In today’s society we depend on technology to perform the simplest tasks. Whether we are engaging in conversation with a friend or are navigating in traffic, we are likely to be found with some technological device in our hands. This dependence has grown over a period of time, and many of us have failed to reflect on the impact technology has had on our lives. The emergence of so-called One-to-One projects, where teachers and students gain access to a personal laptop, does however provide an excellent opportunity to do so. In this study we aim to highlight the teachers’ experiences of work with education after giving each staff member and student access to a personal laptop. We engage in this task by combining two analytical tools, and in doing so manage to bring forth an understanding of the effects of technology as something far more unpredictable than what can be found when presupposing that computers are mere tools used to achieve planned goals. Instead we find that computers affect the way in which teachers engage in the twilight between work and privacy as well as the percieved boundary between the school and the world of information outside of it. Furthermore, the nature of interaction with their students both in the classroom environment and outside of it has been altered. These highlighted effects call into question new perspectives on the roles of the computer and the teacher in modern society.

Technologies and Artworks: An Interdisciplinary Exploration through Ihde and Latour discusses and applies the phenomenological framework described by the philosopher of science and technology Don Ihde, in his text Technology and the Lifeworld, in relation to recent artworks of sculpture and performance that incorporate technologies. The study considers closely Ihde’s embodiment, hermeneutic, and alterity variants for the purpose of developing conceptual tools to investigate the complicated human-technology relationships present in the works considered. A subsequent discussion of psychasthenia and its relationship to Ihde’s embodiment variant demonstrates the limitations of Ihde’s approach and the need for additional sources in order to create a more comprehensive study. Additionally, this study draws on Bruno Latour’s text Science in Action, and in particular on his concepts of modalities and black boxes in order to contrast to and complement Ihde’s approach. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the relationship between art and research, the increase in doctoral programs that accept or are designed for artists, a reflection on the effect of this study on the author’s own art practice, and the productive tension between the different processes involved in research and art.

This study explores the problem of how we perceive built space and relate to its abstract representations. In 1897, Poincaré presented the problem of space for the 20th century in his essay ‘The Relativity of Space’, in which the human body and technics in our spatial experiences were already implied. Merleau-Ponty and Don Ihde's work is based on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and has been influenced to different degrees by Martin Heidegger. The study is presented as a comparative historical-thematic textual study. For Merleau-Ponty, our primordial perception is general, pre-self-conscious and ambiguous. It is only in reflecting on our lived experiences that we can adequately describe our perceptions. One's own body is the means of having a world that is already intersubjective. Merleau-Ponty explicates the fusion of body and soul, as well as our irreducible relation to the world by referring to studies of behavioural pathologies. From these studies the motility and spatiality of one's body, as well as habit acquisition are already informative on general spatial experiences, the syntheses of our perceptions and the unity of the world. The body-subject is the nexus of all levels of perceptions. Merleau-Ponty describes the constitution of embodiment relations (by means of habit acquisition) with artefacts that mediate our interaction and perceptions in the world. Ihde extends this aspect of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. Building on Merleau-Ponty's explications of the body, Ihde poses a structure of human-technology relations with different variations: embodiment, hermeneutic, alterity, background and horizonal relations that transform our perceptions of the world and ourselves. Ihde's 'body one' and 'body two' are based on the notion that perception is meaningful and culturally informed. Ihde (after Husserl), shows that geometry and Euclidean space are instances of cultural habitus as an abstraction from the lifeworld. The different human-technology relations are present in our lifeworld-experiences of which built space is constantly part in the background or foreground of our projects and actions. By comparing both philosophers' work in a phenomenological explication of built space, new light is thrown on our experiences and perceptions thereof which have implications on architectural education. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Philosophy / unrestricted