Situated Objects

Stan Allen is an architect and educator who has won global acclaim, primarily for his work in town planning and his influential 1996 essay "Field Conditions." His new book Situated Objects shows a unique facet of his creative process: a selection of small buildings and projects on rural sites, most of them situated within the landscape of the Hudson Valley, New York. They demonstrate an approach to architecture that engages in a dialogue with this partly wild and wholly non-urban environment that lies just outside the gates of New York City. The projects are presented in drawings and a rich array of images by celebrated photographer Scott Benedict. They are arranged in three thematic categories: Outbuildings, Material Histories, and New Natures, supplemented by the architect's writings and essays contributed by Helen Thomas and Jesús Vassallo. The first book on Stan Allen's buildings, Situated Objects highlights Allen's personal engagement with American material traditions, the conventions of architectural drawing, and the challenge of building with nature.

The dramatic acceleration of digital technologies and their integration into physical products is transforming everyday objects. Our domestic appliances, furniture, clothing, are growing in intelligence. Smart objects are increasingly capable of interacting with humans in a purposeful manner with intentionality. This collection of essays, descriptions of empirical work, and design case studies brings together perspectives from interaction design, the humanities, science and technology studies, and engineering, to map, explore and interrogate ways in which our relationships with everyday smart objects might expand and be re-imagined. By offering a critical assessment on the growing place of smart technology in everyday environments, this book outlines a transdisciplinary research agenda for the future of 'smartness' to help define, envision, and inspire future collaborative design practices. These essays propose an understanding and design of smart objects that embrace their hybrid nature as shifting and blending tools, agents, machines, or even 'creatures'. Authors argue that smart objects have the potential to enter into multiple kinds of relationships with humans, and form complex human-nonhuman ecologies that are both meaningful and empowering in the context of everyday life. This book also shines a light on the hidden infrastructures behind the functioning of smart objects with stirring debates tackling questions of technology, human values, and economic and ecological impact. Whether you are a design scholar, design practitioner or design activist this book will inspire through offering theoretical insights, design concepts and practical ways on how to engage in this research agenda for future smartness.

Pursuing the discursive or material effects of relational queerness, this book reflects on how objects can illuminate, affect, and animate queer modes of being. In the early 1990s the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick defined queer as “multiply transitive . . . relational and strange,” rather than a fixed identity. In spite of this, much of the queer theoretical scholarship of the last three decades has used queer as a synonym for anti-normative sexual identities. The contributions to this volume return to the idea of transitivity, exploring what happens when queer is thought of as a turning toward or turning away from a diverse range of objects, including bodily waste; frozen cats; archival ephemera; the writing of Virginia Woolf; the Pop art of Ray Johnson; the podcast S-Town; and Maggie Nelson’s memoir The Argonauts. Relevant to those studying queer theory, this book will also be of wider interest to those researching identity and the way in which it is represented in a variety of artistic disciplines. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

Objects are essential for how, together, people create and experience social life and relate to the physical environment around them. Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity presents studies which use video recordings of real-life settings to explore how objects feature in social interaction and activity. The studies consider many objects (e.g. paper documents, food, a camera, art, furniture, and even the human body), across various situations, such as shopping, visiting the doctor, interviews and meetings, surgery, and instruction in dance, craft, or cooking. Analyses reveal in precise detail how, as people interact, objects are seen, touched and handled, heard, created, transformed, planned, imagined, shared, discussed, or appreciated. With the companion collection Multiactivity in Social Interaction: Beyond multitasking, the book advances understanding of the complex organisation and accomplishment of social interaction, especially the significance of embodiment, materiality, participation and temporality. By focussing on objects in and for actual occasions of human action, Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity will interest many researchers and practitioners in language and social interaction, communication and discourse, design, and also more widely within anthropology, sociology, psychology, and related disciplines.

Resulting from a conference that took place in Amiens, France, in June 2019, this book examines the place and role of objects centered in teaching practices from kindergarten to university, both in the context of France and elsewhere. These “objects for learning” are considered in their physicality as productions, work or signs that are used for learning. They become “objects to learn about” when the object itself is the learning objective. This book offers a cross-disciplinary perspective, linking the different disciplinary fields studied and the many reference sources used by the authors. This two-volume work offers an overview of current research on the subject, with this second volume focusing on objects in representations of space and time, then on learners’ activities in the making or use of objects, before concluding with different cultural and philosophical perspectives on objects

The Constraint Solving and Language Processing (CSLP) workshop considers the role of constraints in the representation of language and the implementation of language processing applications. This theme should be interpreted inclusively: it includes contributions from linguistics, computer science, psycholinguistics and related areas, with a particular interest in interdisciplinary perspectives. Constraints are widely used in linguistics, computer science, and psychology. How they are used, however, varies widely according to the research domain: knowledge representation, cognitive modelling, problem solving mechanisms, etc. These different perspectives are complementary, each one adding a piece to the puzzle.

An overview of object-based models of attention.

What are the aims of sociology? What are its objects of study? How relevant is the classical tradition to the practice of sociology today? This volume brings together internationally renowned and new scholars to consider the changing relationship between contemporary and classical sociology. Arguing that recent historical and theoretical developments make reconsideration timely, it suggests that whilst the classical tradition has a continuing pertinence, it is inevitably subject to ongoing reconfiguration. Assessing the explanatory value of classical and contemporary forms of sociology, interrogating social theory as both a form of explanation and a mode of practice, and considering the possible consequences for the discipline of questions about its subject matter, Sociological Objects steers a course between assertions about radical epistemological breaks on the one hand, and reverence for the classical tradition on the other. Rather, it emphasizes the value of reworking, reconsidering and reconfiguring sociological thought.