1.5 Restaging: Doing and Undoing Post Anthropocentric Design

Corresponding Chairs

Tau Lenskjold, University of Southern Denmark 

Li Jönsson, Malmö University, Sweden

Co-Chairs

Alex Wilkie, Goldsmiths, University of London

Pablo Hermansen, The School of Design, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Martin Carlos Tironi, The School of Design, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Sissel Olander, Royal Danish Academy – Architecture, Design, Conservation

Laura Forlano, Northeastern University, the College of Arts, Media, and Design, USA

Abstract

This theme track reopens an earlier proposition that remains urgently relevant amid proliferating socio-ecological crises and the rising tide of AI technosolutionism. Introduced at DRS 2022 in Bilbao, Doing and Undoing Post-Anthropocentric Design called for a shift away from heroic innovation toward more modest, careful engagements with the complex entanglements of more-than-human worlds. Rather than valorising novelty, this iteration insists on attending to unresolved tensions, returning to questions that resist closure, and learning to stay with the trouble (Haraway, 2016).

Beyond Latour’s (2008) call for designerly caution with Prometheus, the bringer of fire and progress, we have turned towards Epimetheus, the forgotten twin-brother of after-thought, delayed wisdom and care for more than humans. Designing in a Epimethean mode is not about replacing systems wholesale, but reckons with embedded logics, latent possibilities, and unintended consequences. It prompts researchers to reflect on how design might engage with reproduction rather than production, with situated transformation rather than disruptive change. 

What forms of epistemic reuse, affective attunement, and aesthetic sensitivity (Seghal & Wilkie, 2024) might guide such practices? And what prototyping might embrace and refigure planetary excesses (Tironi & Hermansen, 2020) to help us reimagine and redesign what already exists (Jönsson and Lenskjold, 2017)?

Rather than offering closure, this track cultivates reflection, hesitation, and generative doings and undoings - exploring how design might learn to proceed within damaged yet possible worlds.

• We invite contributions that interrogate and extend post-anthropocentric design, foregrounding its aesthetic, sensorial, political, and temporal dimensions, and remain attentive to frictions of interdependence, affective intensities, and structural inequities.

• Examples may include, but are not limited to, forgotten, oppositional or caring practices as well as conceptual figurations. 

Keywords

Post-Anthropocentric design, Progress otherwise, Epistemic reuse, Design un/doing

References

Haraway, D. J. (2016) Staying with the trouble. Duke University Press.

Hermansen, P., Tironi, M. (2021) Cosmopolitical interventions: prototyping inter-species encounters. In Rucker, Stanley; Roberts-Smith, Jennifer and Radzikowska, Milena. (Eds). Prototyping Across the Disciplines. Intellect Books. pp. 22-44.

Jönsson, L., & Ulv Lenskjold, T. (2017). Speculative prototypes and alien ethnographies: Experimenting with relations beyond the human. Diseña, 11, Design and Politics, pp.134-147.

Latour, B. (2008). A cautious Prometheus? A few steps toward a philosophy of design (with special attention to Peter Sloterdijk). In Proceedings of the 2008 annual international conference of the design history society, pp. 2-10.  Universal Publishers.

Sehgal, M. and Wilkie, A. (2024), More-than-human aesthetics: Venturing beyond the bifurcation of nature. In: M. Michael and A.WIlkie (eds), Dis-positions: Troubling methods and theory in STS, Bristol University Press.