Abstract

Grappling with the non-human is becoming a consuming human concern. Jolting design past anthropocentric outcomes demands a quixotic and confronting discourse for educators. This paper considers Graham Harman’s notion “not all objects are equally real, but that they are equally objects.” In this context, we explore design as layered conversations. Exchanges taking place with and through objects, as a choreographed ethical and moral exchange. We recognize the challenge for emergent designers/design students to consider “humans as objects” positioned within an ecosystem of other actants. This approach to design demands a recalibration of “making-thinking” past human-centered design methods. As teachers, how we locate this conversation within a design education milieu presents a double bind. First, perceiving design as engaged in human to human conversations. Second, design is solution focused and effective rather than harnessing the potential of seeing the human in a shared, interdependent, existence with the non-human. This paper takes the position that the human object lives amidst a plethora of objects populating the universe, including the universe itself. One example of this turn is the New Zealand Government, in 2017, recognizing “Te Awa Tupua as an indivisible and living whole, comprising the Whanganui River from the mountains to the sea, and all its physical and metaphysical elements.” Teaching design in the Anthropocene demands educators engage in visionary and radical imaginary approaches.