Design and Grace
An Ahuman Odyssey
Time: Thu 2024-06-13 13.00
Language: English
Subject area: Art, Technology and Design
Doctoral student: Erik Sandelin , Arkitektur, Konstfack, Art, Technology and Design
Opponent: Professor Alex Wilkie, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
Supervisor: Professor Martín Ávila, Konstfack; Universitetslektor Helena Pedersen, Göteborgs universitet
QC 20240524
Abstract
Design is conventionally comprehended in terms of making new things; designers act through addition and intervention. But, in a world where human activities often violently constrict the lives of others, how can designers also cultivate creative acts of withdrawal, foreclosure and leaving be? This dissertation employs grace – actively not doing what you are able to do – to decouple action from force and passivity from resignation in design.
To explore the friction between design and grace I conduct practical design experiments, and use theoretical tools from Michel Serres, Patricia MacCormack, Simone Weil, and from critical animal studies. The dissertation operates in the nexus of two emerging design landscapes: design and animals, and design and negation. Through recomposing situations where humans consume other animals (eating, angling and shopping) the experiments seek to populate a growing palette of affirmative nos and nots in design.
The design experiments are fuelled by operative prototypes, multitemporal events in which life and representation, activism and investigation, bleed into each other. Four ahuman operators activate and communicate the experiments. Bully goes fishwatching to capture fish on camera instead of on a hook. Addict attends meat addiction hypnotherapy to stop eating animals. Allergic becomes physically incompatible with consuming animals. Odysseus blocks themselves from buying animal products, petrol and plane tickets through binding pacts.
By working towards more supple human-animal relations, the experiments critically interrogate and enrich key notions of contemporary more-than-human design: entanglement, proximity, hybridity and care. I argue that designers need to develop interdependent disentanglements, attentive hesitations, expressive incompatibilities and careful self-bindings, to be able to oscillate between standing with the other in solidarity and graciously leaving the other be.
Design and Grace tends to a friction at the core of design, that between proposing and imposing. It seeks to provide designers and design researchers with confidence, precision and generative exemplars in envisioning and manifesting vital, effective and beautiful nos and nots.