THOUGHTS AND QUOTES FROM TEXTS

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INGOLD – DWELLING

• “The difference between the lodge and the house lies, I argued, not in the construction of the thing itself, but in the origination of the design that governs the construction process. The design of the lodge is incorporated into the same programme that underwrites the development of the beaver’s own body” (Ingold, 2000, p. 175)

•  “For any animal, the environmental conditions of development are liable to be shaped by the activities of predecessors. The beaver, for example, inhabits an environment that has been decisively modified by the labours of its forbears, in building dams and lodges, and will in turn contribute to the fashioning of an environment for its progeny. It is in such a modified environment that the beaver’s own bodily orientations and patterns of activity undergo development.” (Ingold, 2000, p. 186)

 

• Genetical evolution he points out: first beavers will have to adjust, but beavers coming later, will have genetically adjusted to this form of communication.

• Similarity between Thomas Thwaites and Ingold: both talk about the importance of history with people, resembling the DNA of importance with animals, while building.

• Conventional distinctions between human and beaver built environments are not sufficient anymore after reading the text.

 

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Circling the square

• “How to move from the ‘human scale’ to the ‘more-than-human scale’ when exploring, problematizing, re- designing and intervening” – Workshop guide: Circling the Square: Introduction

 

• “While at the individual level Vallvidrera neighbors express caution and a respectful distance with respect to boars, at the collective level this wild companions’ have become a symbol of the districts’s identity. The annual neighborhood’s celebration (Festa Major de Vallvidrera) is announced with a photo of a boar family peacefully grazing at the sunset. Points of touristic interest for waderers are often marked with the sign of boars” – Annibal Arregui, Abstrac:t Boars on the Swings. A reverse Anthropocene.                    

• The idea of animals as a sign for the city: beaver as a tourist attraction and symbol of the Isar

 

• “As we are gaining an understanding of the urban as a changing assemblage where no one agent dominates but rather a host of agents human and non-human, cultural and natural, technological and material, digital and analogue co-exist, coincide and impact on each other, it becomes increasingly difficult to establish which lever needs to be pulled in order to transform the current events in more positive ways” – Karianne Fogelberg, Abstract: Form Follows ecologies

• “How do you go about doing an interview, when a ‘common’ language does not exist? Or, how do you hack the given scale of human embodiment and perspective to engage with other species?” – Karianne Fogelberg, Abstract: Form Follows ecologies

• humans shouldn’t pretend to be a dominant species, instead species should coexist, that’s why we suggest things beaver, without obligating them. No agent dominates.

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Storied-places in a multispecies city

• “animals are also making the shift to urban life. For them also, the reasons for urbanization, while complex, include the same two major constellations of causes: animals are choosing to move into city spaces, and animals are finding their homes overtaken by cities.” (Van Doren; Bird Rose, p.1)

• “This context requires us to develop a language that is capable of prompting recognition of similarity and responsibility, between embodied, social creatures. “Storied-places” and an ethics of conviviality provide one such language.” (Van Doren; Bird Rose, p.5)

• “Where do animals go, and what do they do? We are proposing that in many cases their actions articulate a narrative of place and thus indicate the construction/inhabitation of a storied world.” (Van Doren; Bird Rose, p.5)

• “It seems fair to say that the inclusivity imagined for many contemporary cities — under banners like “multiculturalism” and “cosmopolitanism” — is limited to human diversity in its many forms. Despite the relative lack of interest in urban ecology and its environments – an interest that is now fortunately, but slowly, growing 21 — it is clear that learning to live with nonhuman animals in city places is a vitally important task for our time.” (Van Doren; Bird Rose, p.9)

• “In the great, open-ended, multi-voiced conversations of the storied-places that are cities, some species have fared far better than others, and all have frequently been sacrificed for the needs or convenience of Homo sapiens. […] An ethics of conviviality puts the burden back on humans: to find multiple, life enhancing ways of sharing and co-producing meaningful and enduring multispecies cities.” (Van Doren; Bird Rose, p.19)

 

• If a place was successful for the penguins, they will come back after a certain amount of years, this is the same for beavers. They return to a dam if it ever was a good one.

