Experimenting with modalities of practice in complicity with the stuffs of a shared planet.

Patricia, welcome and thank you so much for participating. We will in any case publish a short biography but just to establish a bit of context, you are an artist, theorist, and designer and of course you're the co-author of the Xenofeminist manifesto. I say this because for me and for many of us, that was something that put feminism back into the discourse in such a powerful way that, I think, resonates in the present very much. And that's also something I would love to come back to.

It's funny timing, because it was 10 years ago this month [July 2024] where we all met in Berlin. We published the manifesto in 2015, but we met in 2014 at a summer seminar at the House of World Cultures, all feeling rather agitated and that compelled us to band together and write something.

I’d love to hear more about it, especially in relation to the topic of pedagogy. But we can get there in due course. You're the Co-head of the Critical Inquiry Lab MA in research-based design at the Design Academy Eindhoven.

Yes, and I also mentor student thesis writing. 

Also, you’re a researcher at Antikythera, which is a wonderful project.

Yes, however Antikythera has different research affiliates for specific iterations, so I was an affiliate in 2023. The timing worked out well because I happened to be in Los Angeles for the month of February that year for a few lectures and some teaching, so was able to visit the fellows and meet a few other LA-based affiliates whose work I admire.

And obviously, you have exhibited widely and been published in many journals, books, and on various platforms. There are talks and lectures on YouTube that I've looked into, at Goldsmiths and a couple of other institutions, that are really informative.

Thanks for your kind words, being a freelancer pretty much necessitates a rather hectic pace of activity to ensure the rent is covered! 

For context, I'm an artist, I've been based in Berlin for several years as well. I was at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Daniel Buren and then got another MFA from Goldsmiths. So when I saw your great talks in this lecture hall… I remember that place well, with Suhail Malik and the curating faculty. Fond memories. I spent a year at the Whitney Program in New York, and have been running a studio in Berlin since. I will finish a PhD at the City University of Hong Kong next year and this year I'm a guest researcher at TU Delft with the Ecologies of Architecture research group.

You’ve also been around, evidently, and know how it goes! I share your fondness for the engagements at Goldsmiths, which makes the gutting of that University so depressing – the talent and knowledge generated there has been extraordinary, and it’s sad to see so many incredible colleagues having their hours slashed. Funny you mention the Whitney program, I applied and got an interview many years ago, and they insisted it be done in person in NYC, which was quite an expense for a young artist living in Berlin. I discovered about 5 minutes into the interview that there was no way they were going to accept me, since I was attached to their maligned “French Theory”! In any case, if this conversation reaches younger practitioners, I think it’s helpful to be honest about our many rejections and disappointments along our path, since bios obscure all of that. At least 80% of burgeoning professional experience is learning how to bounce back from the inevitable “no’s” that pepper our trajectory.

I certainly have a couple things to say about that as well, especially when it comes to the topic of pedagogy. And I really like how our dialog is unfolding just now as much more of an open-ended conversation, that is as participation, rather than the notion of observation somehow implied in the logic of the interview. But the Critical Inquiry Lab, can you talk about what is happening there?

Definitely. It's a two-year MA in research-based design within the Design Academy Eindhoven in The Netherlands. It was about ten years ago when tutors and Department Heads started noticing that several students were turning towards writing, criticism and curating alongside making practices, so it was deemed necessary to establish a particular department to focus the curriculum around such interests. The department was born out of that observation (under a different name) and I joined on as a thesis mentor in 2019 when Saskia van Stein became Department Head and changed the name to what it is today. This position was the first time I had ongoing contact with students, since I had being doing more drop-in guest seminars and studio visits until then at a variety of institutions in art, architecture and design. What was, and is energizing about this mentoring position is the engagement with all the different projects driven by student interests, so your mind has to jump from one topic to the next. It’s a welcome role for an indisciplinarian! Despite all the buzz around transdisciplinarity, when one doesn’t quite fit a profile of specialization within the conventions of a discipline, it can be difficult to find an educational outlet. 

When Saskia was appointed as General and Artistic Director of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam in 2022, she took a year sabbatical, so I became temporary department head, and from 2023 we decided to operate as Co-Heads. Now we're a two-headed, hybrid creature running the program after coming to realise this serves the department well because we have complementary skill sets, knowledge bases and networks. She brings in a wealth of knowledge in architecture, design, art, spatial practice, mediation and curatorial practice, as well as insight into the Dutch cultural/political landscape; whereas I bring in theoretical, artistic and scientific angles from other geographies, with significant research interest in geopolitics, political-economy, Carribean thought, trans-feminism, technology studies, cognition, philosophy of computation/AI, and earth system science. We effectively meet at the juncture of a ‘planetary turn’ and through that shared commitment, we have been mingling our brackets of practice in the development of the curriculum for the department. It’s one that we continually adjust considering the rapidly evolving pace of historical transformation we are witnessing – socially, geopolitically, spatially and technologically, and how the field of design is continually re-evaluated in the wake of such changes. That said, curriculum design is a kind of abstraction and it’s value is dependent on having it activated by our team of tutors and practitioners in order for it to be meaningful for students. We’re incredibly fortunate to work with an excellent team of dedicated practitioners who respond to curriculum visions and develop studios, briefs and classes that bring it to life in tangible, actionable ways. Our students also reciprocate with regular feedback and dialogue, and due to the flexible structure of the program, we can also introduce topics, lectures, field-trips and interlocutors on-the-fly, as certain interests from a student-group emerge over the course of their collective study. We’re a relatively small department with roughly 30 students in total, so we’re able to maintain open communication channels which is essential in interfacing the ‘map’ of the curriculum with the everyday ‘territory’ of practical, lived student experience.

The Critical Inquiry Lab is medium agnostic, so our students work in a variety of formats and materials, with the idea that research-driven practices can take on multiple forms, depending on the context of dissemination. For instance, a research project can manifest in a documentary film, a podcast, a curatorial staging, a performance, an installation, and so on, so we encourage iterative making and thinking across a spectrum of mediums. Perhaps it’s also worth mentioning, that our students stick to the same group over the course of their study, so there’s quite a collective and supportive dynamic at play that they foster on their own terms, which is very different from working with student-groups who are otherwise taking classes in a scattered, autonomous format of study. 

Our first year students pursue an array of guided studios, theory modules, lectures, writing seminars, and workshops to introduce them to diverse set of discourses, analyses, artistic/design research activities, dissemination mediums, material practices and concepts, in order for them not so much to ‘find’ their voice, but to craft it within the topical problem spaces that serve as a milieu for their making and thinking. Our second-year students set out a course of research under their own thematic and methodological terms (with individualized mentorship, interspersed by seminars and workshops, as well as self-organized discursive events) that help them initiate, organize and pursue a particular theory-praxis pathway of their choosing over the course of a year, culminating in a written thesis, a material project, and a self-curated group exhibition for public mediation. 

We oscillate between collective and individual production in our first year, for the primary reason that contemporary challenges of our time are far too complex for a single practitioner, and demand skills in transdisciplinary collaboration, from experience in negotiating team dynamics, to listening and taking in various angles of expertise, to the negotiation of decision-making within a group, delegation of project asks, and so on. Above all, with our first year of study we want to create an openness to a wide palette of research-based design possibilities and discursive concerns, getting students adept at working between formats, sites, mediums, disciplines and methods. We see this process as a way to become ‘co-autonomous’ in the second year of study, which is not to rehearse a fetish for the singularity of authorship, but to also cultivate a social-ecology as an integral facet scaffolding independent research initiatives. 

