Frictioned Functionality. Un/Designing Un/Sustainable Matter

Against a background of ecologies in crisis, the interdisciplinary Autumn School »Frictioned Functionality: Un/Designing Un/Sustainable Matter« invited Post-Docs, PhDs and MA students from the humanities, natural sciences and design to work through the conflicted entanglement of materiality, design and un/sustainability, using frictioned functionality as the guiding principle. In the context of this Autumn School, frictioned functionality has been understood as a working concept to reopen other narrative and performative spaces of imagination in and beyond unruly times.

Organizers

Khashayar Razghandi (MPIKG / HU Berlin), Claudia Mareis (HU Berlin), Robert Stock (HU Berlin), James Auger (ENS Paris-Saclay), Joe Lockwood (Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee), Rasa Weber (Zürcher Hochschule der Künste / MOA).

Abstract

From waste management to circular economy, eco-design or net-zero policies, materiality has become a crucial issue for technical, scientific, social and political considerations of un/sustainability. Far from being a simple task to solve, thinking through un/sustainable matter means to appreciate the conflicting implications that come along with the (co)creation of »uninhabitable landscapes« (Tsing 2016: 241). Scientists, designers, politicians, activists and social groups are increasingly grappling with the unruliness of matter as active agent (Gholami et al. 2022; Krauthausen et al. 2022) in their various attempts to ensure survival on »a damaged planet« (Tsing et al. 2017). For the way in which un/sustainability unfolds in and through matter is never universal, straightforward, or smooth, but rather co-produced by diverse and contradictory actors, interests, constraints, temporalities, and spaces. As a result, the practice-based discipline of design starts reflecting on ways of designing for and with more-than-human material networks (Escobar 2018, Wakkary 2021, Redström & Giaccardi 2021). Establishing a debate on the policies of matter, further implies considering growing social inequality, pollution, exhaustion of raw materials (Stengers 2015: 18) as well as techno-cultural practices and their paradigms (Borgmann 2009) and methods of ecological enquiry (Van Dooren 2016). Local initiatives to develop new materials and production strategies that produce much-needed novel situated knowledge are often intertwined in an uneven global circulation of meaning and data, people and resources. Moreover, in the confrontation of harmful pasts and hopeful futures, un/sustainability narratives and practices unfold in an untimely register in which crisis and resilience, catastrophe and rescue seem to collapse.

Against this background, we propose frictioned functionality as the theme of this interdisciplinary Autumn School. We aim to address the conflicted entanglement of materiality, design and un/sustainability within an interdisciplinary setting, using the complicated relations of friction and functionality as the guiding principle.

Hosted by the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity. Image Space Material« at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin the Autumn School is aimed at advanced MA students and PhD students from the humanities, natural sciences and design disciplines with a strong interest in the thematic complex of materiality, design and un-sustainability. We invite participants not only to bring their different academic or professional expertise into dialogue, but also to engage in experimental strategies of collaborative designing and making.

Conceptual Framework

Referring to anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, un/sustainability must be seen as a cultural form and an emergent planetary condition, whose social and material formation is co-constituted by friction (Tsing 2005, 2016). Friction generates tensions within entangled global assemblages (Collier/Ong 2005), including their ubiquitous devices designed for smooth and seamless functionality. What we problematize as frictioned functionality accelerates and slows down socio-technological transformation processes within the comprehensive realm of digital capitalism, globalized (post-)colonial production and supply chains. In the context of this Autumn School, we wanted to understand frictioned functionality both as a working concept to advance towards a problematization of the present, as well as a deconstructive method to reopen other narrative and performative spaces of imagination in and beyond catastrophic times (Stengers 2015).

We aimed to critically shift attention from universalizing claims and a »technocratic, anthropocentric perspective« of sustainability (Alaimo 2012: 536) towards transversal material agencies where matter and living beings are »immersed in flows of sustenance and harm« (Alaimo 2018: 51). With the emerging debate around practically establishing sustainable approaches towards matters of making, a pristine notion of »nature« or »life« has almost unnoticed found its way back into the common debate. However, the clear boundary line between so-called animate and inanimate matter becomes porous (Bennett 2010). Following the designer Collet, we suggested observing these un/sustainable practices of matter through the lens of three areas to reflect on the intra-actions of naturecultures and biological material systems, more-than-human collaborations, and non-/organic ›hackable‹ systems (cf. Collet 2017: 26). This shift will allow for approaching emergent un/sustainable matter as »sticky engagements« (Tsing 2016: 243). Hence, we proposed frictioned functionality as a mode to both localize and unsettle the many »managerial models of sustainability« (Alaimo 2018: 53) and to reflect instead the multi-faceted ways in which the design of un/sustainable matter affects mundane and damaged habitats while providing uncertain conditions for survival.

Structure

Within the six-day Autumn School Frictioned Functionality: Un/Designing Un/Sustainable Matter we practically and theoretically debated the conflicted agency of un/sustainable matter through the lense of multiple disciplinary perspectives from design, the humanities and natural sciences.

Following a shared panel of opening lectures (James Auger, Maxime le Calvé & Jen Clark, Joe Lockwood & Sandra Stark, Lucy Norris, Khashayar Razghandi, Sabrina Bühn, Robert Stock, Rasa Weber, Charlett Wenig ), students worked individually within three workshop tracks in the field.

The three workshops were summarized in a shared presentation format, to discuss the reflections and results in plenum, followed by Aperó and drinks.

