This thesis presents a study of transcendent experiences (TXs) — experiences of connection with something greater than oneself — focusing on what they are, how artefacts support them, and how design can contribute to that support. People often find such experiences transformative, and artefacts do support them — but the literature rarely addresses designing artefact support for TXs. This thesis provides a step toward filling that gap. The first phase of research involved the conduct and analysis of 24 interviews with adults of diverse spiritual perspectives, using constructivist Grounded Theory methods informed by relevant literature and by studies performed earlier in the PhD programme. Analysis found that TXs proceed in three phases — creating the context, living the experience, integrating the experience — and that artefacts support two phases and people desire enhancements to all three. This TX framework supports and extends experience structures from the literature: it recognises the top-level categories as phases in a cycle where integration may alter future contexts, and it extends the structure of TX by incorporating the relationships of artefacts and of enhancement desires to the phases of these experiences. This extended structure constitutes a grounded theory of transcendent user experience (TUX). The second phase involved the design and conduct of three “Transcendhance” game workshops for enhancing transcendence, which incorporated themes from the grounded theory and aimed to elicit design ideas in an atmosphere of imagination, fun, and play. Participants sketched 69 speculative ideas for techno-spiritual artefacts, and analysis mapped them to TX phases and identified possible extensions inspired by relevant research. The great majority of ideas mapped to the phase Creating the Context, with very few mapping to Living the Experience, which suggests that context may be easier than lived experience to understand and address directly. This point is especially important for experiences such as TX that are tricky to define, impossible to arrange or anticipate, and thus unsuitable for straight-forward “classic” user experience methods. The final phase involved the elaboration of workshop ideas to explore the extension of design fiction for TUX. Analysis related design fiction to the TX phases and suggested features that affect design ideas’ potential for TUX design fiction. This phase ended with the proposal and analysis of three new forms of design fiction — extended imaginary abstracts, comparative imaginary abstracts, and design poetry — using workshop ideas to illustrate the forms, their construction and use, and their benefits to TUX design. Transcendhance workshops and TUX design fictions approach techno-spiritual design peripherally, “sneaking up” on lived experience by addressing context and enabling the consideration of ineffable experience through storytelling, metaphors, and oblique imagery. This thesis combines the grounded theory of transcendent user experience with the Transcendhance workshop process and new forms of design fiction, presenting peripheral design as a promising strategy for facilitating design to enhance transcendent experience.

The banking sector has been under public scrutiny since the credit crisis of 2007/8, and a range of diagnoses and cures have been offered, particularly in terms of regulatory and financial structures. In the public media, much comment has been made about ethics in the sector, but this has provoked surprisingly little response from academic researchers. This thesis explores the crisis in banking as a moral one, taking Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of virtue ethics as a framework for understanding the careers of Scottish banking leaders. The method used for the study is narrative, and depends both on MacIntyre’s philosophy of tradition-constituted enquiry, and on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Conversations were held with ten leaders of Scottish banking whose careers typically span between 25 and 40 years, and the record of those conversations forms the primary data set for the research. The resulting narratives are frank, rich descriptions of deeply felt changes in a particular mode of working life. This was a way of life characterised up until the 1980s by a well-defined status within local communities, professional expertise and a well-ordered tradition. The deregulation of banking and subsequent structural and technological changes to retail banking services eroded that professional tradition, and replaced it with new modes of work dominated by institutional priorities of sales, profit and growth, rather than by an ethic of professional expertise and customer service. The thesis finds that there are structural barriers to the recovery of a professional ethic in banking. It offers new perspectives on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, particularly in the application of his idea of traditions to mainstream economic activity. It also explores common ground between Gadamer and MacIntyre, proposing ways in which both philosophers can enhance our pursuit of qualitative empirical research.

For many, design is the production of useful artefacts. Designing can however also provide a basis for exploration, speculation or critique. This thesis develops this conception further by providing a theoretical framework for conceiving designing and design objects as a mode of and media for philosophical inquiry. Design is regarded as a material philosophy that explores and reflects philosophical issues by situating them in the concrete and particular reality of human life rather than in a generalised and abstract realm. Design objects are equipment and media that can be understood in terms of their contextual references and consequences as well as the way in which they mediate human action, thinking and existence, and thus in terms of the worlds that they open up. As media for reflection they allow one to gain an experiential understanding of these contexts and worlds. Design thus relates to philosophy in terms of ethics and concepts; that is, in terms of exploring possibilities of existence and new forms of thinking. Since design objects can cre-ate new experiences and interactions they can lead to new values and concepts. These objects can be used to reflect on philosopical issues and to thus see the world from a new perspective. These new perspectives may be brought about through three approaches: First, through fictions that render possible worlds experienceable or show the existing world in a new way. Second, through models that serve as tools for understanding and mediation between the general and abstract and the concrete and particular. Third, through situations, simulations and re-enactments that facilitate a direct and bodily experience of a new per-spective. These approaches can make abstract ideas experienceable, as they materialise these issues in concrete situations and thereby allow one to judge them in a real world context, including possible consequences. The activity of designing is accordingly considered an exploration of philosophical questions that uses design objects both as media for conducting an inquiry and communicating its outcome.

