POSTPONED!! Speculative Design Ecologies: exploring relations between humans, non-humans, and artificial systems

Speakers: Dr. Martín Ávila (Design for Sustainable Development at Konstfack Art and Design Institute in Stockholm) and Dr. Henrik Ernstson (African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town & KTH Environmental Humanities, Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm).

  

Based in the emergent practices around speculative design, the seminar will depart from Dr. Martín Ávila’s thesis “Devices” that explored the notion of hospitality and hostility in design ecologies, i.e. the assemblages between human and non-human agents that have emergent properties which we cannot fully control. This will lead into a discussion of the present project “Tactical Symbiotics”  to which Dr. Henrik Ernstson is also contributing. The  project Tactical Symbiotics searches for tactics that can reinforce the interdependence between cultural and biological variation and diversity through cooperation and/or togetherness between humans and non-humans.

Move beyond the comfort zone: three speculative designs

During 2014, Dr. Ávila has worked in Argentina and developed three sub-projects called Doomestics, Dispersal Machines, and Spices/Species. These projects  are organized around questions such as: What if individual households would become parts of a decentred industry that capitalises on humans’ negative emotions to certain animals? What if agricultural machines would maintain the diversity of local ecosystems, helping birds and insects pollinate and fertilize, while producing food for humans? What if we could develop affection for insects and parasitoids that participate in the lifecycles of domestic plants? The projects are design-driven and uses speculative philosophy to make explicit alternative versions of the present or near future. By focusing on relations between humans and natural-artificial systems, the projects strives to de-centre anthropocentric viewpoints to become a platform from which to provoke a possibility to reimagine everyday life.

Doomestics work with the tension established by the ecological need (if we are to maintain biological diversity) to cohabit with beings that are perceived as dangerous, undesirable or disgusting. Among them, spiders, scorpions and bats, to name a few. The project stages a series of products that make these beings visible and integrate them in different ways to everyday urban life. Dispersal Machines proposes interventions in agricultural systems that most humans have no direct relationship to. This project conceives machines that complement, supplement and/or maintain the activities of beings that participate in different natural processes such as the dispersion of seeds or pollen, or the secretion of nutrients to the soil. Spices/Species addresses an intimate level of human relationship with nonhuman beings. This concerns plants eaten as food or used for medicinal purposes and the ecosystem functions they perform through forms of symbioses with, for example, insects and parasitoids.

The projects sketch and engage a diversity of responses that range from the intimate, to completely detached human-nonhuman relations. They still have in common that they affect the diversity of, and our relationship to, urban and agro-ecosystems. By confronting us with alternative realities—and alternative emotions, feelings and shivers—the project aims to open up new, and perhaps surprising ethical and moral dimensions to revalue and re-evaluate our present relations with non-humans.

 

The project strives to formulate a different response to our planetary ecological crisis than those strategies that often sort under terms like “ecosystem services” or “natural resources”. One inspiration for the project can be found in how Michel De Certeau spoke of tactics as practices that evade strategies of power. The seminar will present underlying theory and practical design projects.

—-

Martín Avila is a Researcher, and Senior Lecturer in Design for Sustainable Development at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden. Martin obtained a PhD in design from HDK (School of Design and Crafts) in Gothenburg, Sweden, and has published his thesis entitled Devices. On Hospitality, Hostility and Design (2012). The PhD work was awarded the 2012 prize for design research by the The Swedish Faculty for Design Research and Research Education. Currently working (2013-2016) on a postdoctoral project financed by the Swedish Research Council: Symbiotic tactics. Design interventions for understanding and sensitizing to ecological complexity.