Posts Tagged

ecology

Designing for Beauty, Sufficiency, and Collective Care – Part 2b: What is Solarpunk?

This is the second section in Part 2 of my recent grad school design paper in which I explore two contemporary, post-capitalist movements that have much to offer our creative endeavor to imagine a new, ecologically sensitive design story. Degrowth and solarpunk are neither finished experiments nor cautionary tales but living, still-unfolding proposals, argued over…

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Designing for Beauty, Sufficiency, and Collective Care – Part 1d: The Design Institutes of China

This is the fourth section in Part 1 of my recent grad school design paper in which I explore four laboratories of non-capitalist and postsocialist design. Please find the preceding sections below if you’d like to catch up: Introduction Part 1a: The Designed Object as Comrade in Constructivist Russia Part 1b: Advertising as Cultural Strategy…

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Use-Value Score Calculator: Notes On A Recent Grad School Project

I recently turned in two projects for a grad school class called Emerging Media, which is a graduate seminar that focuses on emerging technological advancements as they relate to the Communication Design industry and design-related fields. Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the “emerging technologies” the instructor introduced the class to was generative AI and for…

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The Judgement and Salvation of the Lone Star Tick: Mammals, Meat, and Non-Human Prophets

“The central theme in the prophecy of Joel, one of the 12 minor prophets (dōdekaprophēton), is that the Day of the Lord (yōm ădȏnay) is at hand (chs. 2–3). […] Joel utilizes the concept contextually for his contemporaries, using the locust swarms to point to the Day of the Lord as a day of both…

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The Manliest of All Rituals: Critical and Creative Nonviolent Reflections on Hunting

“The adoption of fixed settlements also created problems with regard to the status of women. When a hunter-gatherer people took up fixed settlement, in actual practice it pursued its livelihood through fishing or simple cultivation and herding, but it preserved the lifestyle that had existed in the hunter-gatherer phase. In sum, a division of labor…

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The Theo-Aesthetic World of William Morris: Introduction

This is the introduction to a paper on William Morris I am writing for a MFA class, the rough draft of which I recently submitted.  Introduction As generative AI floods our screens with astonishingly strange deepfakes and algorithms continue to commodify creativity, a quiet rebellion has been blooming: Gen Z “Luddites” ditch smartphones for flip…

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I Hate COPS Because I Love COPS

“As an occupation, policing necessarily involves people in a violent institution, demands they forfeit their freedom to a hierarchical chain of command and constraints imposed by their oath of office, and asks them to participate in an idolatrous view of the nation-state as the place where God’s action in history is primarily to be experienced…

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Nobody is spared from the logic of a mode of production built on exploitation: Tad Delay and the Future of Denial

“Nobody is spared from the logic of a mode of production built on exploitation. As Lacan put it, capitalism is the discourse or algorithm in which, instead of communicating to another person as a person, we are forced to negotiate through cloudy signifiers. We are workers relating to other workers in an environment mediated by…

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If a variety of nervous systems exist in nature, then what plants have is clearly one.

“Given what we know about the dynamics of sensing in creatures that have a brain, the lack of one should mean that any information generated from sensing ought to ripple meaninglessly through the plant body without producing more than a highly localize response. But it doesn’t. A tobacco plant touched in one place will experience…

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