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

The post Article in Design Issues appeared first on Alex Taylor.

Vinciane Despret Archives | Alex Taylor

Article in Design Issues