in writing, experience and discourse. Nietzsche's thrust of questioning the idealism of progressive humanity is crucial to this discussion. Ultimately I am inviting a way of weaving threads of difference in a texture of communication to elicit a more critical awareness and response to the task of living in a global world of difference as a task for the new humanities. (shrink)

This PhD responds to a two fold problem with the philosophy of design and the practice of design. The philosophical problem is stated as the discrepancy between a dominant philosophical framework that orders the world according to eternal essences and the actual conditions of the world in which we exist: the conditions of becoming and of flux. Commencing with a critique of the western metaphysical tradition of statics this research project proposes that we need to find a way of describing (...) an evolutionary model of practice, and by so doing to provide a revitalised narration of process. Consequently, the PhD explores the meanings of process through a critical examination of an ensemble of projects created by the author. Within this framework, a number of questions are posed in order to explore the proposition of a process practice. These questions are: What is process? How does one think process? Indeed, how do we get to grasp change? What are the consequences of process thinking on the practices of design, their fields of operation, and their productions? And, how can the thematising of process contribute to the design of the constructed environment, as well as reconfigure the practices of design? This thematising of process is argued to involve a necessary address to the constitutive and interrelated characteristics of process: space/time, movement, change, form and matter. Such an address is also seen to problematise the status of the object, the paradigms of representation, the modes of creation, the economies of exchange, and the structures of community, and to offer a modality of practice which would re-imagine the forms of social exchange to offer an ethical alternative to the tyranny of supply and demand, and thereby reconfigure the potential for dwelling. Making an overview of the discourses and practices engaging with theories of becoming, this thesis argues that almost all of these re-inscribe statics and that consequently the practice of design seems to drag behind our understanding of the world. Through a meditation on dis/appearance, in which the dynamics of being and becoming and the restless ambiguity of the gap are examined, the work establishes a process vocabulary, and makes clear through a material practice, the domains of process thinking, its inclinations, and the kinds of operations and procedures that flourish there. Foregrounding the fertile character of process practice, the PhD then proceeds to introduce notions of the movement-form, the duration-form, the transformational-form, the geometry of encounter, and to argue for physical form as an in-movement poise. Advocating new modes of approach and of attentiveness, and demonstrating new generative methods, this PhD argues that process thinking is not simply an operational stance, but an ethical position that identifies a field of care, and that consequently the design practices be expanded by taking seriously the relationship between process thinking and place making. Thus, this thesis concludes by advocating a mode of place making which, rather than reproduce planned environments as systems of control, configures place as the discursive contested place of encounter and exchange. (shrink)

Constructed Isolation investigates the development of a collection of architectural devices and operations that respond to and have evolved from the specific nature of residential suburban Perth, Western Australia. These devices explore the potential for ambiguity to create space that transforms the occupant from being a passive observer into a dynamic participant. It collates a collection of projects by iredale pedersen hook architects and examines the devices under the thematic concerns of geometry, place, time and craft. The Masters Thesis identifies (...) the potential for Perth's geographic isolation to manifest as a positive construct, developing a unique architecture that opportunistically reinterprets past traditions to create individual environments. 'Constructed Isolation' is an ambitious idea where identity may begin with the individual dwelling and collectively evolve to create a constellation of considerable influence. It demonstrates how these devices may result in new propositions for suburbia, how big ideas with small-scale projects and a little irrational joyousness may contribute to or at least aspire to create change. These small projects will be viewed as a continuation of Perth's 'Heroic Period of Modernism', the fertile and ambitious but incomplete project from the 1950s and '60s. This will also focus on the development and change that occurred as a result of the reflective practice process, while identifying potential opportunities for the future. (shrink)

Towards a Poetics of Light; The Conceits of Light is a critical quest to map associations between rhetorical figures, psychological defences and spatial tropes in an attempt to conceive a poetic design that enacts conceit. Light is an emblem which echoes with an abundance of representations in literature, history, art and architecture and parallels may be drawn between their resemblances however apparently remote. Love, knowledge, hope and creative passion mark turns in the threads that knot ideas and their representations together. (...) Return of the Immortals, the final project in a series of works exploring these parallels and representations, gathers together a cascade of tropes to structure a spatial experience which culminates in The Conceits of Light. (shrink)

