Radical Interdependence: learning/doing with things

METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture, 2022

Starting with the earlier work of Don Ihde, postphenomenological studies in philosophy of technology have been documenting the many ways in which technologies shape human beings' relationship to the world. More recently, Material Engagement Theory (MET), originating from cognitive archaeology, offers descriptions of how human thinking and capacities have been shaped through creative material engagements with the world. Based on a recent collaboration by , this study applies the joint framework of postphenomenology and MET to design research in light of the rising interest in design literature into relational ontologies and embodied practices. The study is built on data from seven case studies of practices in creative engagement with materials and tools, three out of which are reviewed in depth, namely: felt making, make-up, studio camera operation. The cases are analyzed through the joint theoretical lens to identify and describe the human-thing relations as observed in design. We describe such relations as creative and exploratory, materially and socially relational, reciprocally mediated, situated, embodied, and skilled. Our emphasis is on the first three of these six characteristics, emphasizing relationality, reciprocal mediation, and creativity in engagement, as significant contributions of the joint framework to understanding design, making and use in design research. Our conclusion includes a discussion of future research opportunities for studies based on the joint framework.

The goal for this workshop is to provide a venue at CHI for research through design practitioners to materially share their work with each other. Conversation will largely be centered upon a discussion of objects produced through a research through design process. Bringing together researchers as well as their physical work is a means of gaining insight into the practices and outcomes of research through design. If research through design is to continue to develop as a research practice for generating knowledge within HCI, this requires developing ways of attending to its made, material outcomes. The premise of this workshop is simple: We need additional spaces for interacting with and reflecting upon material design outcomes at CHI. The goal of this workshop is to experiment with such a space, and to initially do so without a strong theoretical or conceptual framing.

Products to live with & Prototypes to imagine: Conceptual Design of Everyday Objects, 2018

Designers are now more than ever have possibilities to ask ontological questions to their profession and think of the ethical implications of their decisions. This essay asserts the designer's leading role in making the key choices about the degree of sensitivity embed in the ordinary objects. It takes a closer look to the practices of Conceptual and Critical designers as ones who care about emotional side of people's life reflected in the everyday objects. It does that to trace the ways such approaches might get more attention and support from publics as well as get its own right of the independent voice in design discipline.

professionaldreamers.net

Abstract. The paper discusses the way designers relate to their object of design, and how objects of design unfold in practice. By drawing on science and organizational studies, and with a particular reference to a psychoanalytical debate on the notion of desire, I discuss a detailed case study in Jewellery design and I argue for an ambivalence of attachment between designers and their object of design. Through the analysis, I individualize two basic drivers (lack and plenty) that help to expose to analysis the different ways designers attach to their objects of design as well as how objects of design unfold practices.

Research-in-Progress, 1997

Every design assumes a user, and every user is a body: nerves that fire, joints that flex, muscles that pull. The privilege of defining the body has traditionally belonged to scientific discourse, leaving the study of affect and subjectivity to disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. Recent critical debate among humanists concerning the nature of embodiment, however, along with new research in the sciences, creates serious questions about this Cartesian division of academic labor. The advent of magnetic resonance imaging and related technologies, in particular, have helped trigger a full-scale reevaluation of the nature of consciousness, action and volition. Studies by neurophysiologists such as Francisco Varela and V.S. Ramachandran have uncovered compelling evidence that subjective experience is produced by a set of interrelated systems involving consciousness, the body and the environment; in Varela's own words, "our minds are, literally, inseparable, not only from the external environment, but also from . . . the fact that we have not only a brain but an entire body" (qtd. Rudrauf et al. 40). Given this radical interdependence, theorists such as Patricia Churchland suggest that traditional concepts of voluntary action need to be reassessed. The body may no longer be characterized as a machine under the direction of consciousness, nor consciousness as an analytical engine construing its environment; voluntary action is a co-creation of all three. This paper will argue that design research is in a unique position to address these issues of interdependence, both in subjective ecological experience and in the related creation and examination of the artificial sign tokens that are a central feature of design activity. As designers have long recognized, the boundaries between body and mind, interior and exterior, physicality and subjectivity are permeable. The destabilization of science's ability to maintain a totalizing discourse of self and the body creates opportunities for other disciplines to renegotiate their relationship with scientific discourse. Design research should be at the forefront of these new developments, since its approach addresses not merely objects or experiences, but the whole range of interactions between the two. First, however, it needs to interrogate its own critical practice for the presence of unfounded ideologies of separation.

Temes de disseny, 2022

Multidisciplinary Aspects of Design Objects, Processes, Experiences and Narratives. Springer Series in Design and Innovation 37, 2024

Through an applied research project in the field of contemporary design, the essay identifies and illustrates the passage of three philosophical transitions: the idea of the object as a design project (Flusser, Sottsass, Mendini) – first transition -, crosses over to the realm of the thing (Heidegger, Bodei, Rigotti) – second transition – until it reaches the notion of the hyperobject (Harman, Morton), – third transition – involving human and non-human entities. Through reclaiming for design the possibility of becoming a trigger for divergent thinking, the object acquires new human and dialogic qualities. The transition from the object-function to the object-thought [1] transforms the meaning of the product to the extent that it is no longer a passive element of dialogical discourse but rather the triggering actor of that same process of confrontation. In this perspective, the object transforms from an exclusive commodity with normal function into a thing full of meaning and expressive possibility. Such objects are connected to the individual and the intellectual relationship they establish. From a posthuman perspective, they are narrative subjects of a reflection increasingly striving for a pluriverse coexistence beyond humankind itself. The last transition, to the hyperobject, is illustrated through a design experience at the boundary between these three value transitions. The final hyperobjects designed have their primary meaning and raising awareness around diverse relationships – with ecosystems, beyond the human – unhinging an outdated interrogation idea that sees the object forcibly relegated to the world of practical and tangible consumer commodities.

What would it mean to take seriously Donald Schon's idea of 'back-talk' in designing? Is it merely ventriloquism when the brick responds, as Kahn suggests, to the designer's question, 'What does the brick want?' This paper attempts an account of how that mimetic or animistic gesture could explain how designers manage to create truly new things-in-the-world. To do so, the paper draws on the kind of a-subjectivity that Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen draws from Freudian psychoanalysis; and pairs this with the conversance-with-material-forbearance that Martin Heidegger describes when explaining Aristotle's debate with the Megarians.