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Tag: material engagement theory

Four Icon Challenge: How Things Shape the Mind

Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes

My colleague Jason Toal’s recent blog post on visual thinking exercises inspired me to take the Four Icon Challenge and capture the core ideas from How Things Shape the Mind, Lambros Malafouris’s facinating interdisciplinary exploration of cognitive archeology and material engagement theory.

I discovered Malafouris’ work through Jonathan Bean, Bernardo Figueredo and Hanne Larsen’s fascinating paper at EPIC 2017 on Material Engagement Theory and branding gestalt research.

What is ironic about me completing this exercise  using icons from the  Noun Project is that one of Malafouris’s core arguments is that conventional semiotics reifies representation and privileges human intention over systematic, dynamic explanations of meaning.

Cognitive Archaeology: How might we learn about the prehistoric mind through analysis of the intersections of brains, bodies, tools, and media?
Embodied, Extended, Externalized, Distributed Mind: Cognition emerges as neurological function, enacted agency, mediating artifacts and material media interact..
Enactive Signs. Overcome the analytical limitations of representation, methodological individualism, and Cartesian dualism and embrace meaning in the making.
Material Engagement Theory. Thinking is mediated and enacted in the interaction between bodies, tools and material. Human and non-human elements interact.

Author David RubeliPosted on December 22, 2017Categories Design, Learning, UncategorizedTags EPIC, Hanna Larsen, How Things Shape The Mind, Jason Toal, Jonathan Bean, Lambros Malafouris, material engagement theory, Miguel Figueriedo, Noun Project
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