What’s unique about being ‘critical’ in a design context compared to academia, is that we’re not only in an discursive register, but operate more along the lines of what Chakanetsa Mavhunga called a “critical thinker-doer”. This entwinement with the ‘doing’ of a design academy is welcome breath of fresh air because academic ‘critical theory’ often remains purely in a diagnostic space, reluctant to risk propositional positions (which are entirely different from proposing ‘solutions’). On the flip side, the most trivial picture of design we work against, is that it’s a field that invents solutions to given, self-evident and predefined problems. The synthesis of critical thinking-doing, demands rather a robust articulation of the problem space itself, a crafting of a diagnostic milieu to embed research inquiries, requiring material and methodological experimentation to follow-through upon the logics of said diagnostics in realizable ways. By moving between the craft of analytical diagnostics and propositional realizability, we also challenge some of the unhelpful caricatures of ‘speculation’ in design that, in otherwise admirably seeking to escape the muck of given contexts, often do so ahistorically or in a purely ‘ideal’ register, neglecting the material, social and technological path-dependencies that are real conditions constraining/enabling meaningful realizability. For instance, rather than adding to the flood colourful renderings endemic to acritical pictures of design (ones that are now auto-generated with a few prompts), it’s far more pertinent to leverage design-based inquiries that ask how said imaginaries historically emerged as generic clichés via media theory, how do our engagements with them libidinally train us to desire such things or forms of life, and as a result, how may design practices tinker with propositions that denaturalise those desires and the constraints upon possibility inherent to them, and what would we aesthetically encounter from those counter-propositions?

This is spot on in terms of the topic of speculative urban futures: Strengthening design education by collecting and exchanging existing knowledge and experience while developing new methods in the field of design.  That very much pertains to what you just said. My own perspective takes artistic practice as a starting point but at the same time, we would want these boundaries to blur so the distinction might be kind of obsolete.

I agree, our students are borrowing from artistic research approaches as well, so there’s a blurring of the fields in terms of inventing experimental, non-canonized methods, and insisting on a parity between making as a form of thinking, and vice-versa. The main difference is that the background of our students do not typically come from the visual arts, but from industrial design, architecture, graphic design, product design, and we very much welcome curious misfits from other fields as well. One recent project came from a student who had formerly studied constitutional law in Hungary (Viktória Kaslik), and developed a collaborative choregraphic work based on Orban’s authoritarian constitutional rewriting. Another who was working in a visual arts auction house (Janfer Chung), created a powerful and rich archival / autotheory film wherein her family history was used as an allegorical lens for the transformation of Hong Kong following its re-integration into mainland China post-1997. Broadly stated, our students often arrive to the program because they’re dissatisfied with the conventions of design pedagogy they’ve experienced, or other limitations in their field that have become apparent to them throughout the BA or in the early stages of professional life. Many are seeking ways to come into transformative contact with the myriad of issues facing us in this geohistorical polycrisis, and so what we aim to facilitate in the department are points of access into these so-called ‘wicked problems’ as they are often named in design discourses. 

Unfortunately however, terms like ‘wicked problems’ can come to act as euphemisms for impenetrable complexity, so I think it’s our task as educators to establish programs that demystify such complexity by constructing access into resonant issues of our moment in scale-sensitive ways, without withdrawing from, nor overly simplifying them. For example, one of our studios (Moving Matter, led by Zuzanna Zgierska) has been partly inspired by the anthropologist Gabrielle Hecht’s ‘interscalar vehicle’ methodology, wherein she departs from a uranium-bearing rock in Gabon, and from that very local object, can travel across human and geological time scales, liaise West African geographies with Japan and France, narrate colonial, technological and chemical histories, all the while addressing the political economy of mining, material extractivism and present-day toxic labour exploitation. Such a method enables transits across materials, temporalities, societies, and geographies in accountable ways, while it introduces a perspectival shift towards the stuff populating our world, and how each material thing contains within it an expansive trans-scalar narrative. Seeing material specimens as comprised of a myriad of human and inhuman energetic exchanges, allows designers to consider the forms of agency said materials possess relative to their physical morphology and chemical composition. Considering materials in this way, unsettles a Euromodern picture of design as an activity of mastery over earthly matter, and highlights a metabolic interaction, similar to what Reza Negarestani called a ‘complicity’ with materials. Rather than sticking to a sheer critique of design from a Euromodern framework, we experiment with forms of practice to enact, make and think from without this historical disciplinary legacy of mastery over, but complicity with the stuffs of our planet.

There might be terminology and other things that are a little bit different from how we use them in art, and in teaching studio classes. I think of it like a project or challenge for me to sort of shift my perspective or, on the other hand, introduce students to artistic approaches or certain methodologies that might then actually be useful in their field and their practices.

I agree. I think this perspectival shift you mention is crucial, since it not only implies a shift of position in viewing something, but the speculative question of what it means to commit to the consequences of that new perspective in forms of making. What are the different sets of constraints, materials, ethics, processes, etc., that emerge because we no longer ‘see’ (I prefer sense) from a former perspectival position? I love that problem postulated by Kierkegaard: how to live in the consequences of an idea? It’s a very difficult question that summons a parity between knowing of and knowing how that feminist epistemologies have been insisting on for decades. Translating that into research-based design, it’s not about the illustration ideas, nor the sheer transmission of information, but the imagination of worlds structured by those unfamiliar pre-historical ideas, the ethical gestures and material artifacts that make sense from within those worlds of thought. What I appreciate working more within design and architecture these days, is there’s less of a fight about functionality, insofar as the narrative I was educated in from the visual arts, was that we were ‘superior,’ because of our functionlessness – a deeply problematic self-narration that claims critical relevance while disavowing function. I’m oversimplifying of course, but I never understood how this was even logically possible. It’s welcome that within art discourses today there seem to be more interest in developing a functionalist account, shedding some of its former self-inflationary romanticism.

I remember many conversations on this claim of art as having no function. This would be a separate and interesting topic in its own right. Perhaps we can touch upon it, but I completely agree. And I suppose if you look at practices like, for instance, Tania Bruguera, who specifically calls her practice arte util, as in useful art, that indicates something. And whatever that functionalism is, I think that we have to think about that and develop it further. It's something I’m certainly trying to do in my own teaching.

One thing I'd be very interested in, because this may also help in establishing something, are your influences concerning pedagogy. Are there any formative influences for you in terms of how you approach education and pedagogy, within the field of the institutions and schools, or completely outside, early or later. I mean, if I think about it for myself,I remember many conversations with Daniel Buren on a project in Paris during the 90s, which was called the Institute des hautes études en arts plastiques. It was founded by the curator Pontus Hulten in the late 80s, and it was operational for about 10 years. It was an independent one-year program, you could call it a school. They brought in people from all kinds of fields, from the sciences, the humanities, practitioners, everything. And it produced artists who then went on to develop these really great interdisciplinary experimental practices. And that, for me, made me question how the established institutions work - compared to a more sort of independent, small and flexible, and perhaps also in certain regards more political approach. So that's one and then obviously I could talk about the Whitney, but maybe more so actually in terms of the people. Someone like Mary Kelly, who, if had to pick someone, maybe it would be her, such an important influence, who for me brought feminism back to the table, like you did a couple of years later.Or people like Gregg Bordowitz. And then, historically, looking into Bauhaus or Black Mountain College. And as far as Bauhaus is concerned, the curator Marion von Osten, she has done this amazing work on it. Sadly, she passed away a couple of years ago. So, it's a broad topic and this is some of what I recall for myself. And obviously there are new influences that come in all the time. I wonder what influenced you in that regard?

