This network engages with posthumanism in design practice, education and research. We are designers and scholars, based in Sweden or its neighbouring regions, who want to nourish our curiosity and belief regarding the need for designers to pay better attention to non-human earthlings like other animals, plants, and everything in-between and beyond. Together we want to explore how design practice, education and research can grow and thrive in contact with posthumanism – and how designerly and artistic skills, methods and approaches at the same time can contribute to posthumanism.
Members
Thomas Laurien – PhD, Senior lecturer at HDK
We urgently need to increase the PH value in our minds. Instead of being part of the problem I believe that a designer, by taking a stand for other-than-human stakeholders, can play an important role in the crucial survival project of decolonizing and re-enchanting the world.
HDK profile
Kristina Lindström – PhD, Senior lecturer at MAU
Given that design and the way it has been practiced have participated in creating urgent environmental concerns, I believe there is a need to rethink and rework the foundations of design. Posthumanism can offer an alternative imaginary for design, that invites designers to work with interdependencies between and across more-than-human actors.
MAU profile, The Un/Making Studio
Erik Sandelin – PhD student at KTH+Konstfack
The world is not a smorgasbord for humans to indulge in. Exploitation of non-human animals permeates our everyday lives. I believe some posthumanist concepts may be productive for (re)imagining what being human could be like, beyond human supremacy. In the tension between affirmative posthumanism and critical animal studies imaginative alternatives can be prototyped.
Konstfack profile, Unsworn
Åsa Ståhl – PhD, Senior lecturer at LNU
Design has contributed to good life for many, but also excluded many actors, spaces and temporalities - and left problematic marks for generations to come. Posthumanism can generatively help practitioners, educators and researchers to transform the basis for their inquiries, choices and answers, partly by a shift in who is even understood as an actor.
LNU profile, The Un/Making Studio
Tom Cubbin – PhD, Senior lecturer at HDK
The diverse histories of ecological design movements reveal many limitations in how the sustainability agenda has been introduced within design education since the 1990s. I am interested in how the environmental humanities and posthumanist perspectives can help students to reveal new contexts and choices in their work that can shift a focus from ‘green consumerism’ towards new ways of framing environmental topics that they will take with them into industry and public organisations.
Martin Avila – PhD, Professor at Konstfack
Design devises, which implies creating divisions, arranging partitions, material and sensible, including some and excluding others. Thus, a form of togetherness is inscribed in, by and through things that tend to maintain us in our relating to (some) others. The norm of the devising through design has been human; done by humans and for humans. There is a need for an ethical commitment to create designs that acknowledge other beings, and to create a culture that devises disruptions of anthropocentric spatialities and temporalities. Responding ecologically, in working to increase life-affirming response-abilities.
Konstfack profile, Personal website
Mohammed Jaffar Ali – PhD student at RMIT
We need to adjust the way we look at and listen to the world, where living and non-living entities are currently directed through frameworks of production and consumption. By rethinking and redesigning more equal relationships between humans, with non-humans, with the material world, can we hope to create meaningful change before our critical environmental systems become irreversibly damaged and damaging.
Aditya Pawar – PhD student at Umeå Institute of Design
To think about participation in a more-than-human world requires us to reconsider the primacy of human agency. The move suggested here is from participation to acknowledging livingness or relational becoming as the modality of connecting bodies, matter and worldly arrangements. I understand this as expanding the sensibility of the political to build durable associations between human and non-humans.
University profile
Anna Maria Orrù – PhD, Research Curator, Lecturer at Chalmers
We are on a voyage of poethical proportion – poetic, political and ethical - to appeal for a posthuman and postnature approach to critical spatial practice. By taking inspiration from our companion species helps to re-align relational activity between humans and non-humans. Such transformations to the making and relating to space are fundamental to understanding a significant otherness that goes beyond anthropocentric mindsets for a reorientation of coexistances so that new interactions can emerge. In this endeavour, Biomimicry offers a way forward and provides an overflowing cradle of knowledge taken from 3.8 billion years of nature’s research and development.
