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- Mendoza-Collazos, Juan Carlos
(författare)
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From tool making to pictures : a design semiotics approach
- 2019
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Ingår i: ; , s. 76-77
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Studies on cultural evolution from archaeology, neuroscience and cognitive semiotics have shown the role of tool making for development of novel cognitive capabilities in early humans. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that tool making was a cognitive threshold from nonhuman primates to hominins. Tool making begun with rudimentary skills for tool production based on motor patterns, learned socially by direct imitation. Further evolution led to a continuous improvement of tools with refined technology, supported by bodily mimesis (Zlatev 2014) as a device for learning, rehearsal and skills enhancement. Ultimately, the process led to a developed society with language, technology and symbolic culture. In this paper, I propose that tool making could be connected with the origin of pictures. I present a design semiotics explanation of tool-making based on the cognitive resources of a typical design process. The elaboration of this thesis focuses on the evolution of design (Mendoza-Collazos, in progress). Proto-design emerged along with tool production in nonhuman hominids. It evolved into design, preserving and improving its original cognitive resources in early humans (perceptual-motor adaptations, controlled motion patterns, observation, bodily mimesis, social cognition, social learning and cultural transmission). These cognitive resources resulted in two payoffs for design. First, perceptual-motor adaptations, controlled motion patterns and observation are capacities required both to shape stone tools (in proto-design and early forms of design) and to shape prototypes and 3D scale models in modern design. Second, bodily mimesis along with the improvement of working directly with materials (see Malafouris 2013), and the need for social learning and cultural transmission evolved to the capacity of drawing and sketching. Thus, I argue that this process marked the emergence of pictures in early hominids. Today, the abilities of sketching and modelling still are primary in design processes.
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| 2. |
- Mendoza-Collazos, Juan Carlos
(författare)
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The notion of agency and the material engagement theory : An Agentive statement
- 2019
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Ingår i: ; , s. 27-27
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Malafouris (2013) proposes that agency is an emergent product of the relational ontology of our material engagement. However, I suggest a distinction between meaning and agency for a better understanding of our relational ontology with things. Meaning is the payoff of the relational ontology, meaning emerges when an agent act within the world. Agency is the capability to act, signify, produce and obtain meaning, and this capability is exclusive of living organisms. The distinction does not imply to fall in Cartesianism. Agentive semiotics (Niño 2015; Mendoza-Collazos 2016), for instance, is far from an anthropocentric or Cartesian conception of the way the agency operates. The treatment that agentive semiotics proposes for the exclusiveness of agency in living organisms could enhance the force of Malafouris' relational approach, explaining the key role of material culture without methodological fetishism.
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