Author Archives: Jeff Watson

“We might frame the question this way: does the need for the ground-level agreement of participants pull social artworks towards a uniformly positivistic or even utopian tone? If participation is furthered by honesty, fairness, giving, and helping, does this prevent … Continue reading →

“Culture in all its early uses was a noun of process: the tending of something, basically crops or animals. The subsidiary coulter — ploughshare, had travelled by a different linguistic route, from culter, L — ploughshare, culter, OE, to the … Continue reading →

“Popular was originally a legal and political term, from popularis, L-belonging to the people. An action popular, from C15, was a legal suit which it was open to anyone to begin. Popular estate and popular government, from C16, referred to … Continue reading →

“From a first-person point of view, intersubjectivity comes in when we undergo acts of empathy. Intersubjective experience is empathic experience; it occurs in the course of our conscious attribution of intentional acts to other subjects, in the course of which … Continue reading →

“This, and much more, she accepted – for after all living did mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case – mere possibilities of improvement. She thought of the endless waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have to watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, as the monstrous darkness approaches.”

– Vladimir Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” Continue reading →

“Last year, the futurologist Stuart Candy visited the department and showed us a wonderful diagram he used to clarify how we think about futures. Rather than one amorphous space of futureness it was divided into Probable, Preferable, Plausible and Possible futures. One of the most interesting zones was Preferable. Of course the very definition of preferable is problematic — who decides? But, although designers shouldn’t decide for everyone else, we can play a significant role in discovering what is and what isn’t desirable.”

– Design Interactions→Introduction Continue reading →