Enhanced agency and the visual thinking of design
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Juan Mendoza-Collazos
Juan Mendoza-Collazos is an associate Professor at Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He holds a doctoral degree in cognitive semiotics from Lund University. He currently investigates the role of artifacts in relation to agency and the notion of
collective agency of vulnerable communities that carry out social innovation processes. He has authored and co-authored book chapters and articles on design semiotics.
Abstract
Visual thinking is a systematic way to produce knowledge in design by means of mental imagery, spatial reasoning, and the use of an array of visual representations. Pictorial representations such as sketches are crucial for the activity of designing at the early stage of the creative process. Designers see more information in sketches than was actually drawn. The ability to see more information than is sketched out can be seen as an enhanced visual capacity of human agency. Enhanced agency is the prosthetic incorporation of artifacts to improve the original agentive capacities. The incorporation of artifacts to draw raises some fundamental questions: Is the pencil an extension of the mind? Can we think with our hands? What agentive capacities are increased with the use of the pencil? What is the representational status of sketching? The chapter is structured around these key questions to suggest some answers inspired by the work of Göran Sonesson. Using the notion of enhanced agency and the layered model of agency, I explore the way in which the pencil improves the visual thinking of design. In doing so I found that it is important to maintain the principle of asymmetry in cognitive systems to reconsider relational ontology in favor of ecological relationships.
About the author
Juan Mendoza-Collazos is an associate Professor at Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He holds a doctoral degree in cognitive semiotics from Lund University. He currently investigates the role of artifacts in relation to agency and the notion of collective agency of vulnerable communities that carry out social innovation processes. He has authored and co-authored book chapters and articles on design semiotics.
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© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Foreword
- Articles
- The semiotic phenomenology of inverse alteroception
- The cultural semiotics of Jingshen and cognitive homeostasis
- Facing objects of haecceity: advantages of Peirce’s categories
- Apple-and-pin drawings by blind novices show occluded features: region theory
- Art, pictoriality and semiotics – a reflection on Göran Sonesson’s contribution to art theory
- Enhanced agency and the visual thinking of design
- Comparing verbal and visual rhetoric – and the danger of “empirical shorthands”
- Dialogue and the “miracle of language”: the early and late Bakhtin
- Psychologism in the study of children’s semiotic development
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Foreword
- Articles
- The semiotic phenomenology of inverse alteroception
- The cultural semiotics of Jingshen and cognitive homeostasis
- Facing objects of haecceity: advantages of Peirce’s categories
- Apple-and-pin drawings by blind novices show occluded features: region theory
- Art, pictoriality and semiotics – a reflection on Göran Sonesson’s contribution to art theory
- Enhanced agency and the visual thinking of design
- Comparing verbal and visual rhetoric – and the danger of “empirical shorthands”
- Dialogue and the “miracle of language”: the early and late Bakhtin
- Psychologism in the study of children’s semiotic development
