Abstract
This paper examines how the material performativity of experimental prototypes can provide us with new insights into what it means to “have a stake” when engaged in co-design. For participants like birds and frail elderly people, a participatory interest cannot necessarily be articulated through language and discourse. Drawing on examples from the recent research project Urban Animals and Us (UA&Us), we suggest that experimental prototypes hold the promise of material enactments of relations that enable a re-articulation of what it means to have a stake in a socio-material event. In the specific context of this project, a stake might be the enchantment of a reality otherwise bound to conformity and limited by deteriorated mental and physical faculties. We further argue that the experimental prototypes hold a capacity to structure and enable an essentially deanthropocentric relationality that affords cross species relations and installs a sense of wonderment by extending the life-worlds of elderly people beyond the windowpane and towards the birds in the park. In conclusion we suggest that a stake, under these conditions, could be related to the methodological inventiveness by which prototypes and practices are associated with the speculative attempt at producing novel realities such as new interspecies relations.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2015.001
Citation
Jönsson, L.,and Lensskjold, T.U.(2015) Stakes at the edge of participation: Where words and things are the entirely serious title of a problem, in Tham, M., Edeholt, H., Ávila, M. (eds.), Nordes 2015: Design ecologies, 7 - 10 June, Konstfack, Stockholm, Sweden. https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2015.001
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Stakes at the edge of participation: Where words and things are the entirely serious title of a problem
This paper examines how the material performativity of experimental prototypes can provide us with new insights into what it means to “have a stake” when engaged in co-design. For participants like birds and frail elderly people, a participatory interest cannot necessarily be articulated through language and discourse. Drawing on examples from the recent research project Urban Animals and Us (UA&Us), we suggest that experimental prototypes hold the promise of material enactments of relations that enable a re-articulation of what it means to have a stake in a socio-material event. In the specific context of this project, a stake might be the enchantment of a reality otherwise bound to conformity and limited by deteriorated mental and physical faculties. We further argue that the experimental prototypes hold a capacity to structure and enable an essentially deanthropocentric relationality that affords cross species relations and installs a sense of wonderment by extending the life-worlds of elderly people beyond the windowpane and towards the birds in the park. In conclusion we suggest that a stake, under these conditions, could be related to the methodological inventiveness by which prototypes and practices are associated with the speculative attempt at producing novel realities such as new interspecies relations.