Article in Design Issues

Design Issues, Sum­mer 2017, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 25–36
Cover art for Design Issues, 33 (3) 2017

ABSTRACT — In his 2015 Research Through Design provo­ca­tion, Tim Ingold invites his audi­ence to think with string, lines, and mesh­works. In this arti­cle I use Ingold’s con­cepts to explore an ori­en­ta­tion to design—one that threads through both Ingold’s ideas and Vin­ciane Despret’s vivid and mov­ing accounts of human-ani­mal rela­tions. This is a “think­ing and doing” through design that seeks to be expan­sive to the capac­i­ties of humans and non-humans in rela­tion to one another.
I’m so pleased to final­ly have this arti­cle pub­lished in Design Issues, and very grate­ful to Abi­gail Dur­rant, John Vines, Jayne Wal­lace, and Joyce Yee for all their help with edit­ing my text and the Spe­cial Issue: Research Through Design: Twen­ty-First Cen­tu­ry Mak­ers and Mate­ri­al­i­ties.

In my con­tri­bu­tion, I’ve reflect­ed on Tim Ingold’s provo­ca­tion at the Bien­ni­al Research Through Design con­fer­ence, and tried to play around with open­ing up a more gen­er­a­tive kind of design. My exper­i­ment has been to put Ingold’s ideas of lines and mesh­works in con­ver­sa­tion with Vin­ciane Despret’s uplift­ing sto­ries of ani­mals and becom­ings. A strange mix, but one that for me at least rais­es plen­ty of inter­est­ing ques­tions — and isn’t it more ques­tions we need?!

For an ear­ly draft of the arti­cle see:  What lines, rats and sheep can tell us, Design Issues 2017

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