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Sousanis, Walter Nickell. Unflattening: A visual-verbal inquiry into learning in many dimensions Teachers College, Columbia University, 2014. While the importance and effectiveness of visual thinking and multimodality in teaching and learning have been demonstrated and discussed at great length, for the most part it has still only been talk. Academic discourse remains a text-based endeavor at all levels. Our bias for what serious thinking looks like runs deep to the roots of Western culture. Images are relegated to the sidelines, at best used as example or ornament, but never seen as complete on their own and always expendable. By undertaking this philosophical inquiry entirely in the visual-verbal medium of comics, I seek to challenge the very forms in which we construct knowledge and demonstrate the utility of comics as a powerful tool for thought in the scholarly sphere. (Note, while the terms "graphic novel" and "sequential art" have come into fashion, I continue to refer to this work as a "comic" or a "comic book.") Here, images are not subservient to the text; rather, ideas are embodied through the inextricable partnering of words and pictures, in which neither has the upper hand. Through both its form and content, the work asks, in relying on the verbal as the sole tool for conducting serious study, what possibilities are we missing? What avenues for discourse emerge when we embrace a multiplicity of approaches for making meaning? The work weaves its argument through an interdisciplinary framework - drawing on science, philosophy, art, literature, mythology - and employs the very means by which we see as metaphors for considering new approaches to how we think and how we learn. By integrating the different views from our two eyes, we create perspective. Similarly, by making an observation a half year apart on the earth's orbit around the sun, we make "two eyes" to find the depths to the stars. Perception is thus not only this distance between, but the way in which our movement in space changes our relationship to our environment. It is an active process of constantly evaluating how things appear and incorporating a multitude of views to expand our understanding. In contrast to this is the static contraction of sight I call "flatness." Taking my cue from Herbert Marcuse's notion of "one-dimensionality," I see flatness as conforming to a narrowness of thought aligned in a single dimension. Edwin A. Abbott's Flatlandprovides a more literal metaphor. A flatlander's inability to fathom the concept of "upwards" suggests that perhaps we too are limited in our sight and may be unable to see beyond the boundaries of our current frame of mind. The work challenges the fixed viewpoint, recognizing that the Copernican revolution is never finished. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design -----------------------------------------------------------------