Designing in Times of the Anthropocene

Alexandra Arènes is Doctor in Architecture from the University of Manchester. She co-founded Studio SOC (Société d’Objets Cartographiques) in 2016 to produce maps, workshops and exhibitions. The studio designed an installation at the ZKM Museum in Karlsruhe for the exhibition Critical Zones. Observatories for Earthly Politics curated by Bruno Latour. She co-authored Terra Forma, a book of speculative maps published by the MIT press in 2022. Her research and practice address the understating and representation of landscapes in the context of climate change, through her thesis »Design at the time of the Anthropocene: Reporting from the Critical Zone«.

Could the Anthropocene be the result of an anthropocentric understanding of our environment? If this is the case, how can we overcome this view and move towards an alternative one? This talk will attempt to bring a new perspective to the understanding of landscapes through the sciences of the critical zone. This understanding shifts the human-centric focus and provides previously unexplored dimensions of nature entities that were taken for granted or appeared as a background of human activities. The research in the critical zone observatories is combined with collaborative work with scientists in order to visualise the complex processes at work in this critical zone. Thus, new representations of these landscapes have been constructed, both through the creation of new reference systems and methods of sharing knowledge.

El Hadi Jazairy is an Associate Professor of Architecture and the Director of the Master of Urban Design at the University of Michigan. He is a founding partner with Rania Ghosn of the studio DESIGN EARTH. His research investigates aesthetic forms of environmental engagement to visualize how urban systems transform the Earth. The work of DESIGN EARTH is in the permanent collection the Museum of Modern Art in New York and has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Bauhaus Museum in Dessau, the Times Museum in Guangzhou, SFMOMA and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Jazairy is co-author of Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (3rd ed. 2022; 2018), The Planet After Geoengineering (New York: Actar 2021), and Geographies of Trash (New York: Actar, 2015). He is the founding editor of New Geographies and editor-in-chief of NG 4: Scales of the Earth (Harvard GSD, 2010). Jazairy holds a Doctorate of Design from Harvard University, a Master of Architecture from Cornell University, and a Bachelor of Architecture from La Cambre in Brussels. Jazairy is the recipient of the United States Artist Fellowship, Architectural League of New York’s Prize for Young Architects + Designers and ACSA Faculty Design Awards (2014, 2017) for outstanding work in environmental design fields as a critical endeavor.

Read more: https://design-earth.org/ Instagram:_designearth

How do we make sense of the Earth at a moment in which it is presented in crisis? In this talk, I engage the speculative project—as expounded through drawings, models, and material artifacts—as one possible medium to reassemble publics around representations of the Earth. The project here becomes a medium that critically synthesizes spatial knowledge across scales to speculate on how to live with the many forms of environmental externalities, including oil extraction, deep-sea mining, ocean acidification, air pollution, space debris, and a host of other social-ecological issues. The talk is an exploration of media devices to exhibit the Earth — terrarium, aquarium, planetarium through three projects from Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment.

Mitch McEwen is a multifaceted architectural designer with international experience. McEwen also teaches at Princeton School of Architecture, where she directs the architecture and technology research group Black Box, exploring mixed human-robotic processes in design and construction. She is one of ten co-founders of the Black Reconstruction Collective. McEwen's design work has been commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art and the Venice Architecture Biennale US Pavilion, as well as awarded grants from the Graham Foundation, Knight Foundation, and New York State Council on the Arts. Prior to founding Atelier Office, McEwen earned experience on complex large-scale projects at New York City Department of City Planning and Bernard Tschumi Architects, as well as independent collaborations. Hands-on experience includes waterfront development, media zones, museum design, mixed-use neighborhood frameworks, and non-profit community space. McEwen holds a Master of Architecture degree from the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and an undergraduate AB in Social Studies with a minor in Economics cum laude from Harvard.

What needs to be abolished to make another planet possible - a non-European planet? How can the planet be inhabited as not natural or European but fugitive? Where and how do we encounter the planet escaping us, escaping Europe, escaping nature, escaping commodification? I'd like to consider what it is (again and again) to lose a home. (Moten). If ecology always returns at some level to home/house/planetary home, locus, systems at home-- what nested techniques are we committed to for our home systems in the world-- for systematizing home and homing the systems we live in? And how can we escape this, too? What forms of planetary underground hint at this fugitive planet, whisper about it, show itself in codes in ways that might demand something other than architecture?

