Author: Andy Dong File Type: pdf The Language of Design Theory and Computation articulates the theory that there is a language of design. This theory claims that any language of design consists of a set of symbols, a set of relations between the symbols, features that key the expressiveness of symbols, and a set of reality producing information processing behaviors acting on the language. Drawing upon insights from computational language processing, the language of design is modeled computationally through latent semantic analysis (LSA), lexical chain analysis (LCA), and sentiment analysis (SA). The statistical co-occurrence of semantics (LSA), semantic relations (LCA), and semantic modifiers (SA) in design text are used to illustrate how the reality producing effect of language is itself an enactment of design. This insight leads to a new understanding of the connections between creative behaviors such as design and their linguistic properties. The computation of the language of design makes it possible to make direct measurements of creative behaviors which are distributed across social spaces and mediated through language. The book demonstrates how machine understanding of design texts based on computation over the language of design yields practical applications for design management such as modeling teamwork, characterizing the formation of a design concept, and understanding design rationale. The Language of Design Theory and Computation is a unique text for postgraduates and researchers studying design theory and management, and allied disciplines such as artificial intelligence, organizational behavior, and human factors and ergonomics.

Author: Gareth Fisher File Type: pdf From Comrades to Bodhisattvas is the first book-length study of Han Chinese Buddhism in post-Mao China. Using an ethnographic approach supported by over a decade of field research, it provides an intimate portrait of lay Buddhist practitioners in Beijing who have recently embraced a religion that they were once socialized to see as harmful superstition. The book focuses on the lively discourses and debates that take place among these new practitioners in an unused courtyard of a Beijing temple. In this non-monastic space, which shrinks each year as the temple authorities expand their commercial activities, laypersons gather to distribute and exchange Buddhist-themed media, listen to the fiery sermons of charismatic preachers, and seek solutions to personal moral crises. Applying recent theories in the anthropology of morality and ethics, Gareth Fisher argues that the practitioners are attracted to the courtyard as a place where they can find ethical resources to re-make both themselves and others in a rapidly changing nation that they believe lacks a coherent moral direction. Spurred on by the lessons of the preachers and the stories in the media they share, these courtyard practitioners inventively combine moral elements from Chinas recent Maoist past with Buddhist teachings on the workings of karma and the importance of universal compassion. Their aim is to articulate a moral antidote to what they see as blind obsession with consumption and wealth accumulation among twenty-first century Chinese. Often socially marginalized and sidelined from meaningful roles in Chinas new economy, these former communist comrades look to their new moral roles along a bodhisattva path to rebuild their self-worth. Each chapter focuses on a central trope in the courtyard practitioners projects to form new moral identities. The Chinese governments restrictions on the spread of religious teachings in urban areas curtail these practitioners ability to insert their moral visions into an emerging public sphere. Nevertheless, they succeed, at least partially, Fisher argues, in creating their own discursive space characterized by a morality of concern for fellow humans and animals and a recognition of the organizational abilities and pedagogical talents of its members that are unacknowledged in society at large. Moreover, as the later chapters of the book discuss, by writing, copying, and distributing Buddhist-themed materials, the practitioners participate in creating a religious network of fellow-Buddhists across the country, thereby forming a counter-cultural community within contemporary urban China. Highly readable and full of engaging descriptions of the real lives of practicing lay Buddhists in contemporary China, From Comrades to Bodhisattvas will interest specialists in Chinese Buddhism, anthropologists of contemporary Asia, and all scholars interested in the relationship between religion and cultural change. **