Clarifications

Nov 17, 2019

As mentioned, the biggest take away from the last course was, that working with animism as a concept might prove diffult for several reasons:

• It’s not something I have easy access to, and working from beyond a community of practitioners is not something I should or want to do
• How the fuck should I ever generate any non-spiritual use cases from this :D
• The discourse is in its infacy here, while it’s something in practice elsewhere since millenia

I tried to shift to a similar discourse, namely new materialism, in an attempt to word out the base of my research project. I wrote a short text about that:

• Agency within the context of new materialism

After two coachings, with Robert and Luiza (and a mini-coaching by Ulrike Felsing), I also figured that I should not concentrate too much on the discourse basis in the beginning, but try to get into a practice as soon as possible – getting concrete.

In an attempt to be concrete, I speculated about possible solutions to the problem of our relations to our things. There is a fragmentary text about that exercise, as well as a critique on an attempt to use animism in design research:

• Design and New Materialism - Possible approaches
• On the Application of Animism in Design

One thing I liked a lot from the coaching with Luiza was, that my work with animism might be an attempt to find a language for something I know from experience. From this whole process I singled out one aspect I’m especially interested in:

Care and Maintenance

Let’s roll with this for a moment.

Photo by Daniel Leone on Unsplash.