Workshop Cracking Nuts led by Lucia Kolesárová

Encountering the walnut as our main actor, the workshop aims to expand the awareness towards the relationships and timeframes we share with more-than-humans. How to sense and attune oneself to an ordinary jet so distant companion? We aim to crouch under its shell and get involved with topics of growth, rest, waiting and perception of time. Thus, the walnut invites us to step away from narratives of productivity and progress.

The workshop is an experiment under the premise of rejecting modern dichotomies (object/subject, nature/culture etc.). Emphasising unlearning, attunement and mingling – as ever-fluid methods of stumbling – we aim to find „designerly“ ways of relating within a vast mesh of entanglements — a hard nut to crack.

With this workshop, we would also like to propose and bring a different than the primarily rational perspective of getting to know other than human actors, which is most often offered by research methodologies of the design process. How could we and the project we work on benefit from getting to know these actors through our senses or via our subjective experiences with them?

In her practice, Lucia Kolesárová combines design, research and art. She focuses on sustainability and regeneration of the environment and multiple agencies, dependencies, and relations within it. She is part of the design research group RIBL, Research Institute of Botanical Linguistics, which aims to attune itself and others to the dynamism of the other-than-human world and foster ways of coexistence through multispecies encounters. She is co-lead of Climate Designers Czech Republic & Slovakia, an initiative supporting not only designers to become climate leaders within their teams and organisations. Lucia is also part of a design agency focused on sustainability, Stride XL.

Workshop Diffractive Mapping as a Post-Anthropocentric Design Method led by Clyde Doyle

Our dominant anthropocentric culture and embedded paradigmatic design methodologies have contributed hugely to global ecological crises. New modes of design that draw on alternative epistemologies are urgently required to break with the extractive, growth oriented, human-centered ways of being. Those new modes of design should not simply de-centre the human, but shift us towards a shared centre, with the aim of contributing to truly ecological design practices.

In this workshop participants are invited to experiment with a post-anthropocentric mapping tool which facilitates a new way of marking how we sense more-than-human “voices” in-place; an element of a larger body of work which been developed through a diffractive methodology. We will follow the mapping with a conversation around the outcomes. The workshop will ask: what might we sense, and perhaps learn, when we attend to what is already there?

Clyde Doyle is a design lecturer and Co-Chair of the MA Design for Change at IADT, Dublin. Currently engaged in PhD in Design at the National College of Art and Design he is developing post-anthropocentric design methodologies. They are also a founding member of IADT’s new Public Design Lab (2022) which is focused on design for social and public good.