This lecture draws on decades of working with repairing, caring, composting and other worldmaking practices. Over the years we have come to see these practices as ways of hospicing modernity (Machado de Oliveira 2021), cultivating the arts of living (Tsing et al 2017), and keeping possibilities open (Stengers 2023). We’ve been conducting our design research in the Un/Making Studio, a Tiny House on Wheels in Holding Surplus House and through gathering around Hope and Grief. Our participatory design approach has predominantly been involving publics.  

 

Drawing on our more recent work in the research environment Design after Progress: Reimaging design histories and futures, we will turn these questions and challenges towards design practices and design education.  We particularly seek to carefully untie design’s entanglement with progress and to craft concrete imaginaries of a more socio-ecologically just design after progress. This includes developing and articulating skills, competencies, capabilities, and concepts necessary for designing after progress. 

Along with others who work with education on regeneration we want to emphasise the need for taking care of the losses and letting go in the transition and transformation processes. This entails to not just add, but also cherish that which we want to hold on to and take care of what we’re letting go of in various affective ways.

from Feminist Technoscience in Practice: Digital Counter Mapping recorded on May 22, 2025

With guest Marysol Ortega Pallanezç, Assistant Professor at Arizona State University

 

Visioning — the act of imagining futures — is crucial to design, yet dominant approaches often rely on fast, linear notions of time that limit what futures become possible. This lecture explores how the synergy between embroidery and design, as time-variant and material practices, offers an alternative mode of visioning, one that embraces layered, relational, and non-linear temporalities. By engaging with these plural timescapes, designers can contribute to a rebraiding of these temporalities — including and questioning dominant narratives of progress — to more intertwined futures. This approach invites a shift toward future-making that is embodied, affective, and attentive to ongoing change.

 

from Feminist Technoscience in Practice: Digital Counter Mapping recorded on November 28, 2024

With guest Gökçen Erkılıç, Founder of Coastliners Lab and lecturer at Northeastern University College of Arts Media and Design

 

As mapping has long been entangled with colonial practices of surveillance, control, and power, activists, artists, and visionary thinkers have sought to liberate spatial representation through counter-mapping methods. Despite these efforts, we continue to live with a dominance of digital maps that reduce our spatial relationships to utilitarian navigation, populist political propaganda, or global misinformation. This talk revisits the decolonial mapping possibilities in the works of Coastliner Lab. The talk was followed by a digital co-mapping workshop entitled “you would not take me there.”

 

From Feminist Technoscience in Practice: Digital Storytelling recorded on October 8th, 2024

With guest Dr. Benjamin Worku-Dix, Founding Director of PositiveNegatives, Senior Fellow, SOAS University of London

 

This guest lecture with Dr. Benjamin Worku-Dix which focuses on the foundations of the project PositiveNegatives, his personal experiences working with the United Nations in conflict areas as well as his PhD in Anthropology on adapting complex testimonies into sequential art. In this lecture, Ben introduced us to a few examples of projects that have been interesting and challenging in producing animations and dealing with issues of representation and language.