From pagan god Pan to panic from transposons pandemic: Greek word panikos, meaning sudden fear, combined with a pandemic which is a disease epidemic that has spread across a vast region, for instance, multiple continents. Pan, the pagan god, is among the dancing spirits in Dionysus’ entourage. Pan is the god of the wild, shepherds, flocks, nature of mountain wilds, father of Fauna. His energy is bawdy, lustful and mischievous. For clarity Fauna meaning the animal of the geological period, for example, I/We live in the human-made geological time of the Anthropocene. So I count my body as an animal representative to put it a complex bacterial, fungal and bio cell meta cluster of myself.

On another unwashed hand, a virus or transposons, also known as jumping genes, can represent a small parasite that cannot reproduce by itself. Once it infects a susceptible cell, however, a virus can direct the cell machinery to produce more viruses, like SARS-CoV-2 aka COVID-19 and his cousins SARS and MERS. Back to the word ‘panic’ which stems from Pan’s name and why I/We have the collective feeling of losing control because the ecstasy generated by his energetic presence can be too much to assimilate. Thus, in hope, I am fearless. Wish you all good health.

#StayAtHome #day9of quarantine

KraalD, 2019, Practice-based Projects Overview Diagram 2014-2019, (on the left) Green design engagements; (on the right and top) Blue design series, DIWO and DIY mode.

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.

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 starts from 15:00 h to 17:00 h on the 7^th 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 8^th 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/

First 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