essays and ideas from Eliza Sarobhasa
Pixel to Product is a research study of the Canadian digital media industry. Its purpose is to put real and actionable numbers towards an industry whose size and scope isn’t clearly understood.
via Pixel to Product: A report on Canada’s digital media economy.
if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.
via Does Your Language Shape How You Think? – NYTimes.com.
Continue reading “Does Your Language Shape How You Think? – NYTimes.com”
This approach examines how the elements of language relate to each other in the present, synchronically rather than diachronically.
Structuralism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
In Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (written by Saussure’s colleagues after his death and based on student notes), the analysis focuses not on the use of language (called “parole,” or speech), but rather on the underlying system of language (called “langue”).
This approach examines how the elements of language relate to each other in the present, synchronically rather than diachronically. Saussure argued that linguistic signs were composed of two parts, a “signifier” (the “sound pattern” of a word, either in mental projection—as when we silently recite lines from a poem to ourselves—or in actual, physical realization as part of a speech act) and a “signified” (the concept or meaning of the word).
This book provides a comprehensive manual for designers on what design research is, why it is necessary, how to do research, and how to apply it to design work.
Doing research can make all the difference between a great design and a good design.
Most experienced designers would quantify this “legwork” with the term research. By engaging in competitive intelligence, customer profiling, color and trend forecasting, etc., designers are able to bring something to the table that reflects a commercial value for the client beyond a well-crafted logo or brochure. Although scientific and analytical in nature, research is the basis of all good design work.
This book provides a comprehensive manual for designers on what design research is, why it is necessary, how to do research, and how to apply it to design work.
As designers embrace research methodologies, they share a common vernacular with their clients, and establish respect as idea people. In an increasingly crowded marketplace, embracing research practices will ensure a continued viable role for designers in business.
Structuralists view society and its rules as expressions of deep structures, often binary codes, that express our primary natures.
structuralism: art as not autonomous.
Structuralists view society and its rules as expressions of deep structures, often binary codes, that express our primary natures. A systematic study of such codes is semiotics, which was later hijacked by Poststructuralists as evidence that language alone provides a true reality.
Biorobotics – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Biorobotics is a term that loosely covers the fields of cybernetics, bionics and even genetic engineering as a collective study.
Biorobotics is often used to refer to a real subfield of robotics: studying how to make robots that emulate or simulate living biological organisms mechanically or even chemically. The term is also used in a reverse definition: making biological organisms as manipulatable and functional as robots, or making biological organisms as components of robots.
In the latter sense biorobotics can be referred to as a theoretical discipline of comprehensive genetic engineering in which organisms are created and designed by artificial means. The creation of life from non-living matter for example, would be biorobotics. The field is in its infancy and is sometimes known as synthetic biology or bionanotechnology.
In fiction, the robots featured in Rossum’s Universal Robots, the play that originally coined the term, are presented as artificial biological entities closer to biorobotics than the mechanical objects that the term came to refer to. The replicants in the film Blade Runner would be considered biorobotic in nature: (synthetic) organisms of living tissue and cells yet created artificially. Instead of microchips, their brain is based on ganglions/artificial neurons.
via Ship of Theseus – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus’ paradox, or various variants, notably grandfather’s axe and (in the UK) Trigger’s Broom (based upon the BBC sitcom Only Fools and Horses) is a paradox that raises the question of whether an object which has had all its component parts replaced remains fundamentally the same object.
The paradox is most notably recorded by Plutarch in Life of Theseus from the late 1st century. Plutarch asked whether a ship which was restored by replacing all its wooden parts remained the same ship.
The paradox had been discussed by more ancient philosophers such as Heraclitus, Socrates, and Plato prior to Plutarch’s writings; and more recently by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. This problem is “a model for the philosophers”; some say “it remained the same, some saying it did not remain the same”