Politics of Design: Exploring the More-than-Human

In a state of ontological crisis, all boundaries between human and machine, nature and culture, and the organic and inorganic have been severely blurred. We find ourselves exhaustively tackling the turmoil of our own designed circumstances, as we emerge to become extensions of the extensions that we built. These are times of curious contrivances, novel natures, inescapable automation and posthuman performances – where human and nonhuman find themselves being entwined, meshed and muddled into new unwitting entanglements. Deeply entangled in this crisis of the Anthropocene, the need to radically reassemble relationships of ecologies and technologies is more vital than ever – to re/think socio-technical practices and re/design modes of convening with our companion species and environments.

Within the framework of this studio class, we will discuss critical perspectives on paradigms of understanding nature, culture and technology, exploring pluriversal approaches to interspecies design. We will explore concepts of beyond-western-centric cosmologies, speculating on organic technologies and the symbioscene. We will practice and formulate critical perspectives on the topic, discovering novel phenomena and shadowing the material regimes of power that we ourselves live within – and drawing on the approaches of speculative and critical design, we will debate and prototype alternative human-nonhuman relationships (with an open source soft- and hardware attitude), integrating critical thinking with designing.

Literature:

• Haraway, D. (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto. Dogs, People and Significant Otherness. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press.

  • Braidotti, R. (2006). ‘Posthuman, All Too Human. Towards a New Process Ontology’, Theory, Culture & Society. London/Thousand Oaks: SAGE. Vol. 23 (7–8), pp. 197–208.


- Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press

- Dunne, A. and Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.