Ontological Branding

Using Heideggerian tool ontology to investigate antiblack racism in the United States, Ontological Branding: Power, Privilege, and White Supremacy in a Colorblind World provides a novel account of race and racial justice. Bonard Iván Molina García argues that race is best understood as a tool to brand persons of color, particularly Black persons, as subordinate in order to privilege whiteness as the proper state of persons in a world created by and for persons and in which all (and only) persons are equal. Persons of color, particularly Black persons, are thus excluded from full participation in the rights and privileges of personhood and instead relegated to ways of being in service to the white world. This white supremacist system was created through law, and despite significant changes, U.S. law’s current approach to racial justice through colorblindness only serves to safeguard white supremacy. Racial justice instead requires a critical race consciousness that accounts for the ontology of race. Racial justice requires ontological justice.

Exploring current issues in brand management, this book fills a niche in the burgeoning cache of branding literature with a distinctive managerially and theoretically informed perspective on the cultural dimensions of branding.

"The focus of this book is on information and communication sciences, computer science, and artificial intelligence and provides readers with access to the latest knowledge related to design, modeling and implementation of ontologies"--Provided by publisher.

Semantic Web technologies enable people to create data stores on the Web, build vocabularies, and write rules for handling data. They have been in use for several years now, and knowledge extraction and knowledge discovery are two key aspects investigated in a number of research fields which can potentially benefit from the application of semantic web technologies, and specifically from the development and reuse of ontologies. This book, Applications and Practices in Ontology Design, Extraction, and Reasoning, has as its main goal the provision of an overview of application fields for semantic web technologies. In particular, it investigates how state-of-the-art formal languages, models, methods, and applications of semantic web technologies reframe research questions and approaches in a number of research fields. The book also aims to showcase practical tools and background knowledge for the building and querying of ontologies. The first part of the book presents the state-of-the-art of ontology design, applications and practices in a number of communities, and in doing so it provides an overview of the latest approaches and techniques for building and reusing ontologies according to domain-dependent and independent requirements. Once the data is represented according to ontologies, it is important to be able to query and reason about them, also in the presence of uncertainty, vagueness and probabilities. The second part of the book covers some of the latest advances in the fields of ontology, semantics and reasoning, without losing sight of the book’s practical goals.

This book seeks to establish the meaning of design research, its role in the field, and the characteristics that differentiate research in design from research in other fields. The author introduces a model to explain the relationship between the components of the ontological reality of design: the designed object, the designer, and the user. Addressing design research across disciplines, the author establishes a foundational understanding of research, and research paradigms, for the design disciplines. This will be crucial for the emerging field of design research to find its own identity and move forward, building its own knowledge base as it finds its positioning between science and art. The book will be of interest to scholars working in design history, design studies, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, architecture, fashion design, and service design.

In Designs for the Pluriverse Arturo Escobar presents a new vision of design theory and practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth. Noting that most design—from consumer goods and digital technologies to built environments—currently serves capitalist ends, Escobar argues for the development of an “autonomous design” that eschews commercial and modernizing aims in favor of more collaborative and placed-based approaches. Such design attends to questions of environment, experience, and politics while focusing on the production of human experience based on the radical interdependence of all beings. Mapping autonomous design’s principles to the history of decolonial efforts of indigenous and Afro-descended people in Latin America, Escobar shows how refiguring current design practices could lead to the creation of more just and sustainable social orders.

This book makes a significant contribution to advancing post-geographic understandings of physical and virtual boundaries. It brings together the emergent theory of ‘border thinking’ with innovative thinking on design, and explores the recent discourse on decoloniality and globalism. From a variety of viewpoints, the topics engaged show how design was historically embedded in the structures of colonial imposition, and how it is implicated in more contemporary settings in the extension of ‘epistemological colonialism’. The essays draw on perspectives from diverse geo-cultural and theoretical positions including architecture, design theory and history, sociology, critical theory and cultural studies. The authors are leading and emergent figures in their fields of study and practice, and the geographic scope of the chapters ranges across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South America, Asia, and the Pacific. In recognition of the complexity of challenges that are now determining the future security of humanity, Design in the Borderlands aims to contribute to ‘thinking futures’ by adding to the increasingly significant debate between design, in the context of the history of Western modernity, and decolonial thought.

Successful educational programs are often the result of pragmatic design and development methodologies that take into account all aspects of the educational and instructional experience. Instructional Design: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools and Applications presents a complete overview of historical perspectives, new methods and applications, and models in instructional design research and development. This three-volume work covers all fundamental strategies and theories and encourages continued research in strengthening the consistent design and reliable results of educational programs and models.