I think we all have memories of the people who significantly impacted us throughout our own education. It’s a strange imposter feeling the first time you’re in that teaching role, and try more consciously to reflect on how those meaningful educators organized their classes and how they approached students. The most enduring lesson from these figures was that they never attempted, nor desired for their students to become disciples, but were seeking to empower us, often through the quite frontal critiques and meticulously dissecting our ideas and works. Beyond the occasional bruised ego, these educators were taking us students seriously, at eye level, and not as naïve underlings. This had the effect of setting a tone of creative and intellectual maturity because we were being treated as serious people, yes, fumbling with ideas and processes as with anything unpracticed, but as burgeoning practitioners worthy of critical investment. When that sense of worth is imparted, the ambitions one cultivates for oneself become far more important than chasing after a grade. This ethos of pedagocical empowerment seems all the more important for the pursuit of creative work, which is not about fulfilling the expectations of others, but learning how to work with and through the uncertainty any new project, idea, or process entails.

The best thing an educator can impart to students is an insatiable desire to learn, the skills to pursue that desire, and the humble confidence required in creative work to experiment with unfamiliar tools, techniques and processes, which is always somewhat autodidactic. We certainly didn’t have the star-power of some US institutions in Canada, but I was fortunate to have experienced a handful of excellent professors who were incredibly encouraging and generous with their time, feeding me additional references and readings upon expressing eagerness, effectively trusting in a student’s capacity for autodidacticism. That’s an invaluable lesson in intellectual generosity and nourishing an appetite for self-education. What I came to see many years later, was that this generosity demonstrated that autodidacticism doesn’t take place in a silo, but is incredibly social and discursive, revealing that the pursuit of creative work – even if carried out as a singular author – is wholly dependent upon a supportive and enriching context that requires maintenance. This gestures to the consideration of one’s work in an ecosystemic way beyond a single project; not only about making stuff and writing texts, but participating in one’s milieu, where sometimes that means taking on a supporting role, working adjacently to one’s practice, or orchestrating contexts for exchange. In this way teaching and setting curricula are not a distraction from one’s personal creative work, but are a means of participating in the meta-questions of our field, establishing cross-generational interaction and creating conditions for research by other practitioners to take root.  

Those implicit lessons in social autodidacticism from art school have stuck with me, and another figure who was inspiring as a burgeoning theorist was Manuel DeLanda. A (once) film-maker who literally devoured the contents of the New York Public library with no philosophical training, and ended up writing A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. It’s hard to fathom a trained philosopher in the 90’s would have ever written such a book, and that’s hugely instructive since it shows the significance of what an untrained, yet wildly rigourous mind can bring to a discourse, or what working adjacently can yield, since the pursuit of practice in whatever discipline can be quite conservative when strictly adhering to its rules, canons and methods. 

I would also say that the city of Berlin has been incredibly nourishing because there are so many discursive forums, screenings, readings, exhibitions, and a large community of engaged artists and thinkers who keep the scene active and tenacious. This is now under threat due to the sky-rocketing costs of living here in the last 8 years, and the defunding of culture, so it feels this ‘scene’ is slipping away quickly, particularly in our recent extreme funding cuts to cultural spaces, notably those initiated by non-Germans. What is worrying today, is that for Gen Z (the generation of students I typically work with), those indirect, wandering paths of self-development in creative and intellectual registers are far less evident and hospitable. The pressures today are immense, even for relatively priviledged students. The cost of living in most cities is staggering, many students are coping with significant precarity, we witness egregious dehumanizing violence daily on our timelines, and this generation is inheriting a world on fire. Much of which is met with a widespread geopolitical response underdirded by neo-fascist tendencies, and students are just aware of all of this as their educators, so sugar coating this predicament is dishonest. Without falling into a trap of morose doomism, nor painting a hopeless picture, it’s important to recognize, and grapple with these generational differences in conditions in order to discover practical inroads against a sense of immobility. What is inspiring, is that this generation seems to implicitly understand that working creatively in such inherited conditions is entirely dependent on participating in support structures - that despite their often informal quality, they are hugely formative in sustaining one’s energies over the long haul. It’s joyful to see students support one another, and this is certainly a significant difference to the dominant vibe of art school of my generation in North America, which was ruthlessly competitive and that acritically echoed a self-made, go-it-alone imaginary of ‘being an artist’.

I recall early on this high degree of atomization and everybody's sort of fighting for themselves. In a way it is reflected in the whole idea of the crit as in poking holes in each other's practices. And then, again, discovering someone like Mary Kelly, who took a completely different approach to it, which is all based on this notion of listening and that, for me, was transformative. About as transformative, I would say, as later, for instance, someone like Erin Manning, whose work has been incredibly important for me, specifically from the perspective of pedagogy.

I was thinking about another professor that was influential for me, Liliana Berezovsky. She’s a sculptor in Montreal, and she described her crits as getting in the shoes of the student. I’ve always taken that with me, not to impose my research interests, nor artistic methods, but to help students discover, understand, articulate and work from the problem-spaces of their own practice-based predelictions. The master-disciple model of art and design education is dismally boring! It’s much more exciting to witness students, particularly at the level of an MA, come to cultivate their voice after a period of uncertainty and struggle, to arrive at unexpected positions and works in their own terms. At the start of the year I typically say that students will eventually be the ‘teacher’ of their research topic, and it’s rewarding to see that click emerge over the year. One of the strengths in our program is that our students work with a wide variety of mentors and practitioners, so it is not directed by an impulse of ‘master’ mimesis, but rather encounters with, and exposure to diverse ways of working that negotiate the techno-social and ecological realities of our time in different ways.

This was certainly completely reinforced and perpetuated in my early studies. It allowed me to work with someone like Buren for a couple of years, which was wonderful, but at the same time, the whole model, as you were saying, it's very questionable.

What’s rewarding is that often students surprise you. Like when mentoring, and you’re not exactly sure where a research-based project is going, and then a corner is turned by the student and you see the relevance clear as day. Playing a humble role in nurturing their self-directed turn is perhaps the best part of working in education, when we see the students witness their own transformation and maturation, and gain a self-consciousness of their practice in that process.

Definitely. I meant to relate this to how the notion of education is connected to the future. One thing that was a transformative moment for me was when Gregg Bordowitz talked about his education, or rather the lack thereof. He became HIV positive in what must have been the late 80s. Much later, as a full professor, he said his highest degree is a high school diploma. We know why, right? Because there was no future at the time. Why would you even go to university? You had to fight to get treatment, because the government wasn't doing anything. And this denial of a future makes a formal education impossible as much as nonsensical. Oftentimes I think we take a future for granted in certain ways, some kind of future, right? At least I did to a certain extent. And that was a moment where I thought, wow, a future isn’t guaranteed, it must be fought for. So then, what do you do? What are the implications of that for education? You know, what Act Up did back in those years collectively and in solidarity, which, of course, was way before my time, was so much more important than any PhD could ever have been, and yet the institutions could never have integrated that. And I think that, for me, is a thing I keep thinking about. I have no solution to this. But how does this notion of a future factor into our notion of education?

