When we start to ask questions about who gains and who pays for design, we must be able to extend these questions beyond human actors to non-human actors, and even to non-living entities. How do designers begin to work in ways that respect and understand the needs and potentials of the non-human and the non-living? What is the role of the designer working with regard to “post-human” worlds? How do designers serve as “reliable witnesses” for non-human entities? How does this relate to energy and climate change?

“But systems ecologists seem to be moving toward a more radical description of the world, such as Latour’s empirical or “practical metaphysics” which argues that there are multiple, contradictory realities inhabited by different agents whose actions cannot be explained in terms of some external structure. According to this view known as actor-network theory, to work within systems, as systems ecologists suggest, is to treat the human and non-human agents that comprise the system as what actor-network theorists call actants, components that are described in the same ontological terms. The rationale for this is that any differences between actants are generated by the relations within the system itself, and should not be presupposed.” [5]

What does it mean to design for different time frames, for cycles and stages of the lives of non-human entities? Death, decay, decomposition, be it of plants, animals or cities become the source of life.  Nietsche says “Do you know what Life is to me? A monster of energy… that does not expend itself but only transforms itself… [A] play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many…; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing” [6]

r e f e r e n c e s  & s u g g e s t e d  t o p i c s

s e s s i o n  t h e m e s

p r e s e n t e r s

l o g i s t i c s  &  e v e n t s

U n i v e r s i t y  o f  M a n i t o b a

F a c u l t y  o f  A r c h i t e c t u r e

P a r t n e r s

 F e b r u a r y 5  - 7   2 0 1 5

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