This research explores how human values and concerns are manifested and negotiated through the process of design. In undertaking this study, a variety of design interventions were explored to facilitate how values can be articulated and discussed amongst project stakeholders during the design process. These design interventions will be referred to as projects within the exegesis. In this exegesis, I will argue for the importance of a dialogic process among project stakeholders in the creation of a human-centred design practice in (...) communication design. This exegesis explains the central argument of the research and how the research questions were investigated. It presents a journey of the discoveries, learnings and knowledge gained through an inquiry of the research questions. The total submission for this research consists of the exegesis, exhibition and oral presentation. Through each mode of delivery I will share and illuminate how the research questions were investigated. (shrink)

This thesis explores the relationship between emancipatory politics and spirituality, and what this has to offer a critical postmodern approach to social work. At the centre of this thesis is a focus on forming a connection between critical postmodern social work theory and liberation spirituality. Liberation spirituality is a framework proposed by Joel Kovel which has at its heart connects emancipation and spirituality. My first chapter outlines my research approach. Chapter two explores the diversity and complexity of spiritual meanings, examines (...) the influence of the western context on spirituality, analyses the relationship between language and spirituality, and outlines my assumptions in relation to spirituality. Chapter three examines the historical and social context influencing social workers' engagement with spiritual issues. It also explores the engagement of current social work literature with issues of spirituality. Chapters four and five consider distinctions between critical social work in the modernist tradition, and critical postmodern social work. This establishes why critical postmodern social work approaches are more suited to engage with spiritual issues. The conceptual connection between critical postmodern social work and liberation spirituality is explored in chapter six and chapter seven. The latter in particular includes a detailed examination of the relationship between emancipatory politics and spirituality. The thesis concludes in chapter eight by analysing implications of this conceptual connection. (shrink)

This thesis proposes a re-conceptualisation of engineering practice that moves towards responding to the nature of our 21st Century (21C) predicament – the dynamic, turbulent, labyrinthine flux which has developed through the inhabitation of modern humanity in our open living world. It describes a philosophy and practices to achieve this. Key concepts are the context within which practice takes place and an integrated approach at the system level. Together these principles promote processes and practices that can design life situations which (...) are more desirable and feasible, not only for humanity but to strengthen our natural environment. This is active adaptive planning; it changes practitioners’ relationship with the world by providing spaces where the agenda is not “driven” by the “push” of the past but elicits the “pull” of future intentions. Using these approaches people are engaged collectively in processes that re-connect with context taking into account the relevant uncertainties across what are often articulated as “different” systems (e.g. social, environmental, technical) and between past, present, future. Further, it works the loops – performing ontological politics that is linking and knotting what emerges from these processes with all the potential stakeholders, mobilising resources, peers, allies and the public. The thesis identifies links between Socio-Technical Systems, Actor-Network Theory and process philosophy. This extends Actor-Network Theory which has already removed those intellectual constructs that disarticulated reality, focusing attention on practise, movement, the making and remaking of reality, or net-work-ing with the complex heterogeneous nature of agency. It envisages practitioners having an epistemology and ontology that is formed through being “out-and-about” in the world, making “translations”. Through embedding these ideas in the way engineers learn and in the processes that they use, engineering becomes a “putting through”, manoeuvring, dissolving boundaries, always being in action, moving towards sustaining with others, while recognising purpose, congruence and transforming as emergent properties. Through purposive imag(in)ing of different ways of sustainable doing and being integration can occur, reframing across methodology, epistemology, ontology and philosophy. (shrink)

The Act of Reflective Practice explores the manner in which three individuals, young architects, came together and the manner in which their inherent value systems inform and determine the way they produce architecture. The research offers a systematic distillation of the common value systems behind the individuals who comprise iredale pedersen hook architects, identifying the particularity of each practitioner in terms of their expertise, experience and character within the collective and the situations from which the individuals have emerged. The PhD (...) tracks the evolution of the practice and identification of its architecture through the RMIT Invitational Masters of Architecture by Project program and PhD by Project program, contextualizing the work through the establishment of a network of mentors and peers and ultimately locates the work locally, nationally and globally. When introduced to the idea of the 'Reflective Practitioner', the architecture of iredale pedersen hook has taken a significant evolutionary step where the three individuals have begun to operate in a more cohesive manner and the inherent value system and concerns behind the work are now able to inform the future direction of the architecture. The research also explores how this shift has expand the character of the work and transform the manner in which the architecture is conceived, described and ultimately produced. Through the PhD and the accompanying Masters by my two practice partners and collaborators, Adrian Iredale and Finn Pedersen, the primary concerns embedded within our work have been isolated and a systematic but qualitative method developed that may assess the impact of these concerns across a selection of iredale pedersen hook projects. The PhD defines a methodology, The Field of Concerns, by which the projects produced by iredale pedersen hook architects may be scrutinised and assessed in a qualitative framework, based on the agreed parameters and inherent value system underpinning the work. The definition of the Field of Concerns is critical in the ability to establish an identity for each project and place it within the evolutionary output of the practice. Subsequent testing of the projects against the Concerns through the creation of spider diagrams enables the establishment of a visual process for evaluating the success of the projects against the aims of the practice and can be applied throughout the design process and upon completion. Together, the process of clarification, the questioning of our ability to claim authorship, and presence of all partners in each project may offer a qualitative framework for other 'Self-Curating Collectives' to establish criteria for exploring the evolution of their work. (shrink)

