Intenções portáteis: Contributos para o estudo da sociabilidade flutuante entre pessoas e objectos na sua dimensão móvel para uma (des) construção de uma ontologia da arte portátil na contemporaneidade

A questão central que abordamos nesta tese, assenta na génese do pensamento portátil dos nossos objectos não artísticos e artísticos. A portabilidade como sintoma civilizacional, num contexto de crescente mobilidade e transição para modos de vida nómadas e itinerantes nas suas mais heterogéneas expressões. Especula-se, que a génese desta mutação nos estilos de vida que são vertiginosamente acompanhados pela parafernália de objectos que orbitam em nossa volta, numa espiral crescente de portabilidade, esteja na necessidade de busca de novos paradigmas societais, após a falência daqueles que sustentam este modo de vida artificial. ABSTRACT: The central question boarded in this thesis, leys on the genesis of the portability's thought about objects, artistic and non-artistic ones. Portability is seen as a civilizational symptom, in a growing context of mobility and transition to nomadic and itinerant ways of life, in there most heterogeneous manifestations. We speculate that the genesis of this mutation of life styles, that are vertiginously accompanied by all this paraphernalia of objects that orbit around us in a crescent spiral of portability, leys on the necessity to search new social paradigms, after the fall of those that sustain these artificial ways of life.

Design and Technology: A Historical Perspective on the Mediating Role of Technology Between Industrial Design and Engineering

The interdisciplinary relationship between industrial design and mechanical engineering is sensitive. This research focuses on understanding how one can positively mediate this relation, in order to foster innovation. In this paper, technology is considered for this role since it has, in some historical moments, served as an integrator of these two disciplines, in processes that led to innovation. By means of an extensive literature review, covering three different periods of technological development, both disciplines’ positioning in society and their link with technology are analyzed and compared. The three case studies selected help to illustrate, precisely, the technology positioning between both disciplines and society. Literature assumes that industrial design is rooted in the rise of criticism against both the machine and the mechanized production. This is an opposing approach to the current paradigm, in which design plays a fundamental role in adapting technology to society. Also, the social problems caused by the mechanized and massive production triggered the mechanical engineering emergence, as a professionalized discipline. Technology was intrinsically connected with both industrial design and mechanical engineering emergence and subsequent evolution. In the technology conflict with society lays the reform and regulation for design practice, in its broadest sense.

Detection of Glass pattern configurations by the primary visual cortex

The neurons in the primary visual cortex that respond to the orientation of visual stimuli were discovered in the late 1950s (Hubel, D.H. & Wiesel, T.N. 1959. J. Physiol. 148:574-591) but how they achieve this response is poorly understood. Recently, experiments have demonstrated that the visual cortex may use the image processing techniques of cross or auto-correlation to detect the streaks in random dot patterns (Barlow, H. & Berry, D.L. 2010. Proc. R. Soc. B. 278: 2069-2075). These experiments made use of sinusoidally modulated random dot patterns and of the so-called Glass patterns - where randomly positioned dot pairs are oriented in a parallel configuration (Glass, L. 1969. Nature. 223: 578-580). The image processing used by the visual cortex could be inferred from how the threshold of detection of these patterns in the presence of random noise varied as a function of the dot density in the patterns. In the present study, the detection thresholds have been measured for other types of patterns including circular, hyperbolic, spiral and radial Glass patterns and an indication of the type of image processing (cross or auto-correlation) by the visual cortex is presented. As a result, it is hoped that this study will contribute to an understanding of what David Marr called the ‘computational goal’ of the primary visual cortex (Marr, D. 1982. Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information. New York: Freeman.)