Transformations of Experience (Aesthetics, Technics, Perception) This course treats theory as inseparable from the larger patterns of organization that determine how humans relate to, and find accommodation with, the physical and temporal world around them. ‘Theory’ does not claim a mode of existence different from design itself. Theory is inherently neither critical (although it is often powerfully this) nor analytical (although, again, it often operates magnificently in this way) but is first and foremost creative—it is productive of new concepts, combinations and operations that expand the scope of how humans can imagine, interact with, and refashion both their world and in turn themselves. Just as design must not only seek to solve(problems), but also invent (new contexts and new ways to think and feel) so too theory must be speculative and must create. In our approach to theory we do not see two distinct practices, one applied to the other, but imagine both engaged in the mutual, historical act of re-imagining being. Similarly, theory and philosophy are not conceived of in this course as separate disciplines or practices: particularly when one considers the original philosophies, from which all subsequent human speculation ensued, that all sought to supply systematic accounts for the facts of nature. We hold that behind every design, just as behind every system of thought, there lurks a full-blown, if implicit, cosmology of relations. We take as self-evident that in our time, the problem of thought, as of design it to find new ways of understanding and imagining the operations of nature, both in relation to its own indifferent processes, as well as in those that pertain entirely to ‘us’. The natural world and the human world are physically and conceptually bound together. What matters today is how we conceive and gain access to the ‘physical’—and particularly how we account for the constitutive phenomena that operate both below and above this one-dimensional level of appearance. How much physical reality can be directly seen or felt, and how much requires special effort of thought and practical ruse (manipulation of the environment) to capture and harness? History is the history of these efforts and tactical devices. In each instance they are embedded in the wider system of organization that supplies the background of intelligibility for them. This is but another way of saying that our systems of knowledge at once participate in, limit and produce our physical and conceptual world. Thus the purpose of this course is to combine knowing and making into a single process, one that we will not hesitate to call ‘design’.  

Frequent participation, completion of an assignment related to the subject of the course.

It is strongly recommendend to follow the sequence of Problems in Knowledge and Design 1 and 2 in the intended order.

No registration required