This thesis examines how designs based on a conjunction between craft and digital techniques may offer new possibilities for an architect or designer in contemporary practice. How is it relevant that what initially appear to be two distinct approaches to designing and making can be introduced to each other and coalesce to form a constructive attitude of mutually borrowed logic? The thesis champions the crafting of innovative design and the incorporation of digitally derived procedures that allow for globally efficient dissemination (...) and malleability. Such procedures have occupied the practice of architecture and design for some time, giving rise to the current sobriquet of a 'post-digital age'. I propose that at this point in time we can usefully speculate on the relationship between physical making and computer-based production. Too often the stylistic overtures popularly attached to the terms 'digital' and 'craft' narrow our perception of what each term may encompass and how they are likely to manifest. Traditionally, digitally derived design practice is attributed the efficiency of a mathematically precise mode of operation - an oscillation between zeroes and ones that produces a universal logic of smoothly rendered forms. By contrast, 'craft' is often cast into the realm of amateurish making, complete with mistakes, dropped stitches, fingerprints or other traces of human fault that are understood as being charming in the context of handmade human endeavour yet fall short when measured against 'serious' artistic categories that include architecture, design and fine art. This thesis seeks to move beyond such accepted and somewhat polarised positions. First, the thesis offers clearer and more dynamic definitions of the terms 'craft' and 'digital', seeking the ability for each to hold fast to the inherent merits of their particular logic while also finding productive opportunities to integrate with each other. Second, the thesis examines how crafted production can combine with digital tools to offer a useful direction for contemporary design practice. Case studies of contemporary architects' and designers' works are drawn on to illustrate and make observations on the different relationships that the selected practitioners have discovered in their projects, all of which conjoin the conception and manifestation of digital craft. The case studies vary in scale from fabric and furniture production to large-scale installations of significant spatial effect, to entire architectural projects. The range is useful in discussing how the concept of digital craft in architecture can be re ad from various perspectives. This reflects the numerous ways in which digitally created design is used to realise crafted results and is mindful of the fact that architectural processes often follow technological innovation first practiced at more intimate scales such as in industrial design. It is also interesting to compare the idea of the more intimately scaled relationship that craft has traditionally held with architectural practice. Finally, the thesis will speculate upon future developments for the conjunction of digital craft in architecture and design, and will pose several questions for further discussion. (shrink)

What was once begun as research called LIFE has become the key component of my master's project. The meaning of LIFE has been redefined by a new landscape language. Living, infrastructure, traffic, shopping and eating identify the most common scenarios that are an intrinsic part of our daily lives. These are not exempt from the problems and difficulties characteristic of large cities like Shanghai. Landscape no longer focuses only on building parks or squares. In my project it has its own (...) definition that informs about how to create a sustainable space not only for public use but also for private use. The research into the different ways people live has assisted me in identifying the Longtang morphology -a living system that was very popular and successful in downtown Shanghai in the 30's. Longtang is a fast-disappearing architecture due to the urban expansion in older Shanghai. Nowadays people's living conditions have improved. The buildings are new and mostly high-rise, without the unique Longtang style- easy eating and shopping ¨C in the past and without the good neighborhood relationships and useful public space. However, Longtang's living style to some extent surpasses the modern high-rise living structure. This research acknowledges the success of LIFE as a balanced schema in Longtang. The space in a traditional Longtang is neither public nor private. Longtang residents concede and build on its spatial negotiations, as private space is very restricted. Transferring private space into public space is one of the most important rules people learn while living in the Longtang. And my research question concerning how Longtang urban morphology can be used as a tool in the development of Shanghai becomes my key point in studying the Longtang structure, especially the changeability of the Longtang space. The research also identified a need for public space in various scales. The provision of this space is not easy as Shanghai is a highly dense area. My project proposes the use of public space as private-testing the strategy at different scales. (shrink)

