An ongoing series of diagrams that examine aesthetic experience as a means to shape individual perception. The diagrams consider what must be accepted as a starting point if the goal is to employ art (or design) as a way to advance social change. [+]

Essential constructs include understanding art/design as the production of experiences rather than artifacts; recognizing that the viewer-participant is the actual center of the work; and that the nexus of memory and emotion must be triggered in order to produce transformational personal meaning.

The project is an intersection of John Dewey’s analysis of art as experience, Alan Kaprow’s work in relational aesthetics, the phenomenology of reader response criticism, and recent research into the neuroscience of interpretation.

The diagrams were shown as part of Inside/Outside: Working Our Way Out of the Damaged Now (Design as Dialectics), UCSF Design Gallery, 2.16 to 03.30.17. The exhibition’s aim was to offer a dialogue on design as a practice that can “dialectically” change perceptions and reveal unexpressed potentialities. Curated by Joshua Singer and Virginia Tassinari in collaboration with DESIS Philosophy Talk @Studio Time and LUCA Arts DESIS Lab.