That’s an amazing point, and a really helpful reading of Act Up vis-a-vis institutionalized education and its political limits. Perhaps this echoes an earlier worry about what Gen Z is facing, that the Western post WWII future of guaranteed betterment is no longer tenable, nor believable. And of course, with less naivete we know this promise of future betterment has always been highly partial, coming at the expense of degradations elsewhere. When I took on the Co-Head position, I struggled with this problem, albeit framed in a different way, asking what it means to design pedagogies for an end-of-a-world condition, which is very different from the doom of an end-of-the-world? The question of the future seems even more pressing in a design context, since the field has been so discursively, historically entwined with fabricating objects of that guaranteed betterment. I’ve found Suhail Malik’s work on this topic helpful, since he notes how this particular framing of the future figured as guaranteed betterment is not only a Euromodern discursive legacy, but that in such a framing ancestral and descendent commitments and accountabilities are superfluous, because they are unnecessary when futural betterment is ‘guaranteed’. It’s pretty easy to see how, in such a picture of the future, zero accountability is established vis-à-vis ecological and social consequences of actions undertaken in the here and now. What this means is that what may feel as the death of the future, is actually a death of a certain political configuration and discursive framing of the future belonging to Euromodernity, as that which linearly proceeds from the past, through the present. In this sense what we are grappling with is a different historical understanding of the future. While utterly uncertain, this end-of-a-world condition also includes an end to the genre and temporality of futurity that narrated and ‘justified’ the activities of a Euromodern episteme, within and beyond design. So if we witness our current predicament as a juncture between historical world configurations, a re-narration of futurity (as such) is part of this collective world-making project. In Malik’s ‘defuturity thesis’ he argues against ‘futural cancellation’ discourses from thinkers like Bifo Berardi and Mark Fisher, diagnosing our moment, rather, in terms of a surplus of futurity considering the power of finance as a world-making operation, since speculation operationalizes the future before the present, to build the present. His diagnosis helps us critique defuturity authors as implicitly upholding certain historical naturalizations of ‘the future,’ and nudges us to work from without such imaginaries.

Less abstractly, what this unsettling of the concept (and expectation) of the ‘future’ signals, is that we’re increasingly confronted with a pedagogical context for which precedent and disciplinary canons bear less weight. As noted earlier, this is not an excuse for a willy-nilly, a-historical approach to research-based design. On the contrary, it is tangibly working with the path dependencies bequeathed by historical techno-social processes that are also discursive, and that can often be conceptually conflated with a law-like tendency (i.e. that ‘the future’ is guaranteed betterment, that the future comes after the past and present). Institutionally speaking, what’s promising about research-based design and artistic research is that there’s an openness to transdisciplinary work – in fact, it’s encouraged. The issue for us who are designing curricula for students is how to leverage this openness to do this work robustly, to avoid trivial, purely associative borrowings from other disciplines, but truly be contaminated by them in transformative ways. Research-based design education can mobilise this transdisciplinary affordance in empowering ways, where designers are not only makers, but function as relay agents in cross pollination. It would be much harder for a chemist to incorporate developments from art and have it validated as knowledge in their field, whereas one of our students could work with chemistry/chemists and make that a viable process in their practice, for example.

We have a wide aperture of freedom to design and implement our curricula, and we’re housed in an institutional context that emphasises experimentation, so we have space to play and tinker. Considering the unprecedented need for experimentation in design education, this also gestures to a responsibility to create a departmental culture wherein testing things out, having them break, or fall flat as a prototype, needs to be nurtured as part of the process and not something to be feared. It’s much richer to work from risky experiments with unknown, unmastered processes, than having students stick with what they already know, but I see this as a reciprocal demand for the department to create social conditions where that’s welcomed without anxiety, beyond sheer words.

While there’s always a politics inherent to any syllabus or curriculum, the above is certainly quite different from your example of Act Up, and how it could not be enacted via an institution of higher learning. I’m glad you raised this activist proposition, since given the state of things going on geopolitically, there are important questions of how we deal with contentious issues within the educational context, since it’s unhelpful to ignore them or pretend students aren’t impacted by worlds outside of the academy. I think it’s healthy that transformative activism overflows the purview of institutions, especially when it’s student-led. I don’t see the role of education, nor an institution as the imposing of a politics upon any student, but that a thinking through of the ramifications of ideas and practices is fostered, so that the political commitments implicit to student-led practices are self-conscious ones. We have had a great deal of discussion on impurity over the last years, for example, and students have come to initiate discursive forums in order to ‘own’ their disagreements and discomforts, and turn them into active positions beyond a critical pointing to, or sheer moral proclamation. Beyond design education, these are of course crucial skills to develop over the course of one’s social existence. So while I don’t expect educational institutions to instruct student-led activism, they can certainly hold space for students to organize, articulate and take responsibility for their positions, since being a student is an important moment in one’s political subjectivation.

Exactly. And how do we do that as educators, how do we convince our institutions to go along with it. Because those are oftentimes the limitations that we're facing. One thing that really interested me out of many things that you brought up in one of your earlier talks, and this also relates to the idea of the future is this notion of art or design as a modeling practice. I have a couple of thoughts on it but I’d be interested in your take. What is a modeling practice for you, or a model for that matter?

Yeah, it's a great question. The backstory into models and modeling comes from the  increased observation of the impact models have in shaping our reality. I first got into it via the philosopher of science Margaret Morrison, where she was writing about the hierarchies in terms of knowledge adjudication between empirical experimentation versus simulations in scientific practice. Through her assessment of the Large Hadron Collider, and the search for the Higgs boson, she demonstrated the falseness of this fight, and that in several scientific methodologies today, there’s a synthesis between the empirical and the simulated, or at least that simulations were necessary procedures for accessing certain empirical findings. The second entry was via the sociologist of finance Donald McKenzie whose work addresses the performativity of models, so that they are no longer a techne of observation but drivers of reality. What was interesting to me in comparing these model functions as fictions, was how the fictiveness of a simulation could deliver better accounts of reality, while the fictitious status of an economic model could create or incentivise real behaviour. This then sprawled more into biosemiotic directions, in the sense that all organisms model their environment, in order to filter relevant information from an overabundance of stimuli, relative to their sensory-morphology. So models have a way of instantiating worlds in accordance with their filtering frameworks, effectively creating a cut in reality, that makes a world navigable in the face of overabundant complexity. Each cut enacted by a model, creates a filter of informational relevance/irrelevance relative to its world, and with humans we have this additional layer of symbol manipulation and language-tokens (something we’re discovering may not be exclusive to us). Lastly, I became fascinated with accounts of creativity from cognitive science, wherein modelling – as an activity of idea externalisation – is what enables novelty, or thinking without the backing, nor memory of precedent, yet without producing trivial novelty either. This seems important when often ‘creativity’ is upheld as ineffable or utterly mysterious, or that it’s only a force in arts-based activities, which is a rather unhelpful myth, particularly working within education. It would be a pretty impoverished form of education if we impart to students to simply wait, if they’re lucky, for creativity to magically strike! From these angles, I started to think about artistic and design practice as a way of modeling these fictitious cuts in the real, with the idea that every work is a kind of world of its own. It has its own internal logics and reasons for existing, and because it's an externalization, it’s available to the sensorium of others for interaction. So works become a means of post-critical transportation into a different perspectival position, from which a comparative vantage point upon an existing, given world is enabled. In this way, works become a means of denaturalisation, because a comparative world allows us to witness the modelled ‘nature’ of our reality that is often conflated with an immutable fact. This working through models upon the fields of art and design has been a way to tackle this question of their purposefulness in planetary conditions. 

This approach is also spurred on by theories of knowledge – since we often apply ‘knowledge production’ to what we do, but then don’t have much to say about the idea of knowledge we are gesturing to. The interaction with a model and its world (its cut) adheres to an artefactual account of knowledge, that is not simply in the head of a human, nor in the sheer realm of ideality, but a transfer that takes place between things and bodyminds. We interact with things that catalyze concepts, that then transform us in a recursive, yet ampliative way. If histories of ideas and social systems become partly legible to us through artifacts of their time, what would it mean to create artifacts from pre-historical modeled worlds as a kind of counter-factual proposition? If we speak of a planetary history as ‘unprecedented’ from a social organisational perspective, then what are the aparatuses we need to inhabit and sense from such worlds of thought for which we do not have a memory? In cognitive science, such a move goes by way of abductive reasoning, or how to think without the given epistemological/normative constraints upon thought, and I think with art and design we can work within this nontrivial construction of novelty in an expanded way, via sensorial engagement. If one of the many crises of our historical time is participating in the realisability of otherworlds of cohabitation, then mobilising creative activity towards the inhabitability of those otherworldly logics via interaction with its artifacts, seems like a purposeful activity. The synoptic tagline for this within art, would be moving from the Ready-Made (the historical index of art since Duchamp), to Making-Ready (for prehistorical worlds to come and their particular coordination of sense).