In psychoanalytic literature, psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott defines 'potential space' as the space between 'inner world' - creation of the unconscious fantasy, a private replica of the world and objects around us - and 'outer world' - the actual world, objects and people around us - where intimate relationships and creativity occur. Converged around spatial design and psychological concepts, and developing an understanding of the importance between both, I intend to explore the possibility of bringing the 'potential space' notion into the (...) constructed environment. Highlighting, thus, the human condition of architecture where the designer is not a separate entity from the built environment but an intimate part of it through the design process. This investigation concerns how a psychoanalytic approach can be used to establish a background research which provides a foundation from which new ways of understanding one's own design processes can be launched: a way of moving towards the design practice through a 'self' inner sense. (shrink)

The research covered quite a bit of territory with the simple objective - to 'break free' of the 'risk' of continuing architectural patterns in practice through and beyond mid career. On reflection I identified four stages within the history of my practice covering three disciplines; art, architecture and the political economies relation with urban geography. I was hoping to tie these together in a more coherent way and write reflectively to deepen those relations. I declined practicing architecture (late 2003-2006), inflamed (...) an old love affair with 'fine art' and curated sound-art events, designed art-theatre-performance works and installations, continued free-prose writings and visited specific Australian and aboriginal (continent) places and adjacent world destinations. I consolidated the 'art studio' within and returned to architectural practice by 2007. The dissertation about this 'episode of behavior' galvanised many insights into time and the illusive and expansive nature of deep-space. And engaged understanding death in an unusual and liberating way, which ran an exponential affirmation through and beyond life as we know it. Though abstract, these thoughts (and journeys) began to mould ideas for projects within an understood 'complexity'. This assisted my desire for 'the simplicity of elegance' - in everything, and specifically fortified arguments for a multivalent kind of architecture. (shrink)

The project presents processes of working with material fragments in the context of newly designed artefact examples to demonstrate a capacity to explore and apply the expressive potential of material within my design practice.

Principles of design composition are commonly understood to pertain to geometrical systems for arranging parts in assembling a formal whole. Connection to socio-cultural 'meaning' and relevance arguably occurs primarily via the assumed divinity or universality of these systems. In the contemporary architectural world, where explicitly held beliefs in fundamental, geometrically defined principles or values have dissipated, guiding principles of composition appear to be obsolete. This seems particularly true in relation to work that highlights process - or change, responsiveness, interactivity and (...) adaptability - since this implies that the composition remains in flux and unable to be grounded in the composition of form. While processually inflected architecture (referred to here as 'processual architecture'), has been an active field since at least the 1960s, it has been significa ntly developed since design experiments involving digital computation intensified in the 1990s. For this field of work, both highly celebrated and criticised as superficial or unethical, any connection to 'meaning' or value that might be offered by principles of composition would appear especially lost. This thesis reviews, counterpoises and reorients these assumptions, arguing a case for the value of processual architectural that has not been previously articulated. After the last 10 to 15 years of digital experimentation, it is clear that digital technology in itself is not the primary issue, but simply part of a complex equation. The thesis articulates this 'equation' through the model of emergence, which has been used in the field with increasing prominence in recent years. Through both practice-based research and theoretical development, a processually inflected theory of composition is proposed. This offers pathways through which the potential of processual architecture might be productively developed, aiming to open this field of work into a deeper engagement with pressing contemporary socio-political issues. The thesis demonstrates how the cultivation of particular modes of attention and engagement, found to hold an implicit but nevertheless amplified significance within processual architecture, make it possible to develop an embodied awareness pertaining to an 'ethico-aesthetic know-how'. This know-how is acquired and matured through attention to the affective dimensions that arise through design activity. The thesis highlight aspects of design process and products that are routinely suppressed in architectural discourse, generating new insights into the importance of affect for design process, design products and the relations between them. The ethical dimensions of such an approach become especially poignant through the explicit connection made between design activity and the practices of everyday life. Relationships between architecture and the social become re-energised, in a radically alternative manner to the social agendas of modernism or the more literary critiques of post-modernism. Through detailed discussions of the specific, local conditions with a series of design projects I have undertaken, I argue how and why close attention to the affective dimensions of design process offers new and productive ways to approach research through design practice. This offers a response to the calls for new 'post-critical' forms of research through empowering both sides of a previously held divide: theory and practice. (shrink)

