From: David Seamon <triad@ksu.edu>
Date: Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 4:24 PM
Subject: ENVIRONMENTAL & ARCHITECTURAL PHENOMENOLOGY spring 2012 issue
To: SPACESYNTAX@jiscmail.ac.uk
Dear Interested Reader:
"Home and at-homeness" is the theme of essays in the spring 2012 issue of Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, which is attached as a PDF and is also available at the following link:
http://www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon/68%2012%20spr%2023%202.pdf
In the first essay, interior designer Jane Barry tells the story of her California family home. She describes family routines in the house and her father' increasing inability to live comfortably at home during the last few years of his life. Though he became steadily more disabled, he would not move from the house or accept design modifications to make his life there easier.
In the second essay, health sociologist Andrew Moore and nursing researcher Bernie Carter consider the impact of life-saving assistive technology (AT) that many children with complex health needs depend on in their homes. In author interviews, parents of these children explained how this equipment intrudes into the home yet is absolutely necessary if the child is to remain alive. Moore and Carter offer no easy way to reconcile this tension between technological essentials and lived qualities of at-homeness, but their essay perceptively illustrates how properties of the material and technological environment can play both a supportive and undermining role in domestic wellbeing.
In the third essay, philosopher Janet Donohoe overviews home and at-homeness. She draws on the phenomenological ideas of Gaston Bachelard, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but gives particular emphasis to Edmund Husserl's concepts of homeworld and alienworld. Husserl interpreted homeworld as the tacit, taken-for-granted sphere of experiences and situations typically not called into question. Though unique for each person, the homeworld is always in some mode of lived mutuality with the alienworld—a world of difference and otherness but only brought forward to awareness because of the always already givenness of the homeworld.
One of phenomenology's major contributions to contemporary thinking is recognition that human beings and their worlds are existentially intertwined and that an integral aspect of this interconnectedness is how particular physical, environmental, and spatial qualities of a world make that world one way rather than another. In referring to environmental features like dwelling layout, technological devices, landscapes, and geographical worlds, these essays illustrate how materiality, spatiality, and environmental embodiment contribute to specific domestic lifeworlds. Directly or indirectly, the essays suggest how such understanding might facilitate more life-grounded theories, designs, and policies.
Back issues of EAP, 1990-present, are now available at: www.krex.k-state.edu/dspace/handle/2097/1522.
David Seamon
Editor, EAP
Dr. David Seamon
Professor of Environment-Behavior & Place Research
Department of Architecture
211 Seaton Hall
Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS 66506-2901
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