So many interesting points here. There are certain arguments in cognitive science and neuroscience that, in a sense, our experience of the world is a kind of a model that we create. We make a model even of ourselves. So, it might be models all the way down and whatever the inaccessible base reality is, the world as we experience it is a kind of a model. We make a model of ourselves in that world model. Since my teenage years I've never actually touched a video game but at that point I became really interested in game studies because it's exactly that, making models, or engaging with models, and using that for education as well. That was part of the reason as to why I then went to a new media school for the PhD. We've been experimenting with virtual reality and headsets in the classroom. You need funding, you have to buy the hardware. It’s going to be outdated after a year. Not everyone can handle it physically. These are things that we had to take into consideration. However, it's been exciting to work with the technology and explore its potential. And I think that translates from architecture to design to art, as modeling practices or by extension, worlding practices.

I share your fascination with game design in this way of modeling and interacting with and within otherworlds. My colleague AA Cavia helped clarify this relation between the model and the Real, when he wrote that all worlds are models, but not all models are worlds. For me this sits squarely at the synthesis between fiction and empiricism, in the sense that a model is an ideation, and a world is something inhabitable, navigable. This seems particularly relevant at this moment where we have an epistemological recognition (by way of models) of a Planetary Turn, but despite this achievement, it doesn't give us straightforward guidance on how the organization of everyday life ought to play out (as a normative proposition). More colloquially, this is why campaigns of sheer climate awareness are necessary, but insufficient, for example. How do we inhabit consequences of that model, in other words, how do we world this model in a way that is somewhat desirable and realizable as a collective project? What seems important to work with as makers is a self-conscious recognition that the things we make are imbued with the normative encodings and semantic structures of a particular world, so what does it imply for practice to depart from the logics of an otherworld? That general line of approach, has been nourished by the early Xenofeminist work which was very much about disentangling norm from fact, and has been furthered more recently in writing through the work of Pierre Huyghe, on a conceptual plane. What was striking was the unsettling of the sensation of ‘direct experience,’ and how his work produces a confrontation with the mediated ‘nature’ of the feeling of directness, wherein we’re confronted with the modelled nature of ourselves as not being a lawlike artifact of nature, and in so doing a political space is opened because a once fixed entity becomes subject to mutability. This is quite different to the genre of politics we more readily attribute to art and design that may take on more frontal activist positioning, but opening sensorial spaces to witness the potential mutability of the given, is incredibly empowering as well.

Practices like meditation or psychedelics might be ways of experiencing a dissociation from this strong entanglement of how our world models inform our subjective experience of the world. Students are usually very interested in the topic of psychedelics. I encourage meditation or other sustainable ways of exploring conscious states. But it's for good reasons. It's almost like a literally consciousness raising thing where we sort of become aware of and able to transcend the limitations of our individual experience. It can be liberating.

Yeah, I think that’s super interesting, but I don’t know much about it, beyond the mainstream press. It is curious though, that once illegal substances, like trials of MDMA for use in treating PTSD, are entering sanctioned medical practices. Psychedelics and certain forms of meditation help get us out of certain entrenched synaptic patterns of thought, and they enable an escape from those patterns while hopefully bringing some peace to people that are suffering. I happen to think that this ‘depatterning’ can also come about through interactions with unfamiliar things and ideas, like that metanoia effect described in literature where a book completely rewires your perception of the Real.

This is an interesting topic for pedagogy, because as you were saying, we need new models, or we need models to think new thoughts. How does a model afford novelty, I think this is critical.

Yeah, and for what purpose is that novelty, I would add. In one way I think we’re battling against a fetishization of novelty for novelty’s sake from both art and design, as a disciplinary mandate, thus very much fitting with expectations of what we could call probable novelty, compared to something like improbable novelty. It’s on this latter version of novelty that I’m fixated, because it’s not so commercially tied to the imperative of Capitalist ‘newness,’ but to transforming the givenness of problems driving inquiry. For instance, perhaps there’s a crisis of unemployment, and someone may have an idea to boost employment; but a more unsettling form of novelty would ask what it means to imagine a society wherein selling one’s labour power was not a fundamental necessity, and how would societies operate in such a redesign? In the history of human thought across multiple geographies, there are also plenty of ideas that have already been thought of, but their ramifications have been foreclosed upon due to normative world-models of their time. Take for instance, Augustine of Hippo, who’s theologically motivated Medieval thought, nonetheless unsettles the Humanist linguistic turn of Modernity, where ‘signs’ become interchangeable with human language systems to the disavowal of other semiotic instances. Or a thinker like Zero Jacob, who from a cave in then Abyssinia of the 16^th Century, philosophized what we canonically call European Modernity, and whose work was far more socially progressive than Descartes or Kant. It can be far more ‘novel’ to take up a thought of the deep past and work through historical epistemological obstacles, than issue a new iPhone version, for example. I suppose my bias toward improbable novelty is tethered to denaturalizations, and the interference of design-based practice to catalyze such interactions. If we take an idea from 400 years ago and adapt it to our present condition, is that still ‘novelty’? I suppose this reveals a bigger interest in the genealogy and mobility of ideas and their corresponding artifacts, rather than focusing on origination or originality. Like how ideas travel and mutate through geographical, social, technological and historical recontextualisations, from which we may discover embryos of thought that never had a chance to thoroughly evolve. When we discover such historic embryos and the blockages imposed upon them from hegemonic epistemes of their time, we come squarely into focus on the normative domain of knowledge: that its not an asocial linear progression increased precision, but that ideas of any kind are subject to a historical model-world filter that opens some paths as ‘relevant’, while shutting others down as ‘irrelevant’. That’s a bit of a detour, but it seems important to highlight the difference between probable novelty, or expected novelty that is connected to given ready-made problems, compared to improbable novelty which requires a remaking of a problem space.

That's an excellent point. At least for me, certainly in my early education, novelty was really fetishised. It was the pinnacle as to what you were aspiring to as an artist, something completely novel. And that we have to call into question.

It also individualises creative labor, which is a very narrow picture. We tend to memorialise a handful of famous people from art, design and intellectual fields, however all of such figures were embedded in social, technical and historical environments. It seems more helpful to talk about processes and emergence, like asking in what conditions can creative novelty be cultivated? This also deprioritises thought and things in terms of property, and I find it liberating to acknowledge that no one possesses their ‘own’ idea. There’s a curious anecdote about how Einstein came up with the theory of relativity due to his conversations with chemists, so that space of interaction afforded him an adjacent vantage point upon physics, effectively seeing a problem in different conditions, and we know what an impact this had in the history of knowledge.

There seems to be a Western, perhaps actually even sort of colonial, underpinning to this idea of novelty, the exploration thereof or the appropriation.

