Sensing Common Grounds. Towards Collaborative Speculation

How to sense the common grounds of critical humanities and design research? What could be the means for nuanced encounters of knowing and making? While the 2000s were mostly characterized by various forms of differentiation at the disciplinary level and a division of labor between academic fields, the »design turn« (Schäffner 2010) has sparked a vivid exchange between critical thinking and critical designing. In the meantime, the promise of making has emerged as a common denominator of basic research, which now aims at integrative design as the art of the possible. This is by no means a flight of fancy but rather a joint effort to design and negotiate possible futures through the reality of the current ecological predicament.

The symposium »Sensing Common Grounds. Towards Collaborative Speculation«, organized by Léa Perraudin and Martin Müller, asked about the ›how‹, foregrounding the methodologies of such speculations and projections: How to relate speculative design proposals to critical diagnoses of the present and attempts at historical speculation? How specifically can collaborative speculation in inter- and transdisciplinary contexts enable us to sense »what is in the air«? What narratives, prototypes, materials and media hold knowledge (and non-knowledge) of these scenarios? How to unlearn and unmake the predominant modes of world-making by cutting across disciplines, foregrounding embodied knowledges, situated inquiry and extra-academic encounters?

The symposium brought together committed researchers at the intersection of design and the humanities – for sensing and unearthing such new common grounds. The contributions attended to topics and materials as diverse as air pollution, seaweed, paraffin, energy transition, epigenetic memory, robotic worldmaking, atmospheric metabolisms and by means of co-speculation, norm-critique, speculative material histories, scalar translation, post-anthropocentric knowledge production and playful inquiry. In three panels, two impulse talks and a public roundtable event, the speakers examined and critically discussed the disciplinary legacies and critical futures of collaborative speculation. The outcomes of this experimental gathering will be published in an edited volume with Spector Books Leipzig in 2025.

The event is part of the closing activities of CollActive Materials, an experimental laboratory of the Berlin Clusters of Excellence »Matters of Activity« (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and »Science of Intelligence« (Technische Universität Berlin), funded by the Berlin University Alliance.

14 November

Intro: Sensing Common Grounds
Léa Perraudin and Martin Müller (Matters of Activity, HU Berlin)

Panel I: Speculative Histories, Careful Futures, Co-Laboring Worlds
Kristina Lindström (Malmö University): Orienteering Futures

Emilia Tikka (Aalto University, Helsinki)
Speculative Design as Relational Methodology. Tuning-into Ontological Difference in Arctic Reindeer Worlds

Viktoria Tkaczyk (HU Berlin)
A Substance Without Properties? Paraffin and Its Many Stories

Panel II: Research-Creation, Public Imaginaries, Material Metabolisms
Alice Jarry (Concordia, Montreal)
Membranes: Interdisciplinary Porosities and the Precarious Materiality of Air

Julia Lohmann (Aalto University, Helsinki)
Sensing Through Seaweed

Clemens Winkler (HfS Ernst Busch / Matters of Activity, HU Berlin)
Healthy Weather – Imagining the Little Life of Unkissable Airborne Lovers

Impulse Talk: Design Turn Revisited
Wolfgang Schäffner (Matters of Activity, HU Berlin)

Public Roundtable Event, Kurssaal, Zentrum für Kulturtechnik
Claudia Mareis (Matters of Activity, HU Berlin)
Alice Jarry (Concordia, Montreal)
Camilla Andersson (Stockholm)
Julia Lohmann (Aalto, Helsinki)

in conversation with Léa Perraudin and Martin Müller (Matters of Activity, HU Berlin)

15 November

Impulse Talk: Robotic Worldmaking as Co-Speculation
Christoph Engemann, Alex Schmiedel, Florian Sprenger (RUB Bochum)
What is it like to be a Robot? A Speculative Experiment in Scalar Translation

Panel III: Design Politics and Planetary Design Legacies
Camilla Andersson (Stockholm)
Materializing ›technologies of power‹: norm-critical and speculative explorations of design as (re)production of norms

Aylin Yildirim Tschoepe (FHNW Basel)
Designing as Worlding. Multimodal Explorations, Design crossing Sciences, Collaborations in the Ecocene

Johanna Mehl (TU Dresden)
KIDSSTUFF. A Critical History of Experimental Play in Design Research