animals Archives | Alex Taylor

Article in Design Issues

Alex Taylor — Tue, 11 Jul 2017 10:10:12 +0000

Design Issues, Summer 2017, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 25–36

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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“Being Capable” at UCL Knowledge Lab

Alex Taylor — Sun, 26 Feb 2017 20:57:53 +0000

Last Wednesday, tried again to capture my thoughts on capability and capacity, this time at the UCL Knowledge Lab (Institute of Education). The recording of the talk is available here.

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Talk at RCA, Design Products

Alex Taylor — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 11:10:07 +0000

I had a very generous slot for presenting to some in Design Products at the RCA this week.

In this talk, I want to suggest we have spent too much time working with the limits of capability—the limits of the perceptual apparatus, the limits of cognitive capacities, and the limits of how critters (whether human or nonhuman) interact and relate to one another. Drawing on a feminist technoscience and using examples from recent fieldwork, I’ll aim to show that, together, we make ourselves capable. That capability isn’t limited to some pre-given, individual state, but comes into being through (inter)action, through entangled relations between actors of all kinds. This, I’ll claim, gives us a very different way of thinking about our relations with technology and especially the promise of AI and machine learning. Rather than machines aiming to replicate human capability, I want to propose an expansive project that allows us the chance to imagine something ‘other-than’ finite capabilities, that sees capability as a ‘becoming-with’, and lays open the possibilities for much much more.

I’m hoping to fine-tune and do a little tidying of these ideas for this talk at the Knowledge Lab (Institute of Education) later this month.

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