Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at the time. Today, the humanities are more frequently defined as any fields of study outside of professional training, mathematics, and the natural and social sciences.
Design research was originally constituted as primarily research into the process of design, developing from work in design methods, but the concept has been expanded to include research embedded within the process of design, including work concerned with the context of designing and research-based design practice. The concept retains a sense of generality, aimed at understanding and improving design processes and practices quite broadly, rather than developing domain-specific knowledge within any professional field of design.
An art school is an educational institution with a primary focus on the visual arts, including fine art – especially illustration, painting, photography, sculpture, and graphic design. Art schools can offer elementary, secondary, post-secondary, or undergraduate programs, and can also offer a broad-based range of programs. There have been six major periods of art school curricula, and each one has had its own hand in developing modern institutions worldwide throughout all levels of education. Art schools also teach a variety of non-academic skills to many students.
The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), formerly Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), is a British research council, established in 1998, supporting research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities.
The Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) was a United Kingdom national service aiding the discovery, creation and preservation of digital resources in and for research, teaching and learning in the arts and humanities. It was established in 1996 and ceased operation in 2008.
Transdisciplinarity connotes a research strategy that crosses many disciplinary boundaries to create a holistic approach. It applies to research efforts focused on problems that cross the boundaries of two or more disciplines, such as research on effective information systems for biomedical research, and can refer to concepts or methods that were originally developed by one discipline, but are now used by several others, such as ethnography, a field research method originally developed in anthropology but now widely used by other disciplines. The Belmont Forum elaborated that a transdisciplinary approach is enabling inputs and scoping across scientific and non-scientific stakeholder communities and facilitating a systemic way of addressing a challenge. This includes initiatives that support the capacity building required for the successful transdisciplinary formulation and implementation of research actions.
Design methods are procedures, techniques, aids, or tools for designing. They offer a number of different kinds of activities that a designer might use within an overall design process. Conventional procedures of design, such as drawing, can be regarded as design methods, but since the 1950s new procedures have been developed that are more usually grouped together under the name of "design methods". What design methods have in common is that they "are attempts to make public the hitherto private thinking of designers; to externalise the design process".
Design management is a field of inquiry that uses project management, design, strategy, and supply chain techniques to control a creative process, support a culture of creativity, and build a structure and organization for design. The objective of design management is to develop and maintain an efficient business environment in which an organization can achieve its strategic and mission goals through design. Design management is a comprehensive activity at all levels of business, from the discovery phase to the execution phase. "Simply put, design management is the business side of design. Design management encompasses the ongoing processes, business decisions, and strategies that enable innovation and create effectively-designed products, services, communications, environments, and brands that enhance our quality of life and provide organizational success." The discipline of design management overlaps with marketing management, operations management, and strategic management.
Leonard Bruce Archer CBE was a British chartered mechanical engineer and Professor of Design Research at the Royal College of Art (RCA) who championed research in design, and helped to establish design as an academic discipline.
Design thinking refers to the set of cognitive, strategic and practical procedures used by designers in the process of designing, and to the body of knowledge that has been developed about how people reason when engaging with design problems.
The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of Humanities, Letters, Law, and Sciences. The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of European interests in national research agencies.
The Australian Academy of the Humanities was established by Royal Charter in 1969 to advance scholarship and public interest in the humanities in Australia. It operates as an independent not-for-profit organisation partly funded by the Australian government.
Intute was a free Web service aimed at students, teachers, and researchers in UK further education and higher education. Intute provided access to online resources, via a large database of resources. Each resource was reviewed by an academic specialist in the subject, who wrote a short review of between 100 and 200 words, and described via various metadata fields what type of resource it was, who created it, who its intended audience was, what time-period or geographical area the resource covered, and so on. As of July 2010, Intute provided 123,519 records. Funding was stopped in 2011, and the site closed.
Design history is the study of objects of design in their historical and stylistic contexts. With a broad definition, the contexts of design history include the social, the cultural, the economic, the political, the technical and the aesthetic. Design history has as its objects of study all designed objects including those of architecture, fashion, crafts, interiors, textiles, graphic design, industrial design and product design. Design theorists revamp historical techniques and they use these aspects to create more sophisticated techniques of design. It acts as a tool to better future aspects of design.
The arts are a very wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling and cultural participation. They encompass multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both highly dynamic and a characteristically constant feature of human life, they have developed into innovative, stylized and sometimes intricate forms. This is often achieved through sustained and deliberate study, training and/or theorizing within a particular tradition, across generations and even between civilizations. The arts are a vehicle through which human beings cultivate distinct social, cultural and individual identities, while transmitting values, impressions, judgments, ideas, visions, spiritual meanings, patterns of life and experiences across time and space.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the humanities:
Merz Akademie is a non-profit university of art, design, and media, located in the Berg Kulturpark of Stuttgart, Germany and was established in 1985. Its roots lie in the "Free Academy for Recognition and Design" founded in 1918 by reformist pedagogue Albrecht Leo Merz. Under the direction of Markus Merz, University Rector from 1983 to 2016, the facility received state recognition in 1985. Martin Fritz took over as Rector from 2016 to October 2020. Maren Schmohl has been the director since March 2021.
Design studies can refer to any design-oriented studies but more formally is an academic discipline or field of study that pursues, through both theoretical and practical modes of inquiry, a critical understanding of design practice and its effects in society.
Harriet Hawkins is a British cultural geographer. She is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is the founder and Co-Director of the Centre for Geo-Humanities, and the Director of the Technē AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership. As part of Research Excellence Framework 2021, she is a member of the Geography and Environmental Studies expert sub-panel. In 2016, she was winner of a Philip Leverhulme Prize and the Royal Geographical Society Gill Memorial Award. In 2019, she was awarded a five-year European Research Council grant, as part of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. She was previously the Chair of the Royal Geographical Society Social and Cultural Geography Research Group.
Henk Borgdorff (1954) is a Amsterdam-based academic, specialised in music theory and artistic research. He is emeritus professor for research in the arts at Leiden University and at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, University of the Arts The Hague (Netherlands).
