Lifeworlds

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Please note: As a concept, Lifeworld has great importance for the design and development of A Place to Study. We need to put the project in motion, however, in order to work out the modes of interaction between actual persons living and working in different lifeworlds and the resources accessible to them through A Place to Study. This process of emergent design may result in significant changes in the structure and function of A Place to Study.

Lifeworlds

A Lifeworld indicates the activities of a living agent, as that agent lives them, not as an external observer views them. We speak of a lifeworld as seating, instituting, and rendering the actuality of phenomenal experience. A life takes place in its lifeworld; lived lives happen in and through its lifeworld.

Why don't we just speak about the world, plain and simple, without qualifying it as the lifeworld? Isn't the world always there, waiting for us with look and listen? But as soon as we start to think about the presence of the world, we recognize that the greatest proportion of it is clearly, always, out of sight, far beyond ear shot. And even what's right here before my eyes, looks very different to you, before your eyes over there. At the very least, the world right there before us brings many relativities and obscurities with it.

Through much of cultural life, context served to make sense of many perspectives on the world. And clever thinkers sent ingenious effort to find precisely what was common to all the appearances.