Design and Nature A Partnership

Edited by Kate Fletcher, Louise St. Pierre, Mathilda Tham

Proud to make the contribution, See SECTION III: Standing: Standing to achieve a view: Living Landfill Katarina Dimitrijevic https://routledge.com/Design-and-Nature-A-Partnership/Fletcher-Pierre-Tham/p/book/9780815362746… via @routledgebooks

Organised as a dialogue between nature and design, this book explores design ideas, opportunities, visions and practices through relating and uncovering experience of the natural world.

Presented as an edited collection of 25 wide-ranging short chapters, the book explores the possibility of new relations between design and nature, beyond human mastery and understandings of nature as resource and by calling into question the longstanding role for design as agent of capitalism. The book puts forward ways in which design can form partnerships with living species and examines designers’ capacities for direct experience, awe, integrated relationships and new ways of knowing. It covers:

• New design ethics of care

• Indigenous perspectives

• Prototyping with nature

• Methods for new design and nature relations

• A history of design and nature

• Animist beliefs

• De-centering human-centered design

• Understanding nature has power and agency

Design and Nature: A Partnership is a rich resource for designers who wish to learn to engage with sustainability from the ground up.

Design Research for Change Showcase 2019

19th September to 22 September 2019

Old Truman Brewery, 24 Hanbury Street, London, E1 6DR


Open invite to London Design Festival, KraalD is super excited to be selected by the curatorial board and play the part of the DR4C Showcase 2019 narrative that is a vehicle of change in design professions.


Design Research for Change 2019 is a showcase of over 60 design-led projects that traverse disciplinary, methodological, geographical, and conceptual boundaries. The projects illustrate wide-ranging social, cultural, and economic impact and highlight the significant roles that UK-based Design researchers play in some of the most complex and challenging issues we face both in the UK and globally and the positive outcomes that are being designed and developed. 

KraalD Sea PET Jellyfish Mobile Workshop

KraalD Sea PET Jellyfish Mobile workshop starts from 15:00 h to 17:00 h on the 7th August 2019 @ RAW Labs London. Workshop length is two hours free to attend workshop open to ages 4 to 12 years and up and it is designed for the easy peas craft skill levels. The interactive workshop event is part of the Tall Tales of the Kitchen Kelpies Soup group exhibition that is open from 30 th August and closing on 8th September 2019.

Join in your hands in making with plastics Sea PET Jellyfish Mobiles from the reused single-use plastics; fruit mesh, bottle tops, and bottle rings and colourful cable ties with Katarina from KraalD and guest artist T.J. Thorn. Let us make lush plastic voices in this oceanic underwater world affair together! This workshop is helping raise those silent plastic pollution voices heard in a joyful making manner.

In order to have all alphabetical ingredients for the oceanic soup for jellyfish bloom to thrive, bring along a smile and small plastic toys to weave into the making story.

Plastic pollution is hard to understand and super wicked to reverse and thus requires new ways of engaging with plastics materiality. In this design and art activist workshop, we visually co-create and in hands on making evoke and share some of my thoughtful explorations that are offering a more than human perspective on the oceanic plastic pollution.

I also invite the participatory stakeholders and audience to visualise the ocean in novel ways – as the living landfill. In the Sea PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic series, I am gazing in, beyond technocratic and technological solutions addressing plastics waste management, encouraging to envision plastics entanglement in oceans, while engaged in material tactics of single-use plastics reuse.

“I” trash, therefore “we” are.

https://kraald.org/

Re-opening the bin. An international conference on waste, economy, culture and society June 11-13 2020 University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

thumbnail_image001First announcement for the international conference:

Re-opening the bin – Waste, economy, culture and society 
June 11-13, 2020, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Book the date today and please spread out to your networks!

In April 2017 more than 80 scholars from the social sciences and the humanities from all over the world met at Lund University to discuss waste, culture and society during the Opening the bin workshop in Helsingborg. Today, social scientific and humanistic research on waste is growing, yet still needs further encounters as well as a major engagement in the economies, livelihoods, lifestyles, consumption patterns, natures, infrastructures and materialities that shape and are shaped by the organizing of waste.

It is time to Re-open the bin. This call is an open invitation to scholars interrogating waste from a myriad of disciplines within social sciences and humanities, such as anthropology, cultural studies, history, development studies, gender studies, geography, household and consumption studies, organization and management, philosophy, public administration or governance, sociology, urban studies, to mention a few. These disciplines come across the many faces and dimensions of waste, such as waste history; green development narratives such as circular economy, zero waste or inclusive recycling;  waste prevention; alternative practices of waste management; critical assessments of waste policies and governance; social movements engagement, waste technologies and infrastructure; de-growth, repair and maintenance; working conditions and the types of occupations; skills and industrial relations; creative waste economies; social and grassroots innovations; or sustainable consumption and throwaway cultures. 

The conference also aims to bring together experiences from global South and global North communities, as well as practitioners, to critically discuss the places, roles and trajectories as well as the materialities, meanings, practices and vocabularies of waste in culture, economy and society.

Together we would like to continue the dialogue between disciplines, geographies and professions to discuss how to prompt new ways to imagine, conceptualize, design and theorize waste as a complex socio-material phenomenon. Small is beautiful and we are aiming at gathering around 70 papers to facilitate interaction and dialogue.

The conference will combine seminars with field visits, food and waste activities. If you would like to organize a special “waste fraction” (session), please contact us with a proposal by September 15. We will have a “bulky waste fraction” where abstracts can be sent and then “sorted out” to waste fractions by the organizing committee.

