Danielle Wilde

Food and eating (re)connect humans daily with worlds within and beyond us. From the trillions of microorganisms that help make us who we are; through the socio-culturally and tangibly graspable people, animals, plants, fungi and algae that we cohabit with; to decreasingly relatable systems of food production and provisioning across the planet, food stitches us together. We provide four mini cases to consider how using food as a methodology for experimental design research can build relations towards ensuring ‘the good life.’ We explore what the good life is, why relationality sits at its heart, and provide a framework for using food as a methodology for participatory Research through Design to examine how food-based inquiries (re)invigorate design’s worldmaking capacities, foster agency and transformative potential, connecting humans to others through cultural food heritage, for the good of all. The paper contributes to experimental design research by positioning food as a methodology; bridging worldmaking, multispecies relations, and food narratives; highlighting food’s experiential, relational and performative nature; its capacity to shape identities and social belonging.

Data in Design and HCI research is often associated with something captured from the world in digital form and transferred to a database. However, the assumption of digitalisation, as well as the intentions and values underlying it, can obscure more nuanced approaches to data, and is becoming increasingly criticised (e.g., through notions of data colonialism, data extractivism, etc.). In this workshop, we invite participants to critically review data concepts and practices that sustain Western industrialised socio-economic systems, considering their ethical, environmental, and ecological implications. In contrast, we will explore data in the entangled ecologies of organisms, matter, and environments, focusing on ‘livingness’ as a way to reveal embodied, relational, and situated aspects of data. Through wandering and foraging, we will discuss how these aspects of data might help us regain our attentiveness, appreciation, and responsibility towards more-than-human ecologies, and ultimately reframe concepts of data in the world.

We share an emergent repository of nature-entangled methods-to-be shared, experimented with, and discussed during a conference workshop. We present them in-use, as they are in formation. We do not seek to theorise or even fully articulate these methods-to-be. Rather, to make them approachable and actionable for others by showing them not fully polished. By doing this, we advocate for increased transparency in the difficulties of creating new methods, techniques, tools, and approaches. Our contribution is threefold: we provide 1) an annotated portfolio of methods-to-be; 2) illustrative examples of how cross-pollination of these methods can enrich their situated use; and 3) a discussion of ways to further articulate the methods and deepen reflection on their roles in nature-entangled design processes.

By Jorge Frascara, Paul Gardien, Guillermina Noël, et al., Published on 11/29/23

In this workshop, we will bring together designers and researchers working with, for, and around nature to facilitate a transversal conversation around how to engage nature as a key part of our design processes. By deliberately adopting an open and ambiguous idea of what we mean by ‘nature’, we hope to embrace diverse kinds of more-than-human entanglements, including (but not only): farming, companion species, microbiomes, body ecologies, forests and other large-scale landscapes (e.g. oceans), or cohabitation in houses. We argue for the importance of taking such an open-ended perspective, to embrace all possible relevant vectors of nature-related design: multispecies, cohabitation, posthuman sustainability, posthuman care… The workshop is set as a as a platform for shared methodological reflection through the lenses of a more-than-human approach to posthuman research. It will primarily be in-person, given our aim of bringing researchers together and co-experiencing each others’ methods and techniques.

Embodied design ideation methods rely on subjective —first-person— experiences of the designer to bring new ways of designing into being. Shifting the embodied design ideation method to the body of the other, we propose a three-step process that makes the experiences of a dancer accessible to a designer for the ideation of remote intimacies. To support the access to the dancer’s experiences, we facilitate embodied, dialogical exchange over three phases: i) observation of embodied explorations between the dancer and a set of tangibles, ii) analysis of phase (i) visual documentation, and iii) a semi-structured interview with the dancer, using phase (ii) outcomes, incorporating drawing as a form of reflection. This reflexive process reveals the ways how incorporating tangibility, ambiguity, and care into a conversation with the body of the other allows us to open a space of possibilities.