In 2006 Paul Dourish gave a paper that discussed the positioning of (specifically) ethnography and the motives for extracting out “implications for design” i.e. design interventions and form. This is part of the basis of this paper, which develops in essay form a “case-study” that helps illustrate the need to develop and pursue critical interrogations of what Dourish called a “toolbox of methods, ” (download pdf)...

With this issue, Design and Culture begins a recurring section on design education and practice. Our first theme is “design education and social innovation,” and comes at a time when local needs and global challenges converge with design discourse, academia, and design practices in topical and important new ways (Irwin/Vodeb/Guaralda/Penin/Fry/Lo/Yang) (download pdf)...

Issues of research and methods seriously impact the way we think about other cultures, and may create and further instrumentalist practices (download pdf)...

Overview text in Italian...

Reading is becoming a more diverse activity. While the act of reading engages a reader through intense interiorization and reflection, reading is also placed within more exteriorized social contexts through ubiquitous computing, networking, and densely designed public spaces (download pdf)...

What is the nature of politically engaged art-practice in light of the shifting contexts of highly mobile global audiences? How does the issue of translation become a strategy in building awareness across languages? What is the position of being between cultures, of communities on a border, or of crossing a border and living within a larger culture which projects its own stereotypes and assumptions about the minority community? Migration based on economic and political pressure is a huge and pervasive trend that is shaping global culture. These questions are the broad basis for the development of a series of linked projects called the Borderline Series, which focuses on contemporary migrations between Latin and North America.

Electronic interactive information raises many new questions regarding the nature of design. Can the speed and ubiquity of 'new' information, broadly construed, be understood through older theories of communication- or is there a threshold that we begin to cross where immediate distribution through electronic networks and user interaction contradicts many older definitions of information design?

There is a crisis in our understanding. The older models and applied theories of maker and audience seem insufficient within this environment, yet, what new theories are provided seem to be placed within a hypothetical future that seems disconnected to the present. To examine the present is extremely difficult.

Interactivity combines time-based media with traditional literacy. Cognitive psychologists have suggested that memory is encoded very differently based on "episodic or semantic" categories. These categories appear oppositional especially regarding the vulnerability and authenticity of information based on personal perception versus authoritative source. Defining and expanding overlaps may help in determining function on the most basic level of interactive design. This paper defines and expands terms to include how perceptual information may integrate more meaningfully in our use of traditional writing, through alternative structures or "schema" of "new" information especially regarding navigation, and interface metaphor.

Many theorists vie for the supposed key to understanding "new media,” and most are to be found outside of graphic design. Not surprisingly, each author speaks from his or her own disciplinary bias. Critical writing either becomes reductive and ideologically trapped within that bias, or so personalized that the ideas are hard to interrogate. Writers run the gamut, from generalized theories (Bolter and “remediation”), to historical precedent (Manovich) to politics of identity (Haraway).