6 It Matters What Designs Design Designs: Speculations on Multispecies Worlding
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Michelle Westerlaken
Abstract
Critical contemporary discourses on extinction, climate change and planetary boundaries are needed to counter and reject our current ways of living on this planet. But they often end badly. Therefore, we also need to tell the stories that create openings and generate more desirable alternatives. This chapter contributes to the effort of resituating design as less anthropocentric and much more of a multispecies affair. Following scholars such as Donna Haraway, Timothy Morton, Anna Tsing and John Law, this text does so by unpacking the notion of ‘multispecies worlding’ for speculative design practices that involve other living entities. By carrying multiplicities into design processes and rethinking how other species can become a more deliberate part of our (re)worlding efforts, this text articulates the importance of advancing decolonial design aims to generate interspecies harmonies rather than reinforcing oppressive relations. The annotated illustrations and examples of multispecies design projects that appear in this chapter involve an additional effort in identifying ‘big-enough’ stories and already existing multispecies design speculations. As such, this work offers merely one collection of enactments that can allow further worlding and further design work. Such a repertoire of speculative multispecies design work can thereby knot together different realities, from different actors, that can propose and embody other kinds of worlding relations between species. They thereby slowly but steadily break down existing grand narratives that seem all-explanatory to speculate about different ways in which humans and other species already make worlds together.
Abstract
Critical contemporary discourses on extinction, climate change and planetary boundaries are needed to counter and reject our current ways of living on this planet. But they often end badly. Therefore, we also need to tell the stories that create openings and generate more desirable alternatives. This chapter contributes to the effort of resituating design as less anthropocentric and much more of a multispecies affair. Following scholars such as Donna Haraway, Timothy Morton, Anna Tsing and John Law, this text does so by unpacking the notion of ‘multispecies worlding’ for speculative design practices that involve other living entities. By carrying multiplicities into design processes and rethinking how other species can become a more deliberate part of our (re)worlding efforts, this text articulates the importance of advancing decolonial design aims to generate interspecies harmonies rather than reinforcing oppressive relations. The annotated illustrations and examples of multispecies design projects that appear in this chapter involve an additional effort in identifying ‘big-enough’ stories and already existing multispecies design speculations. As such, this work offers merely one collection of enactments that can allow further worlding and further design work. Such a repertoire of speculative multispecies design work can thereby knot together different realities, from different actors, that can propose and embody other kinds of worlding relations between species. They thereby slowly but steadily break down existing grand narratives that seem all-explanatory to speculate about different ways in which humans and other species already make worlds together.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Front Matter i
- Contents v
- List of Figures vii
- Notes on Contributors viii
- Acknowledgements x
- Introduction 1
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Scaffolding
- Foreword to Part 1 9
- Speculating with Glitches: Keeping the Future Moving 13
- Investments in the Imaginary: Commercial Drone Speculations and Relations 36
- Dystopias for Discourse: The Role of the Artist in a Rapidly Reconfiguring City 66
- New Images of Thought: On Two Kinds of Speculative Realism 80
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More-than-Human Worlds
- Foreword to Part 2 103
- Speculative Listening: Melting Sea Ice and New Methods of Listening with the Planet 107
- It Matters What Designs Design Designs: Speculations on Multispecies Worlding 125
- Edible Speculations: Designing Everyday Oracles for Food Futures 145
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Speculative Ethics
- Foreword to Part 3 171
- Beyond Speculation: Using Speculative Methods to Surface Ethics and Positionality in Design Practice and Pedagogy 175
- Touring the Carbon Ruins: Towards an Ethics of Speculative Decarbonisation 200
- Science Fiction, Reconfigured Social Theory and the Anthropocene Age: Exploring and Thinking about Planetary Futures through Fictional Imaginaries 224
- The Debate 250
- Index 256
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Front Matter i
- Contents v
- List of Figures vii
- Notes on Contributors viii
- Acknowledgements x
- Introduction 1
-
Scaffolding
- Foreword to Part 1 9
- Speculating with Glitches: Keeping the Future Moving 13
- Investments in the Imaginary: Commercial Drone Speculations and Relations 36
- Dystopias for Discourse: The Role of the Artist in a Rapidly Reconfiguring City 66
- New Images of Thought: On Two Kinds of Speculative Realism 80
-
More-than-Human Worlds
- Foreword to Part 2 103
- Speculative Listening: Melting Sea Ice and New Methods of Listening with the Planet 107
- It Matters What Designs Design Designs: Speculations on Multispecies Worlding 125
- Edible Speculations: Designing Everyday Oracles for Food Futures 145
-
Speculative Ethics
- Foreword to Part 3 171
- Beyond Speculation: Using Speculative Methods to Surface Ethics and Positionality in Design Practice and Pedagogy 175
- Touring the Carbon Ruins: Towards an Ethics of Speculative Decarbonisation 200
- Science Fiction, Reconfigured Social Theory and the Anthropocene Age: Exploring and Thinking about Planetary Futures through Fictional Imaginaries 224
- The Debate 250
- Index 256