Right, perhaps there’s an analogous ‘Terra Nullius’ imaginary around creative novelty in the Modern Western tradition, not to mention the property regime around it, rather than looking at it as a highly distributed process. Of course there are other traditions that understand creativity in a very different way, from which to draw inspiration. Recognising the deeply social dynamics inherent to creativity doesn't take away the ingenuity of particular people, nor undercut the responsibility of an author, but it demystifies it by accounting for it more procedurally. To echo a point made earlier, it’s rather paradoxical to uphold such an image of ineffable creativity available only to ‘select’ people, and then have art, design and architectural educational programs – I mean if creativity just ‘strikes,’ then any sort of education would be superfluous. The fact that we have education of this kind is already a gesture of demystification, positing creativity as a social and practical labour nourished by experimentation and curiosity. 

I'm glad we touched upon this. The question then might be, how do we facilitate that, how do we implement that, what strategies can we think of to make students aware of that? And this, for me, is really an ongoing question. I mentioned Erin Manning earlier, someone who I discovered a bit later, initially more by way of Massumi and Deleuze. Her work on pedagogy, neurodiversity and the classroom: And how do you even arrange the classroom? How do we use language in the classroom? How do we make pedagogy for diverse ways of sensing? Even a question such as this frankly occurred to me only later in my journey. So, it was one of these moments that were transformative, because it opens up so much. For the practice as much as the teaching, it then really changes things in a profound way. And I wonder if you had any thoughts along those lines, how do you work with students, or how do you structure your classes, or how do you approach pedagogy in that regard?

Those are great questions and are always in a process of being answered to, in practice. I never had formal pedagogical training, but it was important for me to experience the classroom when it wasn’t going well, since I had been simply mirroring the organization of a class in a form that I knew and that had worked for me as a student – and as we gain experience there’s definitely no one-size fits all model that works for every student. Early on in teaching, I was nervous about knowing enough, and demonstrating that so-called expertise, so I wasn’t paying enough attention to the social situation of learning, and it was important to develop confidence in openly expressing unknowns, blind-spots and uncertainties. When these are allowed active entry into the classroom, particularly at an MA level, it leads to richer discussions because one establishes a dynamic of intellectual parity and students partake in the process of thinking improvisationally, rather than sheer absorption of ideas. The Ignorant Schoolmaster from Rancière was an important resource for me in this regard, wherein educators are put in the position of facilitating intellectual emancipation in students, from themselves as educators (the counter figure is the stultifying master upon whom students are intellectually dependent). Spending some time in the classroom of Kodwo Eshun during brief visits to HEAD in Geneva, was also instructive, since he distinctly didn’t overpack the class (they were reading a single Octavia Butler novel together throughout an entire semester) – and the improvised discussions that would derive from this slow, collective activity were incredible; wandering across figures, geographies, music, films, literature, histories, etc. That was such an important model to witness, since it used a common reference as a catalyst for diverse, spontaneous tangents, and the objective was not to become a master of the text, but to diagramtically intervene in its allegorical spaces. The pace of it all was also a stark contrast to seminar formats premised on packing in as much information, or material as possible.   

I’ve found over the years that providing explicit contexts for activities, lectures and texts is crucial, so students understand why we’re doing X & Y, how it fits in the curriculum, and that’s something I had taken for granted as self-evident in the past. Another aspect of contextualising, concerns the introduction of problematic or contentious material. There are ways to do this, say if you bring in Hegel for instance, to acknowledge head on his deeply held racist beliefs in who is permitted a ‘history’ at all. I’m wary of avoiding teaching problematic things, as much as I am about brushing things off too easily as being a ‘product of its time’. A challenge of introducing theory within practice-based contexts is the variation between students in terms of their previous exposure to discursive materials, so presenting concepts less as something to ‘master,’ but as mental toys to play with, and the excitement that comes with seeing phenomena in a different way. Seeing a world in a different way alters the ‘logic’ of how and why one develops a particular practice, so it’s crucial to draw these threads. This is very different from teaching theory in a purely discursive setting, and for burgeoning practitioners classes need to highlight how ideas are useful to making and aren’t about couching one’s practice in fancy linguistic formulations. 

One thing I really enjoy about my work in Eindhoven is that it’s a fairly international group, which means that no singular cultural perspective dominates, including my own, plus we learn of referential digressions from other geographic and linguistic sources.While we congregate in English, this is almost always not the first language of our students, and that’s important to recognise particularly as a native speaker, and there’s a lot of encouragement towards students to use resources in languages they speak, which also helps broaden the referential corpus at play in the collective intelligence of the department. There’s a narrative that frequently circulates in today’s pedagogical work that students are unwilling to confront difficult, problematic material, and in my experience, this isn’t the case. I think this generation of students doesn’t glorify over-work, and that can be harnessed as a burgeoning commitment to other ways of living, not a mark of withdrawal. The classroom can actually be a great sandbox for hosting disagreement and uncertainty, so the challenge is creating a social setting where students feel comfortable to express themselves, and also learn how to sit with ideas they don’t share, and own their dissensus. I don’t use the term ‘safe space’ to describe this setting, since it denotes a space free of criticism or conflict, and there are ways of enacting criticism and conflict that are not injurious, but that are gestures of attentive care, of holding each other – in fact needing each other, in order to be accountable for the ideas and positions we hold. What needs to be nourished in such a social exchange of ideas (which can feel vulnerable), is the recognition that we’re all capable of revising our commitments and positions, and that giving and receiving careful criticism is an integral part of this labor, a labor that extends far beyond institutional study. In a time-scarce world, exchanging attentive reflections with one another, of deliberating ideas with one another, is, to me, a caring act, and performing that general idea that no one thinks alone.

Exploring together for sure, yes, and what you said rings entirely true. What might be particularly pertinent in the current context, these assumptions about younger people that you brought up, really, I think in most cases, it's sort of older people getting confused, because their world models are called into question. And the demands that are being made of the institution and of the teachers oftentimes are very well justified and make a lot of sense if they’re listened to, as in being receptive, rather than dismissed.

Yeah, absolutely. We’ve already mentioned the disparities in material conditions between generations, and our students certainly aren’t functioning in a vacuum. How can we be mad if a reading wasn’t prepared, when a student is struggling to keep a roof over their head, is having financial difficulty, or is navigating Visa issues? I think there just needs to be a basic understanding of these different conditions, with a compassionate ear towards them. That, and not to mention the technological differences, which on the one hand can be distracting, but on the other hand, we now have world libraries and references available at a simple click. The classroom or school-based studio may be a temporary, protective enclosure, but it’s not immune to life circumstances, and certainly not detached from technologies either.

These are wonderful points. When we as teachers perceive students seemingly disengaging, whatever that really means, or being on their phones. Well, I don't know what they're doing on their phones. Our phones are now an interface to the world, a sense-making device, and they may have their place in the classroom, rather than outlawing them, or something like all these things, right? That’s where I have to shift my own perspective. And what does it mean to disengage? There are diverse ways of engaging and they equally require diverse ways of that engagement to be facilitated. That emphasis I think is particularly prominent in Erin Manning’s work.

I like your question on what it means to disengage. I think we all need to disengage to some degree to let ideas work upon us, and it’s unrealistic to imagine full attention over multiple hours. As an educator, I do have certain expectations of students, like being on time (as best as possible considering train commutes) so we don’t have to repeat, and trying to be prepared even if material may be confusing, but just this sets a condition for energetic exchanges, vs. a one-way transmission of material. I’ve had experiences elsewhere doing seminars where almost none of the students even glanced at materials, and it was utterly draining, since you have to speak for eight hours straight with little reciprocity. In those (thankfully few) moments, it felt more like performing unfunny stand-up, and I don’t think ideas really resonate in a one-way transmission format. I also appreciate you bringing up diverse ways of engaging, and that’s certainly something to improve upon as educators, now that we have more understanding on topics of neurodivergence, ADHD, and so on. I think every educator aims to truly communicate with (and not to) students, and that can take different forms for different needs – like for some students it’s beneficial to allot more reading time, have things printed rather than on a screen, listen to a lecture, more than reading it, etc. We still have a lot to learn on adapting classes as much as possible to have the most resonance for each student, and when students feel comfortable in sharing their needs, they are often very helpful in informing us about practical changes that are very doable, and that are impactful for them. My hope is that having expectations of students isn’t in the form of petty pressure, but because there is a belief in what they are capable of, coupled with the recognition that exercising said capability is not something that falls from the sky, but that it’s a labour – a struggle, yes, but also a satisfying one.