This thesis constitutes the first sustained attempt to locate twenty-first-century Anglo-American fiction in relation to Marxist literary criticism, resulting in a solid set of original-reference material for those undertaking work on writers Jonathan Lethem, Dana Spiotta, China Miéville, Thomas Pynchon, and Kim Stanley Robinson, or more generally on the intersections between literature, Marxist critical theory, and philosophy. The project uncovers the topics, concerns, and forms of a collection of contemporary cross-genre narratives that I take to instantiate a new political designation occurring after post-Marxism. Moving from the collapse of "actually existing socialism" to the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the study identifies five authors who demonstrate a willingness to forge fresh dialogues with Marx, Marxism, and left radical politics. Envisioning how society is shaped by the interaction of subjects operating within the capital relation, the selected fictions of these authors set out to recuperate and regenerate the Marxist intellectual tradition through an unashamedly anti-capitalist approach to the post-millennial world. In focusing upon British and American narrative, the study will redress the current disparity within the Marxist critical tradition between the pervasiveness of critical political economy and the relative lack of scholarly attention to Marxist literary criticism, and the contemporary novel in particular. In addition, it argues the contemporary moment offers an opportunity for the development of a more critical and rigorous Marxist conceptual knowledge that exists beyond the boundaries of postmodern epistemology. The imperative to pursue Marxist readings of contemporary literature has been undertaken by a small group of critics in recent years, and this study will seek to make a significant contribution to this emerging field of scholarly endeavour.

A turn away from language and the human mind as the dominant (or only) determinants of reality can be identified within many disciplines, including anthropology, philosophy and literature, reflecting a growing acceptance of human and non-human, living and non-living entities as real, complex and partially withdrawn agents in the world. In Object Oriented Ontology the definition of object is extended to include humans, who have no special ontological status. Timothy Morton proposes rhetoric as a means of drawing closer to other objects, of contacting the ‘strange stranger’; objects cannot be known directly, or fully, but can be explored through imaginative speculation. Drawing on Object Oriented Ontology, my project explores making - an intimate engagement between body and material - as a means of thinking the body as a (strange) object within a mesh of strange objects. Facture is documented as image and language, prompting a series of shifting, speculative questions: • Can writing be brought to making to generate new new approaches to craft production? • How might writing in response to making, or objects, be reintroduced into a making process as a form of feedback? • Can writing_making methods generate new approaches to writing (about) making and materials? • How might a combination of production, documentation and reflection be displayed as artwork/research? • Can making be seen as a means for contacting the ‘strange stranger’?

This study critically examines how the decision-making of two-year-old children may take place and may be interpreted in dialogue. The aim is to increase adult understanding of the decision-making experiences of children. The decisions, as perceived by parents and practitioners as participants, are situated within the non-verbal as well as the verbal dialogue of the children and are interpreted through the dialogue of the interpreting adults. Case studies focus on three children drawn from families and settings willing to engage in extensive observation and analysis. The study is conducted with dialogism meta-theory containing a contextual social constructionist approach. The principal research methods are naturalistic video observations of the children over the course of their third year and video analysis sessions with parents and practitioners. I use a second-person approach to observation that acknowledges my presence with the children. Phenomenological principles underpin the interpretation. Multi-modal interaction analysis accesses aspects of the children’s phenomenal minds (here indicating no separation of mind and body), namely their expressions and responses to each other. The children’s dialogue is discussed in terms of Buber’s I-You relation and I-It attitude to the other, and in terms of what the children make relevant in their decisions in and with the world. Questions are raised about how decision-making in dialogue can be understood, discussing in particular the situated nature of this understanding, with the aim of contributing to the processes of observation and understanding in the future. A key contribution of the study is the exploration of mutuality and contextual knowing involving the perceptions of the adults closest to the children, and the contextual continuity of knowing in adults developing professional judgement in situations of uncertainty, and yet of relevance to the children.

The thesis examines the principal works of Charles Darwin to determine whether there is any evidence of Romantic concepts in his writings and whether, therefore, he owes a debt to the Romantics such as Alexander von Humboldt and Goethe. The first two chapters of the thesis trace the influence of Alexander von Humboldt (1769 – 1859) on Charles Darwin (1809-1882). There are frequent references to Humboldt in Darwin’s works. Humboldt’s Romantic concepts of Nature, expressed in his Personal Narrative [1807 – 1834] and in his later Cosmos [1845], are compared to Darwin’s concepts of Nature in his On the Origin of Species [1859, first edition]. An analysis of Humboldt shows him firmly within the German Romantic school of thought with influences from Schelling and Goethe, especially concerning the concept of Mind. Humboldt’s method of analysing Nature aesthetically had a profound effect on Darwin’s own imaginative view of Nature. Further analysis of this method, coupled with Goethe’s ‘Genetic Method’ of moving between the particular and the infinite when seeing the ‘leaf’ and ‘vertebrae’ archetypes, shows strong evidence of the influence of the German Romantics on the development of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. In analysing the Romantic concept of a ‘One Reality Nature’, the thesis shows that Darwin’s evidence of a common progenitor provides a moral imperative for treating all races as equal in terms of their origins and their potential for development. In Chapter Three the origins of morality are seen by Darwin as having been generated by natural instincts rather than having come from a Creator. This is examined with reference to Darwin’s The Descent of Man [1871; 1879, second edition] within the moral and cultural context of the Victorian era in which he lived. The final Chapter Four compares The Voyage of the Beagle [1839, first edition] to Darwin’s later works to see if there are differences between his earlier and later forms of Romanticism and how easily they sit alongside Darwin the Victorian. The thesis concludes that essentially Darwin’s Romantic theme of wonder and enchantment is the same for both his early and later years. However, Darwin’s Romanticism has moved from an anthropocentric view with Man as its centre to an anthropomorphic view in which Man is seen as part of Nature but not at its centre. Darwin’s self-expression in his writing has also moved from a subjective form of poetry developed through his personal experience of Nature, to a more objective form of poetic science in which Darwin is able to step back from the science he creates. Finally, the Conclusion suggests that there is sufficient evidence in Darwin’s works to claim that he can be regarded as a Romantic materialist. This is evidenced by his view that Mind and Man’s morality have been developed by Nature’s laws out of matter. It is also evidenced by Darwin’s own mental methods of discovery through his own form of imagination and poetry, sharing some of the themes of the English Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Tennyson.