• Korean Institute of Interior Design Journal
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.10-19
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• 2011

This study is to predict the possibilities of phenomenological spatial design, by recognizing that a phenomenological spatial design brings about a change in the type, regime, role and materials of a spatiality due to the effect of contemporary digital technology and by analyzing their characteristics. Therefore, the study is based on the phenomenology of perception of Morris Merleau Ponty, which has the same concept to contemporary out-of-material and out-of-hierarchical paradigm. The case study has been carried out by selecting some of all works since 1980s, which were influenced by Merleau-Ponty. The analyses were performed by substituting the cases into the spatiality of Situation, spatiality of participation and creation, spatiality of retrospect and prospect, and the spatiality of unpredictability, which were the concept of phenomenological space of Merleau-Ponty for the analyses of features of type, regime, role and material of a spatial design. This article has a great significance in expecting the possibilities of changes of phenomenological spatial design by examining the characteristics of phenomenological spatial design.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.4
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• pp.581-598
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• 2011

The recent revival of phenomenology and aesthetics is deeply connected to the development of neuroscience which studies the nervous system and the brain with particular regard to cognition and memory. How are those fields gathered into building up the basis for the communication not only between human beings but also between humanity and its environment? This paper examines the human mind considered unseparable from the body, with reference to Merleau-Ponty's two major works: Phenomenology of Perception (1962) and The Visible and the Invisible (1968). While reading these texts, I investigate the way he overturns the Cartesian cogito and establishes the body as the ground of perception. According to him, human perception is chiefly obtained through the body rather than consciousness. Influenced by William James, who produced the unique concept of cognition and memory through his experiments with the brain, Merleau-Ponty extends Heideggerian Desein to the field of the embodied mind. James also anticipates Bergson, who regards memory as the product of interaction between consciousness and matter (or the body). The intervention of the body which stores the past experiences makes it impossible for us to capture the present moment in itself. This failure, however, is viewed as positive by Merleau-Ponty because the human body is not only a medium of social interaction, but also that of ecological communion.