Author: Brenda Laurel File Type: pdf Brenda Laurels Computers as Theatre revolutionized the field of human-computer interaction, offering ideas that inspired generations of interface and interaction designers-and continue to inspire them. Laurels insight was that effective interface design, like effective drama, must engage the user directly in an experience involving both thought and emotion. Her practical conclusion was that a users enjoyment must be a paramount design consideration, and this demands a deep awareness of dramatic theory and technique, both ancient and modern. Now, two decades later, Laurel has revised and revamped her influential work, reflecting back on enormous change and personal experience and forward toward emerging technologies and ideas that will transform human-computer interaction yet again. Beginning with a clear analysis of classical drama theory, Laurel explores new territory through the lens of dramatic structure and purpose. * Computers as Theatre, Second Edition, * is directed to a far wider audience, is written more simply and elegantly, is packed with new examples, and is replete with exciting andimportant new ideas. ul l This book l l Draws lessons from massively multiplayer online games and systems, social networks, and mobile devices with embedded sensors l l Integrates values-driven design as a key principle l l Integrates key ideas about virtual reality l l Covers new frontiers, including augmented reality, distributed and participatory sensing, interactive public installations and venues, and design for emergence l ul Once more, Brenda Laurel will help you see the connection between humans and computers as you never have before-and help you build interfaces and interactions that are pleasurably, joyously right! **

Author: Antoine Picon File Type: pdf Once condemned by Modernism and compared to a crime by Adolf Loos, ornament has made a spectacular return in contemporary architecture. This is typified by the works of well-known architects such as Herzog & de Meuron, Sauerbruch Hutton, Farshid Moussavi Architecture and OMA. There is no doubt that these new ornamental tendencies are inseparable from innovations in computer technology. The proliferation of developments in design software has enabled architects to experiment afresh with texture, colour, pattern and topology. Though inextricably linked with digital tools and culture, Antoine Picon argues that some significant traits in ornament persist from earlier Western architectural traditions. These he defines as the subjective the human interaction that ornament requires in both its production and its reception and the political. Contrary to the message conveyed by the founding fathers of modern architecture, traditional ornament was not meant only for pleasure. It conveyed vital information about the designation of buildings as well as about the rank of their owners. As such, it participated in the expression of social values, hierarchies and order. By bringing previous traditions in ornament under scrutiny, Picon makes us question the political issues at stake in todays ornamental revival. What does it tell us about present-day culture? Why are we presently so fearful of meaning in architecture? Could it be that by steering so vehemently away from symbolism, contemporary architecture is evading any explicit contribution to collective values? **About the Author Antoine Picon is the G Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology and Co-Director of Doctoral Programs at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). He is also Director of Research at Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees, Paris. He has published numerous books and articles mostly dealing with the complementary histories of architecture, science and technology, among which are French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1992 and 2009), Claude Perrault (16131688) ou la curiosite dun classique (Picard, 1988), LInvention de lIngenieur Moderne, LEcole des Ponts et Chaussees 17471851 (Presses de lEcole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees, 1992), La Ville Territoire des Cyborgs (LImprimeur, 1998), Les Saint-Simoniens Raison, Imaginaire, et Utopie (Belin, 2002), and Digital Culture in Architecture An Introduction for the Design Professions (Birkhauser, 2010).

