Expressive Iteration

Expressive Iteration

A ground-breaking guide to thinking about how routine activities can be designed and innovated to develop narrative meaning and a sense of purpose. Iteration is an integral part of daily routines, such as sleep-wake cycles, commuting, workouts, chores, or practising an instrument. While many iterations just monotonously repeat, others can lead to progression or evolution. With subtle variations among iterations, we can create meaning out of repetitive acts, forging narratives from them and thus making them meaningful to us. Chow draws on rhetoric, psychology, narratology, and design-thinking to show both in theory and in practice how we can innovate the design of mundane and routine activities to give them meaning and expression. He does so by examining Asian and European-originated examples, across a range of domains including visual arts, literature, digital art, video games, and mobile applications. A must-read for designers and enthusiasts looking for ways to innovate across all domains and media and transform tedious repetitive activities into acts of intention.

Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Database Programming Languages

Recursion

This book provides a comprehensive account of the role of recursion in language in two distinct but interconnected ways. First, David J. Lobina examines how recursion applies at different levels within a full description of natural language. Specifically, he identifies and evaluates recursion as: a) a central property of the computational system underlying the faculty of language; b) a possible feature of the derivations yielded by this computational system; c) a global characteristic of the structures generated by the language faculty; and d) a probable factor in the parsing operations employed during the processing of recursive structures. Second, the volume orders these different levels into a tripartite explanatory framework. According to this framework, the investigation of any particular cognitive domain must begin by first outlining what sort of mechanical procedure underlies the relevant capacity (including what sort of structures it generates). Only then, the author argues, can we properly investigate its implementation, both at the level of abstract computations typical of competence-level analyses, and at the level of the real-time processing of behaviour.