Developing a new spatial model for generating poetic intelligence in response to the already constructed and degrading landscape. The thesis has a simple inquiry: what innovative architectural spatial models can be developed within, or in response to, the townships and degraded land located along the Perth-Kalgoorlie water pipeline in Western Australia, to help instigate a new poetic intelligence when considering architectural making that has a direct relationship with the landscape that it exists within? The thesis begins and ends with a (...) triad relationship between human perception, architectural idea making, and landscape: it begins with observation, engagement and recording and ends with a generative proposition. The thesis articulates how the complexities of a defined site can be recorded and modelled to bind disparate elements into being and therefore model more accurately the wholeness of perception that often drives architectural thinking. Commencing with the lens provided by the Perth-Kalgoorlie water pipeline, the thesis examines a domain in which architecture, landscape, and human action combine to activate our poetic intelligence. The thesis shows that we feel what we think we see, the visible power of man in nature and, the relentlessness of a middle distance that has been constructed around us. Through critical reflection a tremoring occurs, causing powerful new imaginings. The research attempts to visualise the new landscape and show that we help to degrade what we treasure. This moment or realisation can be framed as an aesthetic moment that causes us to think again. The research, formulated as a progressive, heightening of experience, leads the observer from Rambler's Gallery through commonplace territory pointing out observations along the way and then ultimately winds these commonplace observations together to construct a new presentation of the commonplace. The final exhibition announces a new spatial model for generating poetic intelligence in response to the already developed and degrading landscape. The exhibition creates a Speed_Space that posits and tests the essential theme of the research; it is an act of invention that creates new knowledge (the poetic intelligence). The common link between architecture and landscape in this thesis is that both are understood to have been significantly constructed by the human subject and, that this constructed landscape is a finite system and is all that we have. This thesis, through the evidence embodied in SPEED_SPACE offers a mechanism to demonstrate what gaining architectural experience is like; uncoiling into the world, observing, weakening, moving at the limit and then coiling up moments of experience, knowledge and perception to create a force of the imagination that generates new poetic intelligence as a result being in 'that' world. The new spatial model shows architectural experience, in response to the already constructed and degrading landscape, to be more like a self-made constellation acting as a force of imagination rather than a sequence of facts collected together. (shrink)

Herein lies the journey of change, from being a frustrated and isolated designer, to finding a connected practice expressing my personal values. Much was learnt on the journey regarding the nature of my practice and how it changed, about sustainability and what it means for my practice, tactics, framing and the recognition of a greater potential of my communication design practice beyond material considerations to becoming a device for connection leading to a more sustaining practice. This research is of value (...) to communication design practitioners wishing to move towards a more sustainable practice. It provides insight into the deeper issues of sustainability applied to communication design practice, a guide to important literature of the field, and some possibilities for an expanded form of communication design practice. (shrink)

Product innovation is vital to ongoing brand equity and has been responsible for revitalizing many brands, including Apple, Dunlop Volley, Mini, and Gucci. While several scholars have noted the relationship between a brand's position and the form of innovation available to a firm, surprisingly no study has sought to bridge this gap. This study aims to address this issue by, first, building a typology of the innovation practices underpinning differently positioned brands and, second, exploring the strategic and tactical implications of (...) different brand-related innovation efforts. In so doing, this study addresses a critical question: How do differently positioned brands organize their innovation efforts? A multiple case-study approach was used in this paper. Cases were sampled from a number of industries and across a range of different countries with a focus on business-to-consumer brands. Thirty-five interviews were conducted across 12 cases. The brands studied differed in their approach to innovation (incremental vs. radical) and in their relationship to the marketplace (market-driven and driving markets). These two dimensions result in four alternative ways of organizing the innovation effort to effectively reinforce the brand: (1) incremental and market driven (follower brands); (2) radical and market driven (category leader brands); (3) incremental and driving market (craft-design-driven brands); and (4) radical and driving markets (product leader brands). For follower brands, new product success is contingent upon the quality of the firm's marketing information systems and speed to market. Category leaders seek to dominate and appeal to the mass market with bold product initiatives. Craft-designer-driven brands aim to maintain an aura of authenticity, downplaying the commercial realities of their innovation efforts, while product leader brands seek to reaffirm their status as industry pioneers. This research contributes to the branding and new product development literature in several ways. It illustrates that differently positioned brands require the deployment of different firm capabilities and resources and a unique organizational philosophy to achieve new product success. The findings also enrich the brand extension literature through an examination of alternate bases, beyond that of product category, by which brand fit can be established. Finally, this research demonstrates how brand positioning can pose limitations on an industry leader's ability to respond to disruptive technologies. This study identifies that failed new products or brand extensions are driven by a mismatch between desired strategy and the capabilities necessary for achieving success (suggesting brand extensions are not as low risk as previously thought). As such, managers should carefully attend to brand perceptions when developing innovation strategies, particularly in relation to brand extensions. (shrink)

