The landscape metaphor and its entailments — (I want to thank my colleagues in the Visualising Transitions research group in the School of Design at UTS, Anne Burdick, Jacquie Lorber-Kasunic, Abby Mellick-Lopes, Kate Sweetapple and Cameron Tonkinwise for inspiring this piece of thinking) In this article I discuss metaphor of ‘landscape’ in multi-level perspectives (MLP) on technological…

A hidden vision With the Olympics in full swing, I thought it might be a good time to reflect on the perhaps forgotten history of this massively successful revival culture. Today the Olympics might seem like a technocratic affair. Beneath the sediment of the results fetishism, however, lies a story about an anachronistic…

There is no there, there. — Some time ago now, I returned to my Facebook account for a visit. The impression I got was of a town I once knew filled with my cousins of an older generation screaming about how the world had gone to shit or sharing strange puzzles and jokes — with a…

Processes, transitions and living space — Read visualising relations Part I here. (I want to thank my colleagues in the Visualising Transitions research group in the School of Design at UTS, Anne Burdick, Jacquie Lorber-Kasunic, Abby Mellick-Lopes, Kate Sweetapple and Cameron Tonkinwise for inspiring this piece of thinking. Thanks also to Chris Gaul and Rachael Wakefield-Rann…

Nests and networks — (I want to thank my colleagues in the Visualising Transitions research group in the School of Design at UTS, Anne Burdick, Jacquie Lorber-Kasunic, Abby Mellick-Lopes, Kate Sweetapple and Cameron Tonkinwise for inspiring this piece of thinking) The metaphor of ‘the nest’ is often used when discussing the relationship between scales…

(This analysis is in part based on a Twitter thread started by Cameron Tonkinwise) Metaphors change based on the way they are used. As Ian Hacking says of the categories we use to name different kinds of people (people who have autism, child viewers of television, women refugees, etc.), they…

The below is my dad, Robert Lee’s talk from the ADAPT NSW Conference November 2019. My name is Robert Lee. I farm sheep and cattle just east of Cumnock in central west NSW. Coorah is a beautiful farm on the slopes just north of Orange ranging in elevation from 500…

Horse racing was a hugely important part of my childhood, particularly the gambling side of things. I ran the book at school for four years (and nearly lost a lot of money in the process when Rogan Josh got up in 2019 Hamish Dixon). I had a TAB account from…

A Degree in Repair? The twentieth century saw the emergence of many new academic disciplines, across fields ranging from design, to business, to environmental science. The emergence of new disciplines is a story of implicit or scattered knowledges coming together as explicit, integrated models of learning. For example, while mercantile…