fields

It’s all about time

I feel like a journalist these days, but the intention (perhaps after changing jobs, changing hemispheres and changing ecosystems) is to use events to help me process a wider ecology of thought and practice.

This time 3 inter-related talks / conversations at the Halfway to the Future Conference in Santa Cruz that has an emphasis upon human, more-than-human, and systems relations, with subtexts that challenge the teleology of ‘futures’.

Open papers here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3686169

In conversation, Fred Turner introduced Donna Haraway to explore storytelling to understand science, technology, and feminism. Haraway discussed her Catholic upbringing, her immersion in biology, and her critiques of molecular biology. Spending sometime to connect “Cyborg Manifesto” to the “The Companion Species Manifesto,” she unpacked the interconnectedness of humans and other species as we describe them in different ways. Interestingly, Haraway critiqued the term “Anthropocene” for its human exceptionalism and in particular the temporal frame of the ‘ocene’ deriving from mid 16th century (denoting a subdivision of a play, or (a piece of) stage scenery): from Latin scena, from Greek skēnē ‘tent, stage’. Point being that forests don’t share the same ‘scenes’ of a human constructed model of time, and Haraway returned us to ‘reworlding’ through play and non-heteronormative kin-making.

Paul Dourish ’s talk that reflected on the ‘integrative’ nature of his work, combining sociological and technical accounts to understand interaction. Paul emphasised the importance of old ways of knowing and critiqued the taxonomic view of embodied interaction. Returning to time, Paul highlighted the persistence of old technologies and ideas which continue to influence modern practices (from Thomas Bayes to the 6502 processor),urging a conscious balance between old and new. Funny leaving Edinburgh that has both an Institute of Histories (The Bayes Centre) full of robots and tech, and Edinburgh Futures Institute (interdisciplinary scholars inhabiting a haunted Infirmary). John Vines hang on to the middle 😉

Kia Höök explored the concept of embodied intelligence, emphasising the role of movement and sensory experiences in cognitive development. Referencing Haraway, Maxine Sheets-Johnston, and Elizabeth Grosz, Kia foregrounded ‘Designing with the Body’ through the evolving nature of the body and its influence from Richard Shusterman’s somaesthetics which integrates mind and body through sensory engagement. Shifting the time of technology to the time of the body, Kia pulled us back to the body as a place where design can start from – call back to Grace L Turtle ‘s talk last week.

Takeaways are the narrative threads that take me back to questions of time, and how the conversations of design futures, regenerative futures need to be very careful in placing activity in to ‘a subdivision of a play’ that has come from a very limited collection of cultures.

#regenerativefutures #temporaldesign #HalfwaytotheFuture