Author: Achille Mbembe File Type: pdf In Critique of Black Reason eminent critic Achille Mbembe offers a capacious genealogy of the category of Blacknessfrom the Atlantic slave trade to the presentto critically reevaluate history, racism, and the future of humanity. Mbembe teases out the intellectual consequences of the reality that Europe is no longer the worlds center of gravity while mapping the relations among colonialism, slavery, and contemporary financial and extractive capital. Tracing the conjunction of Blackness with the biological fiction of race, he theorizes Black reason as the collection of discourses and practices that equated Blackness with the nonhuman in order to uphold forms of oppression. Mbembe powerfully argues that this equation of Blackness with the nonhuman will serve as the template for all new forms of exclusion. With Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe offers nothing less than a map of the world as it has been constituted through colonialism and racial thinking while providing the first glimpses of a more just future. **Review A captivating and simultaneously vexing mixture of historical lecture and political-philosophical manifesto. (Andreas Eckert Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) A very demanding yet incredibly powerful book. (Augsburger Allgemeine) Achille Mbembes Critique de la Raison Negre . . . [is] a book that you want to shout about from the rooftops, so that all your colleagues and friends will read it. My copy, only a few months old, is stuffed with paper markers at many intervals, suggesting the richness of analysis and description on nearly every page. . . . This is certainly one of the outstanding intellectual contributions to studies of empire, colonialism, racism, and human liberation in the last decade, perhaps decades. . . . A brilliant book. (Elaine Coburn Decolonization Indigeneity, Education & Society) Achille Mbembe is one of the paradoxical optimists who predict the worst without ever losing their faith in the future. . . . Admittedly, slavery has been abolished and colonialism is a thing of the past. But today new forms of alienation have arisen, the Other continues to be stigmatized, and the monster of capitalism reaches for its dream of an limitless horizon. An inevitability? Not necessarily, shoots back this thinker, who invites us to reimagine the geography of the world. (Maria Malagardis Liberation) A lucid, thoughtful and sometimes poetic work, with phrases you want to underline on every page. Mbembe is a voice that needs to be heard, in the current discussion about racism and immigration in Europe. (Peter Vermaas NRC Handelsblad) For me the most important African thinker today, Achille Mbembe has published the Critique of Black Reason. A very great book, encompassing the perspectives of the African continent as well as the political challenges facing the whole world. (Jean-Marie Durand Les inrockuptibles) Achille Mbembe has returned with a work that will surely prove provocative Critique of Black Reason. This nod to Kants philosophic classic is, however, devilishly well-chosen since this work speaks to the never-ending tendency to place Europe at the worlds center of gravity. Achille Mbembe . . . fights against established ideas and lazy thinking. (Am Magazine) [I]ncontrovertible reading on the complex dynamic between race and belonging in twenty-first century societies. Though global in reach, the work is primarily infused with insightful analysis and perspectives on the United States, South Africa, and France, spaces in which the historical legacies of slavery, apartheid, and colonialism remain of pertinence to this day, while also being locations in and from which, the author himself has gained particular familiarity as integral components of his intellectual journey and trajectory. . . . [B]rilliant and pioneering. . . . (Dominic Thomas Europe Now 2017-07-05) Critique of Black Reason constitutes an important move in bringing together francophone and anglophone postcolonial thought and is a timely demonstration of the re-invigorating potential of both critical thought and translation. (Hannah Grayson Postcolonial Text 2017-07-01) Critique of Black Reason is an illuminating and brilliant addition to Mbembes corpus. It is the kind of book, I suspect, that will become compulsory reading for undergraduate and graduate classes worldwide. (Manosa Nthunya The African Independent 2018-01-31) Review With Critique of Black Reason, Achille Mbembe reaffirms his position as one of the most original and significant thinkers of our times working out of Francophone traditions of anti-imperial and postcolonial criticism. His voyages in this book through a painstakingly assembled archive of empire, race, slavery, blackness, and liberationan archive that Mbembe both reconfigures and interrogates at the same timeproduce profound moments of reflection on the origin and nature of modernity and its mutations in the contemporary phase of global capital. A tour de force that will renew debates on capital, race, and freedom in todays world. (Dipesh Chakrabarty) Achille Mbembe speaks authoritatively for black life, addressing the whole world in an increasingly distinctive tone of voice. This long-anticipated book resounds with the embattled, southern predicament from which its precious shards of wisdom originate. There is nothing provincial about the philosophers history it articulates. Mbembe sketches the entangled genealogies of racism and black thought on their worldly travels from the barracoons and the slave ships, through countless insurgencies, into the vexed mechanisms of decolonization and then beyond them, into our own bleak and desperate circumstances. (Paul Gilroy) Achille Mbembe has placed the discourse of Africa squarely in the center of both postmodernism and continental philosophy. Every page of this signifying riff on Kants Critique of Pure Reason is a delight to read. African philosophy is currently enjoying a renaissance, and Mbembe is to its continental pole what Kwame Anthony Appiah is to its analytical pole. Every student of postmodernist theory should read this book. (Henry Louis Gates, Jr)

Author: Michael Pakaluk File Type: pdf Uncovering Aristotles motivations and basic views while paying careful attention to his arguments, this introduction to the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotles great masterpiece of moral philosophy, offers a thorough examination of the entire work. The chapter on friendship captures Aristotles doctrine with clarity and insight, and Michael Pakaluk develops original and compelling interpretations of the Function Argument, the Doctrine of the Mean, courage and other character virtues, Akrasia, and the two treatments of pleasure.Book DescriptionThis is an engaging and accessible introduction to Aristotles great masterpiece of moral philosophy. Michael Pakaluk gives original and compelling interpretations of the Function Argument, the Doctrine of the Mean, courage and other character virtues, Akrasia, and the two treatments of pleasure. There is also a useful section on how to read an Aristotelian text. This book will be invaluable for all student readers encountering one of the most important and influential works of Western philosophy. About the AuthorMichael Pakaluk is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Clark University, Massachusetts. He has published extensively in the history of philosophy, including Plato, Aquinas, Hume, and Reid, as well as in political philosophy.