Damian White is Professor of Social Theory and Environmental Studies and former Dean of Liberal Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design. He has been working on climate, environmental and labor issues since the early 1990s in the UK and the US. Most recently he co-organized a RISD Brown/Conference/lecture series on Climate Futures, Design and the Just Transition. Damian received his PhD in environmental sociology from the University of Essex in 2001. He is the author of among other publications. Bookchin-A Critical Appraisal (Pluto Press, UK/University of Michigan Press USA, 2008) and Environments, Nature and Social Theory: Hybrid Approaches (Palgrave Macmillian, 2015) - with Alan Rudy and Brian Gareau. He is presently working on a book entitled Imagining Just Transitions: Design Politics, Labor and Post Carbon Futures. He can be contacted at dwhite01 [​at​] risd.edu.

The field of inquiry that has variously been referred to as »ecological«, »sustainable« and »green« design has stimulated an enormous supply of ideas, propositions, prototypes, schemes and dreams for not only imagining but materializing other worlds and other social ecologies over the last number of decades. However, while abstract »Nature« as muse or model is endlessly foregrounded, the histories and political ecologies that labor has played as an active presence in "the web of life" (Moore, 2016) is rarely systematically explored. More generally, sustainable design studies has had surprisingly little to say about the classed, raced and gendered labor that are necessarily unfolded in all attempts to build and construct just and sustainable futures. How sustainable design might contribute to struggles for environmental and labor justice is often quite unclear. Finally, sustainable design studies rarely has much to say about the power and positionality of designers/architects/planners in the division of design labor as they relate to other modes of design-labor and how this might impact the capacity of coalition building to move a sustainably designed society forward. This talk wrestles with these tensions and issues by considering whether sustainable design studies might have something to learn from past and contemporary attempts to think about a labor-centered approach to design. If design has long been allied with fulfilling the needs of capital, there have been moments in the history of design where socialists, anarchists, feminists, and anti-racist and anti-colonial designers and theorists have proposed visions for how our worlds could be redesigned for more worker-friendly and labor-friendly sustainable futures. As we shall see, this has given rise to a range of different proposals: from design for workers to claims that workers could be active contributors to design schemes. We consider here the strengths and limits of these proposals and reflect on how much they might contribute to ongoing struggles to build post-carbon transitions.

Mika Tosca is a climate scientist, a humanist, an activist. She is an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her current research and public outreach explores the the synthesis of art and climate science and posits that engaging with artists, designers, and makers is instrumental to solving the climate crisis. She spoke about this work as the featured plenary speaker at the AGU Fall Meeting 2022. Mika is an out and proud transgender scientist (she/her pronouns) and a vocal advocate for the queer and trans communities in Chicago and beyond. In 2019 she was interviewed on a segment of Chicago Tonight–on PBS WTTW–about her work combining art and science, and in early 2023 she was featured on a segment of the BBC’s Science in Action.

Valentina Rognoli is Associate Professor in the Design Department at the School of Design, Politecnico di Milano. Here, she studied and began her academic carrier focused on Materials Design. She has been a pioneer in this field, starting almost twenty years ago and establishing an internationally recognised expertise in research and education. For her PhD, she undertook a unique and innovative study on a key but a little-treated topic: the expressive-sensorial dimension of materials of Design and their experiential aspects. At present, her research and teaching activities are focusing on pioneering and challenging topics such as Materials for Sustainable transition; DIY-Materials; Bio-based and biofabricated Materials; Materials from Waste; Materials for interactions and IoT (ICS Materials); Speculative Materials; Tinkering and Biotinkering with materials, Materials Driven Design method, CMF design, emerging Materials Experiences, and material education in the field of Design. She is one of the founders of Materials Experience Lab (2015).

Materials are considered fundamental elements of the design process and have always characterized and influenced the eras of human evolution. The contribution will provide an overview of the primary research on materials for design able to contribute to the vital sustainable transition and can be considered the most promising materials for the post-Anthropocene. It will consider the main aspects of the new materiality that emerge from experimentation and sustainable innovation processes, highlighting those material scenarios that open up solutions for a post-Anthropocene era.
Yesterday the designers focused on the selection of the materials available; today, they can design them for their own needs, helping to find and develop more sustainable solutions. Materials from organic waste, circular materials and those bioprocessed from living organisms are the most promising solutions and valuable tools for planning the transition to the post-Anthropocene.

Martín Ávila is a designer, researcher, and Professor of Design at Konstfack, the University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, Sweden, where he is artistic leader for Design and responsible for the MA Design Ecologies. His PhD work (Devices. On Hospitality, Hostility and Design), was awarded the 2012 prize for design research by The Swedish Faculty for Design Research and Research Education. His postdoctoral project Symbiotic tactics (2013-2016) has been the first of its kind to be financed by the Swedish Research Council. Martin's research is design-driven and addresses tensions in interspecies cohabitation. He is currently working on a project entitled »Material Cultures for Interspecies Cohabitation«, also financed by the Swedish Research Council (2023-2026). His latest book Designing for Interdependence: A Poetics of Relating was published by Bloomsbury in October 2022. See also www.martinavila.com

This presentation 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. It is based on arguments of the book »Designing for Interdependence: A Poetics of Relating«, where 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 arguments immerse us 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 to contribute to the affirmation of cultural and biological diversity.

Ana María is doctoral candidate at UCLA. Under the advice of Susanna Hecht, she is writing a dissertation on the history of urbanization in the Amazon basin, with a focus on the oil urbanisms of Ecuador. In the year 2010, she received a Loeb Fellowship in advanced environmental studies from the GSD for her proposal to develop an open research network devoted to study the infrastructural integration of South America and provide alternative models of intervention, in lieu of the primarily entropic urbanization that follows the deployment of extraction infrastructures, particularly highways. The network became the South America Project and was spawned in close collaboration with Felipe Correa. Ana María has taught design studios and research seminars at PUCE, Harvard, Columbia, University of Michigan, UC Temuco; and has been teaching fellow at the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. She curated the XV Quito Architecture Biennial: Visible Cities, was National Curator for the IX BIAU, and academic advisor for the UN Conference Habitat III. She is currently a member of the Scientific Panel for the Amazon (SPA) convened by the SDSN and the UN. Ana María co-founded Estudio A0 with Jazz Kalirai in Quito (2002). Estudio A0 has designed a diverse array of projects, at all scales, in close collaboration with its clients (private and public), and community partners. It recently won a private competition to design the new Teleamazonas TV station. Its building QPH obtained the first Leed Gold of continental Ecuador and was ranked 8th among the 500 best socio-environmental projects in Latin America at the 2015 Latin American Green Awards. In collaboration with Del Hierro AU and L + A Arquitectos, it won the competition for the Ikiam University campus, which eventually was awarded First Prize in the SDSN Amazonia Infrastructure Award, COP 21, in Paris. Its incremental housing scheme received Second Prize in a Social Housing Competition sponsored by UN Habitat. Estudio A0´s projects have been extensively published. Recent features include 30 arquitectos más relevantes de América Latina (Línea Editorial y Lexus Editores, 2020), Office Design (Booq Publishing, 2019), Company Gardens: Green Spaces for Retreat and Inspiration (Braun Publishing, 2019), and International Houses (Taschen, 2018). Selected works were showcased in the XX Chilean Architecture and Urbanism Biennial, and will be included in the upcoming Bolivian Architecture Biennial.

Kevin Grove is an Associate Professor of Geography at the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies, Florida International University and Editor-in-Chief at Political Geography. His research explores the biopolitics of resilience, with an empirical focus on design-driven urban resilience planning in Miami and New York City, and disaster resilience and development in Puerto Rico and Kingston, Jamaica. He is the author of Resilience and co-editor of Resilience in the Anthropocene (both published through Routledge), and author of numerous peer-reviewed articles in journals such as the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Progress in Human Geography, Security Dialogue, Economy & Society, Antipode, Environment and Planning F, Geoforum, and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.

Designerly Experimentation: Governing Emergent Urban Futures in Post-Sandy New York City. This paper explores what we call urban resilience design as a distinct experimental style of thought and practice in the Anthropocene. Drawing on a case study of the Rebuild by Design (RBD) program in post-Superstorm Sandy New York City, we examine the forms of institutional innovation in public service provisioning that design-driven post-disaster reconstruction facilitated, unpack the forms of power exercised through urban resilience design, and analyze the political and practical limits of designerly innovation. We advance two interrelated arguments. First, we argue that urban resilience design is an ontogenetic practice that immanently generates the world it describes by visualizing, acting upon, and intervening within affective relations between existents. The »innovation« in urban resilience design rests on its ability to transform what exists – materially and ideationally – into functional abstractions amenable to pragmatic synthesis. Second, we argue that despite the designerly compulsion to radically change how systems work, in practice contextually-specific institutional inertia, material infrastructural landscapes and legacies of social struggle limit what design-driven public service innovation can achieve. Overall, we argue that urban resilience design is an ethically and politically charged style of experimentation that is at once highly influential and severely limited.

Gabriele Dürbeck is professor of Literature and Culture Studies at the University of Vechta. Her research fields are German Literature from 18th to 21st century, Environmental Humani­ties, travel Literature, and Postcolonial Studies. She has co-edited the first German introduction into Ecocriticism (with Urte Stobbe, 2015), and Nature Writing in der deutschsprachigen Literatur von Goethe bis zur Gegenwart (with Christine Kanz, 2020). She has conducted the DFG-Project »Narratives of the Anthropocene in Science and Literature« (2017-2020) with numerous publications, e.g. The Anthropocenic Turn. The Interplay Between Disciplinary and Inter­disciplinary Responses to a New Age (Routledge 2020); Narratives of Scale in the Anthropocene: Imagining Human Responsibility in an Age of Scalar Complexity (Routledge 2021, both ed. with Philip Hüpkes) and Anthropozäne Literatur (Springer 2022, with Simon Probst and Christoph Schaub).

Martin Müller researches at the intersection of cultural history and theory, media studies, history of knowledge and science, and design theory. In the Cluster he is a postdoc in the projects Symbolic Material and Material Form Function. Together with Léa Perraudin, he leads the experimental lab CollActive Materials, a joint project of the Clusters of Excellence »Matters of Activity« and »Science of Intelligence«, funded by the Berlin University Alliance under Objective 2 »Fostering Knowledge« (2022-2024). He received his PhD from the Institute for Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, where he has been teaching since 2014. In his dissertation, he analyzes the emergence of synthetic biology and CRISPR as the latest escalation stage in the history of zoopolitics, beginning around 1800 and continuing through the »molecular revolution« in the 1950s to the current 'will to engineer life' in the Anthropocene.

Xandra van der Eijk is a Dutch artist connecting art, ecology and activism. With a specific interest in the influence of the technosphere on evolutionary processes, her projects explore the networked lives of nonhuman actants. Having developed a distinct artistic-scientific methodology, her work aims to decentralize the anthropogenic perspective by re-interpreting a landscape through its materiality. Van der Eijk’s work has been awarded multiple times and is extensively exhibited throughout the world. Her work extends through lecturing, writing, and curating. She is developing and leading MA Ecology Futures at the Master Institute of Visual Cultures (St. Joost School of Art & Design, NL) and is a researcher in the connected Biobased Art and Design Research Group (Centre of Applied Art, Research & Technology, NL) innovating ecocritical discourse and biotech methods in education. She is an associated researcher at Critical Media Lab (FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, CH) co-leading the discussion group “Planetary Ecologies” addressing critical environmentalisms and intersectional metabolics.

Lola Ben-Alon is an Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP, where she directs the Natural Materials Lab and the Building Technology curriculum. She specializes in earth- and bio-based building materials, their life cycle, supply chains, fabrication techniques, and policy. Ben-Alon received her Ph.D. from the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, and she holds a B.S. in Structural Engineering and M.S. in Construction Management from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. At the Technion, Ben-Alon co-founded the Experimental Art and Architecture Lab. She has previously served as a curator at the Madatech, Israel’s National Museum of Science, Technology, and Space. Her work has been exhibited at the Tallinn Architecture Biennale, Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and published in Building and Environment, Journal of Green Building, and Automation in Construction. Ben-Alon serves on the board of ACSA’s Technology | Architecture + Design, and Elsevier’s Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews.

Nonhuman Nonsense work in the embryonic stages of system transformation, in the realm of social dreaming and world-making processes. Aiming to redirect focus to the underlying ethical and political issues, to challenge the power structures that enable and aggravate the current destruction of the (non)human world - allowing other entities to exist. Their work has been presented at the United Nations, in negotiations on the Convention on Biological Diversity. It has been shown at the MU Artspace, Dutch Design Week, Seoul Art Space Geumcheon, ArkDes (Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design), Rhode Island School of Design, Gogbot Festival and the Stockholm BioHackspace. It has been featured in media such as VICE Motherboard, Vogue Ukraine, Gizmodo Earther, Next Nature Network, Makery, Discover Magazine, Dezeen, and they have been invited speakers at the Future Architecture Platform at the Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana, selected as part of the ARTS-Project at the Resilience Center in Stockholm, among others. They are graduates from MA Material Futures at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, BA Design Academy Eindhoven, BA Industrial Design at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design, BSc Engineering Physics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. They are recipients of the Michael Treschow Scholarship, Ulla Fröberg– Cramer’s scholarship, and the iGEM Gold Medal.