Hello, and thanks for all the fish

Welcome to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Artful Design

Hi! I’m Jack, a Ph.D. student at CCRMA working on my Special Area Exams. That means I’m going on a deep, confusing, academic journey to find a community of scholars I’ll engage with. Along the way, I’ll be learning about and ruminating on feminist theory, philosophy of aesthetics, anthropology, psychology, ethnomusicology, and more as they apply to how we make things and how to live well.

What is Design?

Design is an intentioned shaping of the world around us. It’s what you do when you are making something that needs to do something well and look good while doing it! It’s an infusion of art and engineering practices. You might engineer a gear system, or create a painting as a work of art, but you would design a really good-looking chair.

What is Artful Design?

Artful Design is a new and growing theory created by my advisor, Ge Wang. It deals with thinking about the ways in which we make things, and how that in turn affects how we think and live. It’s both a practical philosophy of design and an aesthetic lens for design. He’s just finished writing a manifesto in the form of a comic book! But, the manifesto is not the be-all, end-all of what artful design can mean. It’s a useful starting point that we can build on top of as we see fit.

How does artful design differ from other ways of thinking about design? How does it differ from other philosophies of aesthetics? Those are some of the things I’ll explore here! Stay tuned.

Other Things I Think About

I design musical experiences in virtual reality, with an eye toward individual experience and the development of the self. As such, I think a lot about:

• “folk art” — art practice for your own immediate enjoyment and for the people close to you
• embodiment — one of the primary affordances of VR over other media; psychological experiments, philosophical and feminist theoretical implications
• tools for art-making and design — e.g., Chunity, VRAPL; theoretical implications of said tools
• realism vs stylization in virtual worlds and other art-making
• authenticity — what makes art authentic; feminist perspectives on authenticity and the self (hi Foucault!); authenticity of virtual experiences
• standpoint epistemology and situated cognition
• self-making, especially in adult, small, everyday contexts (much research is on childhood / adolescence, and on adults in extremely new or traumatic contexts)
• queerness, queer perspectives, queering art and performance
• philosophy of aesthetics and of living well, especially feminist perspectives e.g. Nussbaum’s human flourishing
• creativity; what does it mean to create; poetics of making things
• musicking, especially in individual, personal, folk-art contexts (“holicipation” is one useful way of thinking about this)
• probably lots more as I go!

I hope to develop an academic background for myself that infuses elements of many / all of these. I’ll try folding them into artful design, and if that doesn’t work, then I’ll just have to call it something else!

Stay tuned and please let me know any thoughts, references, critiques you have along the way. This will be fun!

Signing off for now,

~Jack