This volume examines the crisis of humanities narratives in the context of neoliberal capitalism and of the emergence and consolidation of the metrics-driven, corporate, managerial university. Do narratives of the crisis of the humanities mobilize specific notions of value and prestige? How are these notions classed, gendered and racialized? How do narratives of the crisis of the humanities relate to current debates and contestations surrounding decolonization? Does the crisis of a traditional configuration of the humanities open up opportunities to use their institutional space for work that is both socially and politically relevant and academically rigorous? The aim is to provide a counter-narrative of the present and future of the humanities. In addition to the study of a multiplicity of media texts and other multimodal expressive forms, formats and platforms and genres, a communicative turn in the humanities entails deepening the study of the value chains in which they are inserted and their conditions of production, circulation and reception. Communicative and digital capitalism, now labelled the Fourth Industrial Revolution, is on its way to bringing its own waves of struggles and confrontations to our campuses and beyond, to which humanities scholars and activists can make a vital contribution—should some of us decide to do so. This book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of art, literature, media and cultural studies, education, politics, sociology, and social and cultural anthropology. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies.

The book is inspired by the third seminar in a cycle connected to the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the Politecnico di Milano (July 2013). "Educating by Image. Teaching Styles vs Learning Styles" was the motto of this meeting. The contributions (coming from lectures, the poster session, interviews and round table) aim to propose an updated look at visual education, highlighting how digital tools and networks have profoundly affected the "representational styles" of the teachers and the "cognitive styles" of the learners, while at the same time reaffirming the importance of the interaction between the two groups. As Herbert Alexander Simon once said, "Learning results... only from what the student does and thinks"; therefore "the teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn". That is no mean feat if we consider that, according to Benjamin Samuel Bloom, visual education not only involves the pure cognition, but also the affective and the psychomotor domains, not to mention the social aspects. This is why, alongside some theoretical and historical retrospectives, the contributions recommend a continuous revision of "what" and "how" could be included in the academic curricula, also in connection with secondary schools, the professional world, targeted Lifelong Learning Programmes for students and teachers. The volume includes an interview with the science journalist and writer Piero Angela.

Ian McHarg and the Search for Ideal Order looks at the well-known and studied landscape architect, Ian McHarg, in a new light. The author explores McHarg’s formative years, and investigates how his ideas developed in both their complexity and scale. As a precursor to McHarg’s approach in his influential book Design with Nature, this book offers new interpretations into his search for environmental order and outlines how his struggle to understand humanity’s relationship to the environment in an era of rapid social and technological change reflects an ongoing challenge that landscape design has yet to fully resolve. This book will be of great interest to academics and researchers in landscape architectural history.

A heavily illustrated study of the foundations and working mechanisms of modern communities.

The threshold as both boundary and bridge: investigations of spaces, public and private, local and global. Today, spaces no longer represent a bourgeois haven; nor are they the sites of a classical harmony between work and leisure, private and public, the local and the global. The house is not merely a home but a position for negotiations with multiple spheres—the technological as well as the physical and the psychological. In A Topology of Everyday Constellations, Georges Teyssot considers the intrusion of the public sphere into private space, and the blurring of notions of interior, privacy, and intimacy in our societies. He proposes that we rethink design in terms of a new definition of the practices of everyday life. Teyssot considers the door, the window, the mirror, and the screen as thresholds or interstitial spaces that divide the world in two: the outside and the inside. Thresholds, he suggests, work both as markers of boundaries and as bridges to the exterior. The stark choice between boundary and bridge creates a middle space, an in-between that holds the possibility of exchanges and encounters. If the threshold no longer separates public from private, and if we can no longer think of the house as a bastion of privacy, Teyssot asks, does the body still inhabit the house—or does the house, evolving into a series of microdevices, inhabit the body?

In order to function, architectural theory and practice must be shaped to suit current cultural, economic, and political forces. Thus, architecture embodies reductive logic that conditions the treatment of human and social processes – which raises the question of how to define objectivity for architectural mentalities that must conform to a set of immediate conditions. This book focuses on meaning, and on the physical and mental processes that define life in built environments. The potential to draw knowledge from aesthetics, psychology, political economy, philosophy, geography, and sociology is offset by the fact that architectural logic is inevitably reductive, cultural, socio-economic, and political. However, despite the duty to conform, it is argued that the treatment of human processes, and the understanding of architectural mentalities, can benefit from interdisciplinary linkages, small freedoms, and cracks in a system of imperatives that can yield the means of greater objectivity. This is valuable reading for students and researchers interested in architectural theory as a working reality, and in the relationships between architecture and other fields.

This book addresses a perennial challenge for product planners and designers alike: how to objectively specify and quantify the aesthetics of products. It provides automotive product planners with a framework for the grammar of aesthetics and a tool for quantifying the aesthetics of an intended product. Further, it equips styling designers with a tool for connecting engineering and aesthetics. Given the author’s extensive experience in motorcycle design, the motorcycle has been chosen as the frame of reference for automobiles. Specifically in the field of automobile design, where engineering and aesthetics go hand in hand, it also becomes important to clearly and objectively define the relationship between engineering design and aesthetics. Accordingly, this book (1) clearly establishes the objective parameters of aesthetics, (2) puts forward a method for quantifying aesthetics, (3) identifies the engineering design parameters affecting aesthetics, and (4) determines the relationship between parameters of aesthetics and engineering design. As such, it offers a useful guide not only for design professionals, but also for students and researchers of design.