Rhetoric And Experience Architecture

Organizations value insights from reflexive, iterative processes of designing interactive environments that reflect user experience. “I really like this definition of experience architecture, which requires that we understand ecosystems of activity, rather than simply considering single-task scenarios.”—Donald Norman (The Design of Everyday Things)

Organizations value insights from reflexive, iterative processes of designing interactive environments that reflect user experience. “I really like this definition of experience architecture, which requires that we understand ecosystems of activity, rather than simply considering single-task scenarios.”—Donald Norman (The Design of Everyday Things)

Rhetoric has been broadly defined as the art of persuasion. Unfortunately, in the last two centuries, rhetoric has suffered a rather bad reputation because it has been deliberately overused to mislead and manipulate. However, the present argument claims that rhetoric is, above all, a method for creation, considering it as the study of the general relationships of unexpectedness for invention and persuasion. Since rhetoric was established in the early fifth century, it has been concerned almost solely with language, public speaking, and literature. The term "figure" (such as metaphor, antithesis, metonymy, among many others) refers to any device or pattern of language in which meaning or form is enhanced or changed. This study extrapolates to architecture and visual arts, what rhetoric does, which is not more than to put "things" together that have not been put together before, to create a new whole. Through the analysis of a large and heterogeneous group of art and architectural examples, this research constitutes a "proto-manual" of more than a hundred rhetorical tools and means by which architecture might be thought of, created, explained, and communicated. It reveals a particular methodology for the creation and communication of architecture and other visual disciplines beyond intuition and magic inspiration. This study attempts to explore the practical possibilities of application of rhetorical methods rather than to elaborate a comprehensive theory of rhetoric in the visual realm. Investigating the relationships among form, event, body, subject, matter and/or space, the study reflects on the spatial and social conventions, contradictions, and dislocations found in contemporary "everyday" life. Rhetorical figures are used as interrogative and critical tools to stimulate our social conscience and also to assist spectators' awareness of the challenges of our society.

Featuring roughly sixty specially commissioned essays by an international cast of leading rhetoric experts from North America, Europe, and Great Britain, the Handbook will offer readers a comprehensive topical and historical survey of the theory and practice of rhetoric from ancient Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages and Enlightenment up to the present day.

This collection offers a comprehensive overview of approaches to teaching the complex subject of content management. The 12 chapters define and explain content management and its accompanying competencies, providing teaching examples in areas including content strategy, topic-based writing, usability studies, and social media. The book covers tasks associated with content management such as analyzing audiences and using information architecture languages including XML and DITA. It highlights the communal aspects of content management, focusing on the work of writing stewardship and project management, and the characteristics of content management in global contexts. It concludes with a look to the future and the forces that shape content management today. The editor situates the collection within a pedagogical exigency, providing sound instructional approaches to teaching content management from a rhetorical perspective. The book is an essential resource for both instructors new to teaching technical and professional communication, and experienced instructors who are interested in upgrading their pedagogies to include content management.

The design arts -- from the design of buildings and machines to software and interfaces -- are associated with types of knowledge and performance thought to be structured, modular, and systematic. Such arts have become increasingly prestigious in our technocratic society. Since Aristotle, the art of rhetoric was conceived as a loosely structured "practical" art thought to be limited in the extent to which it could mimic more precise subject matters. The art of rhetoric has been controversial since classical times, but its status has sunk even lower since the industrial revolution -- a point when civic cultures began to cede authority and control to the cultures of specialized experts. Many sympathizers of rhetoric have resisted its decline by calling for a civic art of public discourse to stand in opposition to a technocratic specialized discourse that has come, increasingly, to disenfranchise the ordinary citizen. This is the first book to question the rhetoric/technical knowledge split from a more fundamental perspective. To get some perspective on what is at stake in rhetoric's traditional classification as a "practical" art, the authors: * explore the distinction between practical and design arts; * enumerate the various criteria cited in the literature for qualifying a cluster of knowledge and performative skills to count as an art of design; * show how the knowledge and performative skills associated with the art of rhetoric meet the major requirements of design knowledge; * propose a general architecture of rhetorical design, one descriptive both of civic address and specialized academic argument; * turn to the Lincoln/Douglas debates to embody and provide some empirical support and illustration for their architecture; * demonstrate how Lincoln and Douglas can be thought of as expert designers whose rhetoric is highly structured and modular; and * explain how the rhetoric of both rhetorical agents can be represented in the layers and modules that one needs to display plans for buildings, software, or other design artifacts. These layers and modules are not just post hoc annotations of the debates; they also illuminate new and systematic ways for viewing the debates -- and by implication, other specimens of rhetoric -- in terms of strategies of artistic production. Kaufer and Butler conclude their presentation by citing some of the research and educational implications that follow from housing rhetoric within the family of design arts.

This volume is a timely intervention that not only helps demystify the idea of a digital dissertation for students and their advisors, but will be broadly applicable to the work of librarians, administrators, and anyone else concerned with the future of graduate study in the humanities and digital scholarly publishing. Roxanne Shirazi, The City University of New York Digital dissertations have been a part of academic research for years now, yet there are still many questions surrounding their processes. Are interactive dissertations significantly different from their paper-based counterparts? What are the effects of digital projects on doctoral education? How does one choose and defend a digital dissertation? This book explores the wider implications of digital scholarship across institutional, geographic, and disciplinary divides. The volume is arranged in two sections: the first, written by senior scholars, addresses conceptual concerns regarding the direction and assessment of digital dissertations in the broader context of doctoral education. The second section consists of case studies by PhD students whose research resulted in a natively digital dissertation that they have successfully defended. These early-career researchers have been selected to represent a range of disciplines and institutions. Despite the profound effect of incorporated digital tools on dissertations, the literature concerning them is limited. This volume aims to provide a fresh, up-to-date view on the digital dissertation, considering the newest technological advances. It is especially relevant in the European context where digital dissertations, mostly in arts-based research, are more popular. Shaping the Digital Dissertation aims to provide insights, precedents and best practices to graduate students, doctoral advisors, institutional agents, and dissertation committees. As digital dissertations have a potential impact on the state of research as a whole, this edited collection will be a useful resource for the wider academic community and anyone interested in the future of doctoral studies.

Social Media in Disaster Response focuses on how emerging social web tools provide researchers and practitioners with new opportunities to address disaster communication and information design for participatory cultures. Both groups, however, currently lack research toolkits for tracing participant networks across systems; there is little understanding of how to design not just for individual social web sites, but how to design across multiple systems. Given the volatile political and ecological climate we are currently living in, the practicality of understanding how people communicate during disasters is important both for those researching solutions and for those putting that research into practice. Social Media in Disaster Response addresses this situation by presenting the results of a large-scale sociotechnical usability study on crisis communication in the vernacular related to recent natural and human-made crisis; this is an analysis of the way social web applications are transformed, by participants, into a critical information infrastructure in moments of crisis. This book provides researchers with methods, tools, and examples for researching and analyzing these communication systems while providing practitioners with design methods and information about these participatory communities to assist them in influencing the design and structure of these communication systems.