Designing and Living with Organisms Weaving Entangled Worlds as Doing Multispecies Philosophy

Abstract

The emergence of biodesign opens new ways for textile design and production processes by e.g. using living organisms directly for growing or dyeing textiles. Researchers and designers who engage in such practices often describe their processes as a collaboration with the living. Since maintenance or acts of caring are often fundamental for a successful result, supportive environments for the living are created. However, most of the organisms are only used to carry out a specific task given by the designers' intention, e.g., excreting pigments to dye a piece of silk, and are killed after the successful completion of the "collaborative" project, which is one of the reasons why the anthropocentric perspective remains an integral part of the textile design process. This research aims to challenge the anthropocentrism inherent in textile design methodologies. Drawing from the work of Donna Haraway, in this exploratory paper, I Svenja Keune obtained her PhD with "On Textile Farming" within the ArcInTexETN and recently started her position as a postdoctoral researcher at the Swedish School of Textiles at the University of Borås, Sweden. She received recently an international postdoc grant from the Swedish Research Council for "Designing and Living with Organisms (DLO)". Her research explores textiles as mediators between people and the natural environment, for example by integrating plants into textile structures; another aspect of her research examines the perspectives open up by relating textile design to spatial design, hortitecture, agriculture, permaculture and environmental philosophy.

Education for Sustainability approaching SDG 4 and target 4.7

“…By experimenting with local and wasted sources, the students can map new local possibilities for circular materials by practically experiencing their life cycles as they try to create them. Dealing with and for living organisms (both living materials and bio-receptive ones), students need to face the dynamic abilities of life, eventually developing feeling of empathy and careKeune, 2021); they can directly observe the growth of the materials, see their responses and behaviors to the environment they are exposed, learning about the physical and environmental parameters needed to co-design with the living. Trying to develop a bioreceptive project, aiming at its restorative potential, also gives students a sense of the ecosystem's dynamics and the relationships between biotic and abiotic in a system.…”