The Design Societies Research Unit is hosting the book launch of the edited collection Design For More-Than-Human Futures: Towards Post-Anthropocentric Worlding, published by Routledge. The launch includes a masterclass in post-anthropocentric design and features designers and scholars involved in rethinking design as a practice focused on more-than-human coexistence. 

Design for More-Than-Human-Futures explores the work of important authors in the search for a transition towards more ethical design focused on more-than-human coexistence. In a time of environmental crises in which the human species threatens its own survival and the highest level of exacerbation of the idea of a future and technological innovation, it is important to discard certain anthropocentric categories in order to situate design beyond the role that it traditionally held in the capitalist world, creating opportunities to create more just and sustainable worlds. This book is an invitation to travel new paths for design framed by ethics of more-than-human coexistence that breaks with the unsustainability installed in the designs that outfit our lives. Questioning the notion of human-centered design is central to this discussion. It is not only a theoretical and methodological concern, but an ethical need to critically rethink the modern, colonialist, and anthropocentric inheritance that resonates in design culture. The authors in this book explore the ideas oriented to form new relations with the more-than-human and with the planet, using design as a form of political enquiry

Following the masterclass, a roundtable discussion with the book’s editors and contributors will take place, engaging with the themes of the book and the challenges posed to design by the more-than-human. The book launch will close with a reception with wine provided by the Embassy of Chile in London. 

The schedule of the event is as follows:

• 15:00 Introduction: Towards pluriversal design
• 15:15 Masterclasses: In post-anthropocentric design
• 17:15 Roundtable discussion with editors & contributors
• 19:00 Wine reception sponsored by the Embassy of Chile in London

The book launch and masterclass features Nerea Cavillo, Marcos Chilet, Nicole Cristi, Liam Healy, Pablo Hermansen, Noortje Marres, Sarah Pennington, Martín Tironi, Carola U Marín and Alex Wilkie. 

The event is supported by the Embassy of Chile in London and Routledge.

The chapter ‘Before the idiot, the poet? Aesthetic figures and design‘ has been published in the edited collection ‘Design For More-Than-Human Futures: Towards Post-Anthropocentric Worlding’ edited by Martin Tironi, Marcos Chilet, Carola Ureta Marín and Pablo Hermansen. The chapter is part of my ongoing engagement with what might be called more-than-human aesthetics as well as an interest in conceptual and aesthetic personae for sensitising oneself to issues and practice.

In the chapter, Mike and I introduce the aesthetic figure of the poet and consider how it can complement and combine with the conceptual persona of the idiot as a means to enhance the speculative in epistemic design practices. Employing a case study involving engagement with energy-demand reduction communities by way of a designed research device, the chapter considers how aesthetics invites questions around affect, feeling and the perceptible and how knowing and concomitant epistemic questions are prefaced by aesthetics. That is to say, what we know is always preceded by what we feel – that something must be felt before it can be known. Crucially, the chapter invokes a particular non-bifurcated, more-than-human understanding of aesthetics, drawing on A.N. Whitehead, where affect, experience and feeling are fundamental to the immanent becoming of all entities and phenomena and not simply the extraneous preserve of human actors. The chapter proposes that the role of the poet is to protest against the exclusion of such aesthetics from knowledge practices and to elicit a speculative sensibility and attunement toward the possibilities of the production of existence and new aesthetic values, in this case involving design and experiments in living with energy, technology and the environment.

Alongside Sarah Pennington I have established the Design Societies Research Unit, in the Department of Design at Goldsmiths. The purpose of the unit is to combine and cultivate expertise in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and design in order to engage with technoscientific and environmental matters of concern and care.

On the one hand, matters of concern stress the problematic role of science and technology in the climate crisis and socioenvironmental issues. On the other hand, matters of care points to the acute need to cultivate ways of appreciating other-than-human interests in matters of concern. The question of care and design emphasises our interest in investigating new ways of understanding aesthetics and care enacted in and researched through design. On both counts, the unit seeks to inquire into alternative knowledge and making practices and their concomitant epistemologies, notably activist, decolonial and feminist approaches.

The unit consolidates longstanding expertise in and engagements between Design and STS at Goldsmiths and is committed to supporting the development of new ways of combining inventive practice-based design research with empirical social research. It also provides a platform for postgraduate research students and early career researchers to experiment with new ways of combining design and STS in the form of the Design Societies Studio.

Key to our approach is the cultivation of international research networks with like-minded scholars and practitioners. This involves visiting research visits, co-organising research colloquia as well as developing new research collaborations and projects. 

The unit’s activities involve organising academic colloquia, such as seminars, workshops and book launches, as well as practitioner-led events such as masterclasses and practitioner talks.

The abstract for a forthcoming chapter, co-authored with Mike Michael, in the edited collection Design for more-than-human futures.

Abstract

This chapter introduces the aesthetic figure of the poet and considers how it can complement and combine with the conceptual persona of the idiot as a means to enhance the speculative in epistemic design practices. Employing a case study involving engagement with energy-demand reduction communities by way of a designed research device, the chapter considers how aesthetics invites questions around affect, feeling and the perceptible and how knowing and concomitant epistemic questions are prefaced by aesthetics. That is to say, what we know is always preceded by what we feel – that something must be felt before it can be known. Crucially, the chapter invokes a particular non-bifurcated, more-than-human understanding of aesthetics, drawing on A.N. Whitehead, where affect, experience and feeling are fundamental to the immanent becoming of all entities and phenomena and not simply the extraneous preserve of human actors. The chapter proposes that the role of the poet is to protest against the exclusion of such aesthetics from knowledge practices and elicit a speculative sensibility and attunement toward the possibilities of the production of existence and new aesthetic values, in this case involving design and experiments in living with energy, technology and the environment.