Workshop track 1: Rethinking Biological Material Systems

Active Matter: An extensive reflection and a hands-on figuration through the lens of a series of bio-inspired Material-Structure-Function-Ecology-Activity paradigms

Lecturers: Khashayar Razghandi (material engineering), Robert Stock (cultural sciences), Charlett Wenig (design)

In this track we developed a theoretically reflected hands-on figuration through the lens of paradigms of materials, structures, function(alities) and nature/cultures. We aimed to rethink the mentioned paradigmatic boundary conditions to tackle arguments central to the meshworks of active matter and bioinspired design in times of un-/sustainable intra-actions. The speculative inquiry and growth of the projects within the interdisciplinary teams was enriched by participants' interests and their situated research perspectives. This gave us a unique opportunity to connect posthuman feminist approaches (Alaimo, Haraway, Tsing), the active matter discourse of material science and biology, and design thinking and methodologies in an interdisciplinary way. This track entailed a visit to two Max Planck Institutes of Colloids and Interfaces & plant physiology (Golm, Potsdam), discussions around urban farming as multi-species cooperations, as well as wood & bark as un-/sustainable matter embedded in the ruined landscapes of the plantationocene in order to spark a fruitful collaboration among participants.

Workshop track 2: Designing more-than-human collaborations

Dark Fluidity: An immersive exploration of liquid ontologies in practice along the multispecies material ecologies of the river Schwärze

Lecturers: Sabrina Bühn (ecological activism), Jen Clark & Maxime le Calvé (anthropology), Claudia Mareis (cultural sciences and design), Rasa Weber (Design)

Water is typically regarded as invisible matter. The life-giving, political, social and ecological implications of »animated waters« (Vernadsky 1933, Margulis 1990) are central for debating un/sustainable ecological futures. Thinking with/in these liquid ecological futures becomes exemplary for the devastating melancholy of the Anthropocene - a form of darkness that needs to be mobilized by addressing our place as human species within the biosphere amidst the ecological crisis (Morton 2018).

The local river Schwärze (Eng. blackness) provides a liquid lifeline from the urban environment of Eberswalde to the adjacent forest. By observing the river as a contact zone for design-anthropological conversations in the field between multispecies agents and emerging practices of more-than-human collaboration, we immersed in the wet ontologies (Gaard 2001, Steinberg & Peters 2015, Neimanis 2016) of river flows, microbes, algae growth, fisheries, muds, researchers and rubbe

Workshop track 3: Hacking natural-cultural systems

Catching Energy: An intensive examination of the natural and cultural local landscape to identify opportunities for catching energy flows through micro and macro interventions

Lecturers: James Auger (design), Lucy Norris (anthropology), Maxime le Calvé (anthropology)

The workshop was built on the theory of Reconstrained Design: Design practice always happens under a particular set of rules, commonly known as constraints. These constraints may be straightforward and indisputable, such as the force of gravity, the tensile strength of a structural beam, or a financial budget. They provide tangible criteria to be adhered to or challenged.

Constraints, however, also exist in more abstract, systemic or hidden forms, such as legislation, legacy infrastructures or even belief systems; these have become so normalised that they constrain designers to simply designing for or within the dominant paradigm.

The pervasive nature of these grander constraints results in a narrower range of technological possibilities than might otherwise be experienced. They keep the designer on a limited path or trajectory, and in some cases condemn us to repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

References

Alaimo, S., 2012. Sustainable This, Sustainable That: New Materialisms, Posthumanism, and Unknown Futures. PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 127 (3), 558–564.
Alaimo, S., 2016. Exposed. Environmental politics and pleasures in posthuman times. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.
Alaimo, S., 2018. Material Feminism in the Anthropocene. In: C. Åsberg and R. Braidotti, eds. A feminist companion to the posthumanities. Cham: Springer, 45–54.
Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant Matter. Durham: Duke University Press.
Borgman, A., 2009. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Collet, C., 2017. ‘Grow-Made’ Textiles. EKSIG 2017: Alive. Active. Adaptive. Conference Paper. Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands.
Eder, M., Amini, S. and Fratzl, P., 2018. Biological composites—complex structures for functional diversity. Science, 362(6414), pp.543-547.
Escobar, A., 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (New Ecologies for the Twenty-first Century). Duke University Press.
Gholami F., Guiducci L., Yani S. & Razghandi K., 2022. Rethinking Active Matter. Current Developments in Active Materials, Berlin u.a. (De Gruyter), Buch & Open Access, Englisch.
Giaccardi, E., Redström, J. 2020. Technology and more than human design. Design Issues 36, p.33-44.
Krauthausen, K., Friedman, M., Fratzl, P., Schäffner, W. (Hgg.), 2022. Active Materials. Berlin u.a. (De Gruyter), Buch & Open Access, Englisch.
Ong, A., and Collier, S.J., eds., 2007. Global assemblages. technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems. 4th ed. Malden, MA u.a.: Blackwell Publishing.
Stengers, I., 2015. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Lüneburg: Open Humanities Press; meson press.
Tsing, A.L., 2005. Friction. An ethnography of global connection. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press.
Tsing, A.L., 2016. Friction. An ethnography of global connection. In: A. Harnish, N. Haenn, and R. Wilk, eds. The Environment in Anthropology (Second Edition). A Reader in Ecology, Culture, and Sustainable Living. New York, NY: New York University Press.
Tsing, A.L., et al., eds., 2017. Arts of living on a damaged planet. Ghosts of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.
Van Dooren, T. 2016. Multispecies Studies. Environmental Humanities.
Wakkary, R., 2021. Things We Could Design For More Than Human-Centered Worlds. MIT Press.