Politics of Things

In a state of ontological crisis, all boundaries have been ruptured between nature and culture, human and machine, and object and subject. We find ourselves exhaustively tackling the turmoil of our own designed circumstances, as we emerge to become extensions of the extensions that we built.

In this practice-based design theory project, the authors share their experiments in negotiating power with things, hacking mundane objects, and thus their own everyday lives, allowing themselves to be swayed and misled, disrupted and called into question.

The experiments delineate a mode of critical cultural inquiry where design and sociology collide to elicit critical perspectives on the ‘designer’ and the ‘designed’ as we act within an entangled politics of things.

• Political agency of things
• Design as critical praxis
• Praxis-based design theory

Michelle Christensen & Florian Conradi, University of the Arts (UdK Berlin) / Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin)