Multispecies Design

On Friday, March 22nd, 2024, the Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Decorative Arts) launched the new discursive platform »More than Human« with the symposium »Multispecies Design«. »More than Human« aims to explore the complex more-than-human concept from the perspective of the creative disciplines, particularly design, through pop-up exhibitions, lectures, workshops, and discussion panels. The project was curated by Claudia Banz, curator at the Kunstgewerbemuseum and member of »Matter of Activities« and realized together with international contributors from transdisciplinary contexts, among them many MoA researchers.

The kick-off symposium »Multispecies Design« aimed at mapping positions and combines research and best-practice examples from different scientific and design perspectives. Speakers from MoA were Rasa Weber and Maxime Le Calvé.

More info about the project and the symposium with the contributors' abstracts and short bios can be found on the platform's website.

Rasa Weber held a talk with the title:

What I talk about when I talk about diving:
A designer in the ocean

In the face of drastic ecological change, the design discipline has begun to develop immersive and sensitive methods to engage with anthropogenic environments. While the discussion on a multispecies design approach has so far mainly focused on the relationships between humans and other-than-human species in the terrestrial, the marine world has tended to be overlooked in these considerations and often remains tied to the normative myth of »purity«, »untouchedness« and »wilderness«. However, coral reefs in the Anthropocene are facing drastic and potentially irreversible changes. Corals are both an indicator and a measure of impending climate catastrophe. The issues arising from an assessment of current biopolitical measures to conserve and restore coral reefs are the subject of fierce debate between different cultures of knowledge and diverse approaches to conservation policy. This talk explores how the role of design might be able to disentangle the design of artificial, human-made habitats from the normative divide between humans and nature and, through the lens of queer ecologies, establish forms of convivial conservation in intimate contact with coral life and livelihoods.

Maxime Le Calvé spoke about:

The Forests Within and the Brains Without:
Ethnographic conversations with neurosurgery and design at the age of the hyposubject

Ethnographic conversations with neurosurgery and design at the age of the hyposubject Modern neurobiology began by sketching visions of the neuronal forest. Through abstraction, these sketches transformed the scenes into clearly defined networks of connections. These graphic innovations had a defining influence on cybernetics. They also shaped our understanding of brains as computers throughout the 20th century. However, these diagrammatic accounts can make researchers and the public alike forget how little we actually know about the ›forests within.‹ The anthropologist Joe Dumit suggests that taking into account the »alien« nature of nervous cells would lead to a different picture of what we understand as the self. (Dumit, 2014.) In my ethnographic fieldwork, I describe how neurosurgeons contend with neuroscientific accounts of the brain. I also explore how design research can intersect with their ways of navigating the neuronal jungle: what can their scientific art teach us about the more-than-human within?