Important dates
Submission of abstract: January 15, 2020
Acceptance decision: February 1, 2020
Registration date: April 15, 2020
Sending in full paper or work-in-progress: May 11, 2020
Conference at University of Gothenburg: June 11-13, 2020

Website
www.gu.se/otb2

Contact:
otb2@gu.se

Facebook
Facebook Re-Opening the Bin Group

Venue
The conference will be held at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Organizing committee

Sebastián Carenzo, University of Quilmes
Hervé Corvellec, Lund University
Jutta Gutberlet, University of Victoria
Ulrika Holmberg, University of Gothenburg

Sandra Samuelsson, University of Gothenburg

Allison Stowell, Lancaster University
Patrik Zapata, University of Gothenburg
María José Zapata Campos, University of Gothenburg

 

Participation fee
1500 Sek / 160 € + VAT if applicable. PhD students and scholars from middle-low income countries can apply for fee release. We are working to get a limited number of grants and will post more information when communicating acceptance decision. Re-opening the bin. An international conference on waste, economy, culture and society June 11-13 2020 University of Gothenburg, Sweden Re-opening the bin. An international conference on waste, economy, culture and society June 11-13 2020 University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Plastics with the Living Voice

Plastics with the Living Voice_The Sea PET

Goldsmiths Postgraduate Research Conference 2019 ‘Futures of the Real’

Plastics with the Living Voice

KraalD praxis continues to nurture a complex metaspace, self-entangled in design research, art and craft-making practice with plastic things exploring ontologies of the “more than human worlds” borrowing the term from the (Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). My speculative materiality research with plastic things was initially theoretically influenced by Bill Brown’s (2001), “Thing Theory” literal critique that rests upon the “material fetishism” (Brown, 2001, p. 5).  Brown argues that as a society, we confront the thingness of objects only when they stop functioning for us (Brown, 2001, pp.1-22). Ambiguous in its core, the power of the thing is almost always associated as ugly once it has been pulled out of its context, eliminated and exorcised.

In the “Metamorphoses” Braidotti (2002), concludes that “if you don’t like complexities of real life you could not possibly feel at home in the third millennium” and predicts that “non-unitary subjectivity, complexity and multiplicity will be the key terms for the 21 century…as well as the fear, terror, ethical and political panic combined with technological and cultural advances” (Braidotti, 2002, p. 263-264).

The research journey further combined Bill Brown’s theory with the Rosie Braidotti (2006) Nomadic ethics, strongly influenced by the “Transpositions” that justifies my changing order of intent “into bio-centred egalitarianism” (Braidotti, 2006:111), and following the notion of the plastics with nonhuman other material embodiment.

‘Futures of the Real’ 2019 Goldsmiths Postgraduate Research Conference

 

When: June 14th, 2019. 10:00-17:00
Where: Goldsmiths, University of London; Professor Stuart Hall Building, LG02
Open to all

https://www.facebook.com/events/1314031865419347/

‘Futures of the Real’https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/futures-of-the-real-goldsmiths-pgr-conference-2019-tickets-61923356426

This conference will explore the implications of changes in our conception of a non-human external reality through the contrasting disciplines pursued by postgraduate researchers at Goldsmiths, University of London. Featuring art presentations, live performances, panel discussions and a keynote address from Dr Ali Hossaini “a biochemist turned philosopher turned television producer turned visual poet” – The New
York Times on modelling the threat from A.I.

10.00-11.00 Keynote Lecture
Dr Ali Hossaini Can Machines Come To Life?
11.10-12.10 Panel I: ‘Post-human.’
Kate Pickering Weirding the Megachurch
Sebastian Althoff Temporal Drag in Hasan Elahi’s Tracking Transience and
Zach Blas’s Facial Weaponization Suite
Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh Becoming Animal / Snapchat Ears
12.30-13.30 Panel II: ‘Non-human.’
Dennis Dizon SANITY / FANTASY: Communicating
in a Techno-Delusional Ecology
Flora Bartlett Experimental photography in explorations of climate change and
the non-human landscape
Katarina Dimitrijevic/ KraalD Plastics with the Living Voice
13.30-14.30 LUNCH

14.30-15.30: Panel III: ‘Operas of Objects.’
Jodie Rottle Operas of Objects
Alastair White Contingency Dialectics in two new operas
Xiao (Lucia) Lu Post-performance experiences of musical theatre:
A study of Chinese audiences’ online reviews
15.30-16.30: Panel IV: Two Performances.
Zhenia Vasiliev Reality // Transmit Don’t Compress
Clareese Hill The Hyper Present

Forest Walk

If you dare to take a walk in the forest, there will be a plethora of life form diversity around you. There is the magical feel that fulfils us, especially after the winter when one feels awaking within and without. Spring: this is natures wisdom, it reminds you that we are all on the Uroboros train of the material entanglement of the death and rebirth.  After a few minutes, I have started following the plastics trail. Firstly, I encountered the abandoned plastic water bottle in the heap of the leaves, followed by the miraculous discovery of the growing moss on the broken green plastic bottle lined with plastic bag withhold by bramble. Next, I was greeted by the chewed up bottle top thread by animal graze (someone was either hungry or teething), bits of plastics parts and broke plastic trail which culminated with the orange netting resting gracefully in the leaves (like the sleeping beauty). In the forest encountering the plastics magic, I did not feel lost as the anthropocentric signposts where all around me. This afternoon walk was full of plastic things and nature others that made me feel that I belong to the Plastisphere, the New Earth. There is a peacefulness of belonging, that lays under the top layer of ecocide denial, guilt and anger, right there in my hearth or knowing myself I would instead say in my gut colony that knows all.