A nine-year-old child in the Argentinean city of Córdoba is taken to the hospital and is kept breathing through artificial respiration. 1 A scorpion had crept in through the grate of the shower and stung him. Similar humanscorpion encounters have become more common over the last ten years and have prompted a public campaign on how to avoid being stung.In this chapter we take an interest in more-than-human urban encounters of this kind. We want to understand what it means to share a place, not with cute, cuddly, or majestic animals that are easily visible, but with small animals, insects, and organisms that we instinctively fear will hurt us. The chapter therefore contributes to a growing literature that elaborates methods and frameworks to think about animals as fellow urban inhabitants. This has ranged from following the traces left by water voles and badgers in Birmingham in trying to upset expert ways of knowing the city; 2 to writing accounts that try to sensitize humans to how penguins and flying foxes experience the city of Sydney as "narrative subjects"; 3 and, finally, to draw on media accounts of a tiger, an elephant, and a cow, which fled zoos, circuses, and slaughterhouses, to elaborate on the possible political agency of nonhuman animals. 4 In relation to this literature, our contribution lies in approaching animals that we instinctively fear and, rather than using more traditional ethnographic methods, we use material design as a method of speculating about such more-than-human relations. Design has the advantage of sustaining affective, social, material, and political tensions and possibilities with species that we humans relate to. In this context, the chapter describes and reflects on an alternative shower grate that we designed with the idea of shifting the roles and relations between humans and scorpions toward cohabitation. A central aim is, therefore, to make urban dwellers more aware
The presentation gives an overview of the book Designing for Interdependence: A Poetics of Relating which is about the practice of designing and design’s capacity to relate (or not) to beings of all kinds, human and others, in ways that are life-affirming. Sensitive to power differentials and the responsibility that this entails, the author develops the notion of alter-natives, a concept that exposes the alterity of artificial things and the potential of these things to participate in the sustainment of environments. The notion of alter-natives indicates the alterity of a thing, its own foreignness to environments by being artificial, fabricated by humans. It demands thinking how some-thing alters the relations to those that live in an environment, how it makes them different in some way. It suggests the possibility that these ‘others’ (alterity) may enter a process of ‘nativization’, if they are designed within the ecological and biological constraints of the particular places where they will be used. Finally, the notion of alter-natives does not explain, does not explicate; it demands answers, the implications need to be unfolded, traced, maintained. Alter-natives emphasize vulnerability in order to become life-affirming. The book immerses the reader in a poetics of relating, a semiotic practice of interrelating humans, artificial things and other-than-human species, a design practice that can make us more explicitly dependable on life and communication across species, a designing for interdependence that can support the necessary rewilding that must happen if we are to contribute to the stabilization of planetary dynamics and the affirmation of cultural and biological diversity. By challenging anthropocentrism through design, a practice emerges from questioning human mastery, and thus a poetics of relating is developed by means of a letting go of control acknowledging other-than-human needs and capacities. In this sense the book is about control, at least to the extent that a human can let go of control by designing something that affirms her living. Avoiding dualistic thinking and the dichotomies harmful-benefit, construction-destruction, natural-artificial, and life-death, the author pursues the work of caring for how our mattering through design becomes both, constructive and destructive in more-than-human ecologies.
Challenging the dominant design paradigm that centres humanity in its practice, Designing for Interdependence puts forward an ecocentric mode of designing that privileges a harmonious relationship between all life forms that share our planet. This book is about the practice of designing and design’s capacity to relate (or not) to beings of all kinds, human and others, in ways that are life-affirming. Sensitive to power differentials and the responsibility that this entails, Martín Ávila develops the notion of alter-natives, a concept that exposes the alterity of artificial things and the potential of these things to participate in the sustainment of natural environments. Proposing a design practice that encompasses humans, artificial things and other-than-human species in a ‘poetics of relating’, Ávila provides practices that support the rewilding necessary to maintaining cultural and biological diversity and the stabilization of planetary dynamics. The book features real-life project case studies to illustrate some of the political-ecological implications of an ecocentric paradigm, which can help us to imagine alternative modes of relating to local environments and alternative modes of inter-species cohabitation. Avoiding dualistic thinking and the dichotomies harmful-benefit, construction-destruction, natural-artificial and life-death, Ávila pursues the work of caring for how our mattering through design can become constructive in creating more-than-human ecologies.
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