Designing Boundaries In Early China

Explores how sovereign space in early China was imagined and negotiated in the ancient world.

"This is the first English-language monograph on the early history of cartography in China. Its chief players are three maps found in tombs that date from the fourth to the second century BCE and together constitute the entire known corpus of ancient Chinese maps (ditu). A millennium separates them from the next available map from 1136 CE. Most scholars study them through the lens of modern, empirical definitions of maps and their use. This book offers an alternative view by drawing on methods not just from cartography but from art history, archaeology, and religion. It argues that, as tomb objects, the maps were designed to be simultaneously functional for the living and the dead-that each map was drawn to serve navigational purposes of guiding the living from one town to another as well as to diagram ritual order, thereby taming the unknown territory of the dead. In contrast with traditional scholarship, The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams in Early China proposes that ditu can "speak" through their forms. Departing from dominant theories of representation that forge a narrow path from form to meaning, the book braids together two main strands of argumentation to explore the multifaceted and multifunctional diagrammatic tradition of rendering space in early China"--

This book presents over 100 papers from the 3rd Engineering & Product Design Education International Conference dedicated to the subject of exploring novel approaches in product design education. The theme of the book is "Crossing Design Boundaries" which reflects the editors’ wish to incorporate many of the disciplines associated with, and integral to, modern product design and development pursuits. Crossing Design Boundaries covers, for example, the conjunction of anthropology and design, the psychology of design products, the application of soft computing in wearable products, and the utilisation of new media and design and how these can be best exploited within the current product design arena. The book includes discussions concerning product design education and the cross-over into other well established design disciplines such as interaction design, jewellery design, furniture design, and exhibition design which have been somewhat under represented in recent years. The book comprises a number of sections containing papers which cover highly topical and relevant issues including Design Curriculum Development, Interdisciplinarity, Design Collaboration and Team Working, Philosophies of Design Education, Design Knowledge, New Materials and New Technologies in Design, Design Communication, Industrial Collaborations and Working with Industry, Teaching and Learning Tools, and Design Theory.

This volume is distinctive for its extraordinarily interdisciplinary investigations into a little discussed topic, the spatial imagination. It probes the exercise of the spatial imagination in pre-modern China across five general areas: pictorial representation, literary description, cartographic mappings, and the intertwining of heavenly and earthly space. It recommends that the spatial imagination in the pre-modern world cannot adequately be captured using a linear, militarily framed conceptualization. The scope and varying perspectives on the spatial imagination analyzed in the volume’s essays reveal a complex range of aspects that informs how space was designed and utilized. Due to the complexity and advanced scholarly level of the papers, the primary readership will be other scholars and advanced graduate students in history, history of science, geography, art history, religious studies, literature, and, broadly, sinology.

This authoritative Encyclopedia provides an innovative approach to theory, reviews, applications and examples relevant to the basic concepts of water science and water management issues in order to facilitate better interdisciplinary cooperation.

Chinese pottery has long been esteemed not only for its beauty and delicacy but also for the utility and efficiency evident in the potter's skill.

An internationally acclaimed expert explains why Chinese-style architecture has remained so consistent for two thousand years, no matter where it is built. For the last two millennia, an overwhelming number of Chinese buildings have been elevated on platforms, supported by pillars, and covered by ceramic-tile roofs. Less obvious features, like the brackets connecting the pillars to roof frames, also have been remarkably constant. What makes the shared features more significant, however, is that they are present in Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, and Islamic milieus; residential, funerary, and garden structures; in Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and elsewhere. How did Chinese-style architecture maintain such standardization for so long, even beyond China’s borders? Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt examines the essential features of Chinese architecture and its global transmission and translation from the predynastic age to the eighteenth century. Across myriad political, social, and cultural contexts within China and throughout East Asia, certain design and construction principles endured. Builders never abandoned perishable wood in favor of more permanent building materials, even though Chinese engineers knew how to make brick and stone structures in the last millennium BCE. Chinese architecture the world over is also distinctive in that it was invariably accomplished by anonymous craftsmen. And Chinese buildings held consistently to the plan of the four-sided enclosure, which both afforded privacy and differentiated sacred interior space from an exterior understood as the sphere of profane activity. Finally, Chinese-style buildings have always and everywhere been organized along straight lines. Taking note of these and other fascinating uniformities, The Borders of Chinese Architecture offers an accessible and authoritative overview of a tradition studiously preserved across time and space.

Designing Gamified Systems is a fundamental guide for building essential skills in game and interaction design to revitalize and reimagine real world systems – from cities and corporations to schools and the military. Author Sari Gilbert develops a set of core principles and tools for using game thinking and interactive design to build motivation, explain hard concepts, broaden audiences, deepen commitments and enhance human relationships. Designing Gamified Systems includes: Topics such as gamified system design, behavioral psychology, marketing, business strategy, learning theory and instructional design Interviews with leaders and practitioners in this emerging field who explain how the job of the game designer is being redefined Exercises designed to both encourage big-picture thinking about gamified systems and help you experience and understand the challenges and nuances involved in designing them A companion website (www.gamifiedsystems.com) with additional materials to supplement learning and practice