That is a great point. This is an open question, and I completely agree, we as educators should have, as Gregg Bordowitz says, the maximum amount of expectation of the student, in the sense of a potential to be realised. But the ways in which that can manifest are diverse. 

Exactly. Our students are people with personalities, as are we, and certain students may resonate better with some personalities, over others. That said, in personal and professional life we’re continually negotiating various personalities, so it’s important to gain some experiences in that realm. Some educators operate in a very structured way, others more improvisationally, and it can be instructive for students to be exposed to said different strategies, to experience what works best for them, and how that may inform the organisation of their own practice.

The way that the classroom is set up formally, students facing the teacher for instance, doesn't work for some people. And this is something I learn as a teacher.

There are certainly techniques, and various stagings one can learn as an educator, but that never replaces the actual situation with real students, their group dynamic, the material at hand, and so on. I definitely learn a lot from seeing other people teach, discussing with colleagues, reading syllabi online, and testing those elements in my own classrooms. This echoes an earlier point about self-relativisation – by that I simply mean that a form of teaching that worked upon me, doesn’t mean it’s effective for the students I may be working with at hand. Above all, teaching is a context-sensitive genre of work, one needs to be attuned to the social dynamics of students, and student-groups, not just focused on preparing and getting through syllabi. In smaller classrooms this is much easier to gauge, and even solicit feedback from students themselves as to what’s working, and what could be improved.

I was wondering if the recognition of a diversity of intelligences, and the designing with those intelligences, opens up a more than human dimension. For you, is that something that we might aspire to in design, art and architecture? You’ve done work on Sylvia Wynter, and this notion of overcoming man. Where do you locate the human in relation to how you think of pedagogy? How do we move beyond the human and design for more than human worlds?

That’s a question a lot of students are drawn to, without necessarily the theoretical background of Wynter’s work, and this abolition of ‘Man’ we may infer from it, nor an overt interest in ‘intelligence’ (although that’s something I’d be keen to see students take up). There are a few ways to go about your question. On the diversity of intelligences, a compelling aspect of AI and Machine Learning, is that it’s a history of modeling (externalizing) what intelligence is thought to be, and through all the somewhat troubled permutations from mechanics to computation, we’ve now arrived at modeling learning systems that unsettle a human monopoly of intelligence. So by trying to mirror (or exceed) human intelligence, we’ve not only (helpfully) undermined a supposed monopoly, but that unsettling has paved a way for the study of a wider spectrum of intelligences in animals, insects, plants, and machines. This is one blow to ‘Man’ in the model of Euro-Enlightenment Humanism, where ‘Man’ (and it is indeed a male model) is a masterful figure, severed from the Earth, because if his rational supremacy. It’s this severance of figure from ground that is key in the model of ‘Man,’ since that primary conceptual separation implies that the stuff of the Earth are apprehended as an infinite resource base for manipulation in order to fulfill not only ‘Man’s’ necessities, and comforts, but his voracious appetite as well. Design and architecture figure heavily in instrumentalising this human self-conception in the model of ‘Man,’ as their modus operandi, since they are largely preoccupied with the self-referential validation of this figure throughout their long-Modern histories. On this level, it becomes incredibly pertinent (if not urgent), to think our fields from without this naturalized figure of ‘Man’ as an orienting force, who could project his desires upon a ‘passive’ Earth, to a different self-conception that is inseparably embedded within complex metabolic processes. So again, we see the potential behind considering research-based design as a type of modeling practice for ‘as if’ counterfactual worlds. What do the artifacts of non-‘Man’ look like, and when we interact with them, how does that nudge us to self-conceptualize in other ways – positionally, relationally and socially?

There are several interesting developments in interspecies and more than human thought, many of our students are drawn to, and take inspiration from in their work. One angle we often debate on this topic is around the question of agency, since the appreciation of a diversity of intelligences can sometimes lead to a flattening of agencies across all species, which seems like a way escaping human accountability, under the guise of celebrating the demise of a humanist, imagined monopoly of intelligence. A second topic we equally debate, is one raised by Lorraine Daston in her book Against Nature, who asked why (historically) do we seem so eager to adopt a finding from the natural world and map it 1:1 into moral and/or social domains? There have been numerous punitive norms adopted in social configurations based on (abusive) importations from the hard sciences, so we need to be mindful of the metaphors (or imperatives) we draw from these fields as designers.

This is an excellent point, especially in a design context. It identifies a more problematic notion of biomimicry.

Yes, that’s a more efficient way to say it! It also extends to astronomical mimicry and so on, basically when a certain ‘law’ is discovered in the hard sciences, the temptation to inflate it as some sort of rule for normative, social orders. Perhaps the artificial mutability of normative orders haunts us with overabundant possibilities, and discovering physical ‘rules’ is tempting as a way of justifying certain hierarchical configurations. I never understood, however, why this ‘justification’ would in any way be desired or sought, especially from the perspective of race, gender and sexuality, when all sorts of vindictive social measures have been historically unleashed in the name of following ‘natural laws’. That was a critical argument of the trans-feminist work we did via Laboria Cuboniks, and this tendency to justify inter-human discrimination based on ‘laws of nature’ is very active today in abusing a deeply ignorant picture of biology as that which stands for immutable determination against trans-identifying persons, for instance. Sylvia Wynter warned against the biological over-determination of ‘Man,’ and it is in this continued type of egregious abuse (and willful scientific ignorance) that we ought to be wary of sifting social, ethical rules from physical or biological systems. 

Apologies for the rhetorical detour, but that problem strikes an acute nerve, and it’s important to highlight the non-innocence when importing ‘natural’ orders (what we may know of them at the time), upon social structures. 

On your question on the more than human in design, my hesitancy above may sound like a dissuasion into said topic for design, but this is the opposite case, it’s utterly encouraged and part of our studio modules. However working within this domain implies moving beyond ventriloquisms of other species, and probing into how we are entangled, not just that we are entangled, which implicitly brings in power/agencies asymmetries into the equation.   

Over the last few years in our department, we’ve been introducing more metabolically attuned approaches to research-based design – from sensing metabolic exchange, through to the political economy of a metabolic rift (initially introduced by Marx who foresaw the abuse of nature in early industrial Capitalism, because of a presumed separation from it, in production processes). When climate catastrophe is considered the biggest ‘economic externality’ to date, it’s easy to see that when productive operations are purely designed and conceived around the object unto itself, all other energies are ‘accidental’ surprises in the chain of (irreversible) events. It’s evidently clear, now, how perilous such a narrow picture of production is in the long run.

Do we move towards a kind of more than human design practice and what could that possibly be? I’m also interested in how this relates to the planetary, which you address in many of your talks. Just now you made this beautiful point of thinking, practicing, or even teaching, metabolically. How do you differentiate a metabolic from an ecological approach?