 

 

The natural contract

• “The parasite takes all and gives nothing; the host gives all and takes nothing. Rights of mastery and property come down to parasitism. Conversely, rights of symbiosis are defined by reciprocity: however much nature gives man, man must give that much back to nature, now a legal subject.” (Serres, 1998, p.38)

  • Reciprocity is a very important thing when speaking about the contract

• “What language do the things of the world speak, that we might come to an understanding with them, contractually? But, after all, the old social contract, too, was unspoken and unwritten: no one has ever read the original, or even a copy.” (Serres, 1998, p.39)

  • Our dam is our contract, not a written one

• “Any contract creates a collection of bonds, whose network canonizes Relations” (Serres, 1998, p.46)

• “Floods take the world back to disorder, to primal chaos, to time zero, right back to nature, in the sense of things about to be born, in a nascent state. Correct measurement reorders nature and gives it a new birth into culture, at least in the agricultural sense. […] Deciding on markers and borders indeed appears to be a moment of origin, without such decisions, there is no oasis separate from the desert. […] who makes this decision? The term decision also expresses cutting, the creation of an edge.” (Serres, 1995, 51-52)

 

 

• We have to stop thinking as parasites, we can’t look down on nature and other species just because they don’t speak the same language we do. Nature communicates “through bonds and relationships”. We’ll just have to try harder to find these.

• Beavers communicate through constructing dams. They show their needs and their preferences (where they place the dam). To locate a building spot for a dam, they follow the sound of flowing water. They also communicate with each other by spreading smells, to mark territory or guide family members. A dam would thus form the perfect contract, because we can imply all this. It will be the closest we can get to communication with beavers.

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Design things and design thinking

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‘things’ vs. ‘Things’:

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‘things’ = objects, an entity of matter (but the word used to mean social and political assembly, taking place at a certain time and at a certain place. People gathered here to resolve disputes)

 

‘Things’ = socio-material assemblies, with a collective of humans & non-humans with the need for a common place where conflicts can be negotiated is motivated by a diversity of perspectives, concerns, and interests

 

Design after design:

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“How can users in their everyday activities understood as a kind of design activity, be inspired by and ‘enact’ the traces, obstacles, objects, and potentially public Things left by the professional designers?”

• People can see our progress on the blog we made, by posting our sources and different steps, they can see our findings and logic behind is

• The beaver suit enables other people to enact the beaver, to come closer to them and understand them better in this way

• role-playing is something we could do for a future model, even though the beaver can't play itself, we can do role-play as a tool of contemporary design thinking

 

Quotes

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“The ‘presenters’ of the object of design, of course, have to be elected and enrolled by the other participants, but once engaged, they are active participants in a design Thing as a collective of humans and non-humans.”

• Beavers have to agree in some way. We see whether they do by following the protocols.

 

“performative design artefacts, such as mock-ups, prototypes, and design games, could act as boundary objects binding the different language-games together.”

• Our means of representation is shown in representations of attempts of communication.

 

“Star and Ruhleder have called such mediation [web of interwoven language games over time] infrastructuring, identifying it as more of a “when” than a “what.”20 An infrastructure (e.g., railroad tracks, cables, or the Internet) reaches beyond the single event (temporal) and the site event (spatial).”

• We establish a neverending contract, with neverending protocols. They will change overtime, since the beaver might disagree in certain situations. We also deliberately chose to make a general design project that’s applicable to any site, instead of just on the Isar.

 

“Such strategies for opening up controversial Things serve as a kind of “event architecture,” where the focus is on designing ‘architecture-events’ rather than ‘architecture-objects’.”

• The protocols and the scheme that uses them in different scenario’s, shows these kind of ‘architecture events’, making a the neverending protocols possible.

 

“As Mouffe argues, the goal of democratic politics is to empower a multiplicity of voices in the struggle for hegemony and to find “constitutions” that help transform antagonism into agonism, moving from conflict between enemies to constructive controversies among ‘adversaries’—those who have opposing matters of concern but who also accept other views as ‘legitimate’.”

• We established protocols between the human animals (IRP) and the non-human animals (beavers).