Emergent objects: Designing through performance

Abstract

This paper presents Emergent Objects 2, a portfolio of sub-projects funded by the EPSRC/AHRC Designing for the Twenty-first Century (D4C21) initiative. Our focus is on the way interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration allows fluidity and responsiveness in uncertain design contexts. Resisting the Modernist, instrumental conception of design, Emergent Objects 2 does not propose an alternative model for direct emulation. Rather, the aim is to defamiliarise the design process; and to play with its nature and possibilities. The notion of a singular designer is displaced by the notion of a collaborative design process, whereby any participant is an active design agent, partaking in design functions. The paper explores how key performance concepts of play and embodied knowing are employed within our design practices, with illustrations from the three sub-projects: Snake, Spidercrab and Hoverflies.Keywords: collaboration, design process, interdisciplinary, play, embodied knowing, responsiveness 1. Emergent Objects Emergent Objects 2 1 is a portfolio of sub-projects funded by the EPSRC/AHRC Designing for the Twenty-first Century (D4C21) initiative. It adopts an interdisciplinary and cross-sector standpoint to promote new ways of thinking about design and designing from a performance perspective. It involves artists, designers, choreographers, performance academics, computer specialists and roboticists from the academy and the professional sphere.

Making do and making new: Performative moves into interaction design

“…By using the data to build visuals, non-programmers or non-developers gain access to the creative possibilities of the data (Armitage 2009). Such tools enable an exploration of designing through performance (Bayliss et al 2007) as well as research through the performative (Haseman 2006). We may, therefore, begin to build for digitally extended performativity of bodies and of systems around bodies, informed not by speculation, but by the data itself.…”