Review and Reflect
Humanities as Hermeneutic: A Method for Understanding Multiple Fields and Perspectives View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andrea Feldman
One Arabic-speaking student from the UAE described an image of a parent giving pieces of a puzzle to a child and interpreted the image as meaning that parents always give everything of themselves to their child. An English-speaking American student saw the same image and thought that the puzzle represented how hard it is for parents to give advice to their child. The way we process visual information is reflected in the way we speak. Likewise, our perception of the world is highly influenced by our language. Because students learn and perceive the world in diverse ways, all students can benefit from multiple ways of presenting information. We can’t assume all students come from a common background with common understandings of how to access information. In the classroom, we need to attend to how we highlight critical concepts and emphasize major points of inquiry, engage background knowledge, and provide models for writing. A case study in the humanities can serve as a method for understanding multiple fields and perspectives. Following the approaches used in art history, students first describe a piece of artwork or visual representation in detail. Next the image is deconstructed to analyze its meaning from the student’s perspective. The students then reflect on the significance of the artwork as applied to their own lives. By embracing and leveraging the unique blend of experiences and knowledge that each student brings into the classroom, we can better ensure that all learners benefit from new insights and a welcoming environment.
Design Thinking: Revitalizing Knowledge Making in the Humanities View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rolf Norgaard
Even as we question received cartographies of knowledge and the maps of disciplinary fields, we would do well to ask about not just the shape of what we know or even its geneology, but also and perhaps more fundamentally, about the process of coming to know. This paper engages design thinking and explores its potential to revitalize knowledge making in the humanities. The point of departure for this paper is a common definition of design thinking: the human-centered, empathy-driven process of imagining, creating, testing, and revising responses to critical, highly contextual, dynamic, and messy problems. It is a way of problem framing and solving that values empathy with audiences and users, radical collaboration, ambiguity, a bias toward action, productive failure, iteration, and regular feedback. This paper (1) unpacks key concepts and terms in this definition, (2) suggests practical ways of implementing design thinking in both humanities research and pedagogy, and (3) explores how design thinking resonates with other development in the humanities—from Deleuze’s rhizomic network of multiplicities, to John Dewey’s experiential learning, the maker-space movement, situated cognition, and the generative role of craft knowledge (techne). In so doing this study questions a fundamental presupposition: that knowledge consists in its mapping, and can be stored in an archive. We would do well to consider how knowledge can also lie in its making, that doing and knowing are fundamentally related. After all, cartographies of knowledge have their source in voyages of discovery—a voyage that design thinking can help guide.
How Technology Got a Surface: The Creation of Planned Obsolescence in an Age of Technological Detachment View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jason Farman
In 1953, industrial designer, Brooks Stevens, coined a term that has become a touchstone for contemporary technological life: planned obsolescence. From his perspective as someone hired by companies to modernize their technologies — from tractors to clothes irons, from automobiles to ovens — his work sought to create the desire in consumers to “own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary,” as he phrased it. This paper explores how the designs of our technologies became fundamentally defined by a desire for the new, as represented in the glossy surface that removes us from a sense of the inner workings of these technologies. This study traces this shift across design history, the Constructivism movement in art history, and consumer culture from the annual model change for automobiles (introduced in the 1920s) through the annual model change of the iPhone. By following the shifts in design and consumer desire, this project points to the negative impact these designs have had on our intimate connection with devices and how they work, and traces a history of planned obsolescence and disposability that have come to define our current (and unsustainable) approach to tech purchasing behaviors. This paper argues that our lack of embodied connection to the inner workings of our technologies, which has been replaced by glossy surfaces, has created a technological and infrastructural illiteracy. As a result, we tend to discard and upgrade instead of being cultures that fix, repair, and maintain.