Intuitively I would say that metabolic processes are part of ecology, but that highlighting metabolism emphasizes energetic exchange between entities, whereas ecology names a complex holistic system of interrelations. It’s helpful to nudge imaginaries of ecology away from romantic natural landscapes and greenness (like what we’d end up with in an AI generated image or a Google image search), since ecologies are also composed of e-waste dumps, artificial forests, and blinking, automated server farms. So partly the distinction boils down to the fact that there is a canon of clichéd pictures of ecology, whereas thinking metabolically seems more open when introducing it to students, because it doesn’t conjure default ‘green’ imaginaries to rely upon. What a metabolic approach enables is an inseparability between figure and ground, maker and stuff-made, and there are very tangible ways to experiment and sense from this vantage-point. Eating, and the very design of our caloric intake (in part based on a continual retraining of our taste), is a practice of metabolising the environment around us, as is the act of breathing. I mention food and eating specifically, because we have several students intuitively drawn to culinary practice, and via the lens of metabolic interaction it’s possible to provide broader contexts for inquiry, beyond the plate, the recipe, or a ritual for eating. How would a metabolic perspective on the design of diets at a collective level, transform our relationship to surrounding environments? The point being with such extended hypothetical questions, is that through a metabolic approach we may be able to tease out cosmological consequences of a particular trajectory of thought that germinates in our students, enabling them to focus on something highly localized whilst extrapolating wider consequences of such a move.

In the context of architecture and urbanism, but it relates as much to design and art, in a sense, I think we have to address what Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell have called The Smartness Mandate: The smart city, or the smart whatever. For me, it’s a Stieglerian notion of stupidity, as much as its equivalent, the human centric. How do we move beyond that, how do we design against it, how do we actually teach against it? What strategies can we develop? These are questions that interest me.

Orit’s got a great sense of humour besides being a wonderful thinker, so yes there’s a genre of stupidity captured in a ‘smartness’ mandate! I believe what she's referring to is similar to other pitfalls noted earlier – the pitfall of over-inflation of an idea, method or approach. ‘Smartness’ in this context, refers to automation, which is the opposite of cognition, in the terms of Katherine Hayles, since automation relies heavily on pattern analysis and prediction based on precedent; whereas cognition (here more related to improbable novelty) is not premised on familiar thought. Although I’ve not yet had the chance to read Orit’s book and know her work on this from a few lectures, it’s important to note that she’s not a technophobe, so the smartness mandate isn’t anti-automation in an absolute sense, but against it’s over-inflated deployment across a totality of human-urban interactions. I agree, it’s stupid to apply a certain technological affordance across the entire domain of urban existence, especially when said ‘smartness’ tends to idealise smoothness and human convenience as an end goal of city experience. There could, of course, be plenty of automated systems integrated into urban frameworks that are not human centric, and that could serve as a radically different basis from which to enact decisions in urban organization. When we hear ‘smartness,’ however, that’s usually a corporate code for outsourcing decision and memory that rehearses normative social values and political economy, like the most futuristic city still designed around nuclear family-style residential dwelling, for instance, so there can be a lot of implicit conservatisms imported into ‘smartness’ that are simply shinier versions of the status quo. Some of the applications are rather ridiculous considering the sophistication of computational engineering required, like solving the ‘problem’ of queuing for check-out by automating product payment upon exiting a shop.    

In terms of bringing such debates into the classroom, I definitely bend towards a Simondonian approach, in the sense that I think one needs to understand the technicity of something before leaping to sweeping conclusions. Simondon was important for refusing a separation between technics and culture, and warned against either technophobic or technophillic appraisals of technology, and this helps us avoid facile moral trappings when analyzing them. For example, a lot of the polarization around AI or automation either romanticizes some idea about losing our ‘humanity’ (as if human-made atrocities don’t already do that), or fetishizing technological supremacy – neither of those approaches is helpful, in fact they can be quite dangerous. When we take time to understand such systems as techno-cultural ensembles, pathways open for them to become entities to tinker and collaborate with as designers. Think of the work of Beth Coleman, in her Octavia Butler AI project, where she speaks about using GANS (Generative Adversarial Networks), and the interplay between generators and discriminators. I’m simplifying, but typically the discriminator model reigns in the weirdness of a generator by attributing probability values as to a real or fake assessment, based on human-centric, perceptual and cognitive precedent or expectation. In her project which is truly a collaboration between computational and human intelligence, the discriminator model is not designed to appease human expectations, but runs wild, producing all sorts of strange hybrid, otherworldly images, that push beyond questions of better ethics in data sets. I’m not suggesting that training-data ethics is unimportant, but there are other potentials for said technologies when they are untethered from purely human concerns (and the ongoing history of our biases), and that enable a rethinking about cognition and normative frameworks, as such. The lesson we can draw from Coleman’s approach, is to enact critique on AI systems by way of technical meddling, which embodies that ‘critical thinker-doer’ ethos mentioned earlier in research-based design education. The explosion in the recognition of a diversity of intelligences – even within the human species – is certainly a much more robust way to go about design-thinking than a facile consumer-biased smoothness which the bulk of ‘smart’ technologies adhere to.

For me, smartness is just a very poor, narrow and reductive understanding of what intelligence could be, and you just put it brilliantly: how do we design with and for a diversity of intelligences, and those could be biological or organic or synthetic. And this is where I see design, architecture, and art, heading, to the same extent.

Exactly, which brings up the dynamic of friction in intelligence, which is different from fulfilling user-consumer expectations of smoothness. While I don’t want to glamorise ‘friction’ as some absolute state (as a frequent Deutsche Bahn commuter, I dream of a Hong Kong-like AI train system), our inductive patterns of thought upon which we enact expectations are never challenged when they are continually fulfilled. Intelligence needs friction, it is catalyzed by unsettling, by encounters with things that do not fit our socio-normative taxonomies, and we need to avoid the comforting temptation to force things into familiar cognitive organisational frameworks. It’s a very weird (and somewhat terrifying) moment in our history, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how we may imagine an ethical approach to Otherness without Othering, nor by subsuming Otherness to familiar and/or normative precedent? This is what interests me in the discourses around a diversity of intelligences, is what can emerge when collaboration is enabled, and a relativization of human forms of intelligence (most often itself narrowly modeled on the self-narrated intelligence belonging to Wynter’s Eurohumanist ‘Man’) is embraced in designerly practices.

Exactly. I was just thinking of what Viveiros de Castro calls wild, wild in reference to Lévi-Strauss, that which is not domesticated, which does not yield a profit. The wild city or wild… design.

It’s interesting you contrast wildness with the ‘taming’ mechanism of profit. Curious because unleashing networked technologies ‘in the wild’ is often a point of critique, but that form of wildness is indeed incentivised in conservative terms. To put it in the GAN analogy, profit is our conservative ‘discriminator’ parameter within a Capitalist configuration. It’s depressing to understand what some of these technologies can do, but are utterly dumbed down because they are forced into a profit framework, or more brutally, for unregulated military applications as we’re witnessing in Gaza. I’d love to see more discussions around technological reappropriation within design and architecture pedagogies, since far more work needs to be done in imagining the reuse of our planetary techno-infrastructural artifacts, from without the ‘discrimination’ of privatised profit and the organisation of socio-technical cultures in that image. What this unprecedented condition of the planetary compels us to think as designers, artists and architects, are realisable imaginaries of coexistence for an environment in common, where ‘common’ here has nothing to do with sameness, but denotes a shared space. Perhaps ‘smartness’ is a techno-discursive relic of globalisation, in the sense of engineering desired smoothness predicated on homogenising operations, thus (impossibly) seeking to tame reality in service of ‘Man’s’ existence. Whereas a planetary intelligence requires the negotiation of (and learning from) frictions endemic to the entanglement of heterogeneous agents, at an inter-human level and also in relation with various organic and non-organic entities in the service of coexistence.

Coexistence, a wonderful point to end. Thank you so much.