This study examines the piano teaching methodologies used to train final-year undergraduate performance students at four tertiary institutions in Hong Kong. As there is a hierarchical relationship among the philosophies, principles, and methodologies of teaching, this study discusses two chief areas of philosophy, five principles, and six aspects of teaching methodologies that were identified in the literature as being important in the teaching of piano performance. The philosophies include both philosophical ideas and philosophies that are derived from practical experience. The (...) philosophical ideas investigated include rationalism, empiricism, and pragmatism, and the philosophies derived from practical experience cover the issues of inculcating in students an abiding enjoyment and love of music; acknowledgement of the place of aesthetic education in the teaching of piano; recognition of the teacher’s and performer’s roles in transmitting to others musical knowledge, personal insights, and a significant expression of culture; ideally, the need for pianists to be well-balanced intellectually and emotionally and not narrowly focused; the importance of instilling in students a sense of humanity that goes beyond their role as a mere pianist and, ideally, gives them a world perspective. The five principles identified relating to the teaching of piano performance majors include: the need to nurture in students an ability to express emotions and ideas; the importance of pianists producing a considered and appropriate tonal quality; the importance of developing the imagination and nurturing creativity; recognizing the need for encouragement and stimulation in teaching; and committing to quality teaching. These ideas provide the foundation for the discussion of the methodologies of teaching piano performance, which is divided into the six aspects of technique, style, memorization, practicing, acute listening skills (or extending aural ability), and devising solutions to stage fright. The information in this research was collected from the four tertiary institutions in Hong Kong that offer a Bachelor degree in music. The participants included the heads of department, the teachers of final-year undergraduate piano performance students, and undergraduate students of piano. Case studies of the ten teachers’ are presented that include their philosophies, their principles, and the teaching methodologies that they used to teach technique, style, memorization, practice, and the development of aural ability, and to solve the problem of stage fright. The data from the heads of department, teachers, and students were analyzed, and the findings from this analysis are presented. Models of philosophies, principles, and methodologies of piano teaching are proposed, and recommendations are offered for teachers, students, and institutions to improve the quality of piano performance teaching. (shrink)

This article provides a biographical sketch of the Russian composer and educator D. B. Kabalevsky, a discussion of his philosophy of music and education, and an overview of his music for children. Kabalevsky's philosophy of education and music encompassed a wide range of ideas that were developed over his life-time. Central to his philosophy is the belief that music and the arts should be accessible to all children and, in turn, to all people.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the philosophy of the journal and present a summary of its content and how the various papers link to the journal's philosophy. The paper is a limited literature review to establish the journal's philosophy and linked description of the issue's content. This helps readers to understand the scope scale and expectations of reviewers with respect to papers to be submitted and also helps readers understand what kind of papers to expect in this (...) and future issues. As the first issue, this editorial establishes the themes to be expected and it outlines several innovations in the journal's format. (shrink)

Engaging the question 'what learning means', this paper opens thresholds of teaching to consider the political economy of subjectivity in the act of learning. This premise is more than acknowledging 'the teachable moment'; more than the assumptions of 'plural voices' in the pedagogical contract. This is about critically engaging with questions of subjectivity: such as, how do people become a learning subject and who initiates the shaping power of that political architecture? Drowned in the wash of humanist idealisms the significance (...) of the 'political' as a way of thinking is too often submerged. Foucault has dealt with the way human beings become subjects through discourses of power; Helene Cixous seeks a language whereby subjectivity can re-speak its ontological formations; and Laclau and Mouffe have argued for a 'radical pluralism' whereby aspects of validity and subjectivity are not to be impounded in the liberal, humanist, transcendental ground of the metaphysical subject. This discussion seeks alternative authorities for legitimating subjectivity that may displace scaffolds of the 'natural' in favour of the 'political' as an ethical point of departure and of arrival, and ultimately eschewing any pellucid returns to dominant assumptions. The research promotes alternative narratives of transgression which may at first sight appear inapposite. But are they? (shrink)