Personal website, FoAM website
The Posthumanities Hub / Prof Dr Cecilia Åsberg & Dr Marietta Radomska – Founding Director and Co-director, KTH and LiU
The Posthumanities Hub is a postconventional research group and a platform for postdisciplinary humanities, art and science, and more-than-human humanities. We work across the arts and sciences, with philosophy informed by advanced cultural critique and some seriously humorous feminist creativity. In our research, we specialize in the more-than-human condition and re-inventive feminist theory-practices and methodologies for how we can learn to live better together on a damaged planet. Conceptually, we explore, re-think, design and put to use posthuman, a-human, inhuman, nonhuman, and trans-, queer or anti-imperialist and feminist theory-practices for academic or societal uses. We target specific cases and relevant phenomena in our projects - all with the clear aim to meet up with pressing societal challenges.
Web
Fanny Lindh – Part of design studio Doma, applied research designer at RISE Interactive
By engaging in and with the nonhuman, I believe that we can unveil the stories where human and nonhuman are not that inherently different from each other, and place us human as something not separated from the world around us, but part of it. The human perspective is not the only one, but rather one amongst the many perspectives that creates the story about the world that we live in. Not only are we changing the world but it is also changing us, it is about time that we take responsibility in the why’s, how’s and what’s we change.
Li Jönsson – PhD, Senior lecturer at K3
In regards to recent discussions around environmental issues and ecological changes, it is argued that we need to take account of ozone holes, coral reefs, garbage heaps, and all the rest. This requires us to become posthuman-designers; to question not just arrangements between humans, but to open up to an entirely different universe - a multiverse - of actors. I believe posthumanism and design can help us here, to practice and imagine how to create mutually beneficial relationships and more ecological entanglements between and among this sprawling multiverse.
Studio Märka : a collaborative identity of MFA designers Klara Lindqvist and Philippa Stenmarker
Through a range of formats we are rephrasing the ways of discussing design and posthumanism. With an aim of decolonising the discourse we reach out to a diverse audience outside academic institutions. We work close to - and with - our companion species, learning by living alongside and exploring new ways of cooperating with the more-than-human. Our methodology is grounded in design and collaborative practices where we learn, create and change together. How can we understand and change perspective when it comes to looking at the world from a point where theory of posthumanism and design meets?
Studio Märka website
Henrik Lübker – PhD, Curator at The Hans Christian Andersen Museum, Odense, Denmark
Museums have always been the very symbol (or even temple) of Enlightenment and thus also of anthropocentric thinking. It’s features and modalities, for example the amassment of material objects or the exhibition as an open-ended format with no beginning or end, are designed to accommodate and celebrate the bourgeois individual as the pinnacle of civilization and history. However, if designed right, museums may also be one of the best places to stress questions instead of providing answers, to focus on relations instead of autonomy, and cherish difference over sameness and inclusion. Museums might be a fundamental space to rethink our relationship with the world around us.
Web
Petra Lilja – PhD student at KTH+Konstfack
The paradigm of human exceptionality has set in motion a machinery of global effects of which design, by adding to mass-production and consumption, can be argued to be one principal cog. Informed by critical posthumanist concepts, my work aims to disrupt human-centeredness and open up for reconfigurations of design practices to better engage with troubled presents where a myriad of other species is overlooked and becoming extinct. My research project also explores multispecies-inclusive narratives and strategies for engaging and empowering scales of actors and knowledges otherwise unaddressed.
Konstfack profile
Elin Sundström – Master student at Konstfack
The arts: making something out of something else; what a promise of change that is. Posthumanism and the environmental humanities; such yummy ingredients to use. Looking at posthumanism through claywork and vice versa, I will keep exploring some posthumanist ways of relating to place, matter and multi-species relationships, with a special concern for water. What does being in deep relationship mean, what does it look like and who will we become?
Instagram
Martin Malthe Borch – M.Sc.Eng Biotechnology, M.IxD, Coordinator of BioFabLab and external lecturer at Roskilde University
How do we shift from designing inert or “dead” matter for human experience to evolving systems of living matter and agency for multispecies experiences? And how can ecosystem design practices and principles be supported by existing biological and ecological models and knowledge?
Personal website, BioFabLab RUC