Prof. Dr. Michelle Christensen, Dr. Florian Conradi
Design + Crisis: More-than-Human Technoecologies
Block seminar, English, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS, 5 places
Course Duration: 24.-28.2.2025, 10-17 h, Introduction: 24.2.2025 at 10 h
Room: Berlin Open Lab, Universität der Künste Berlin, Einsteinufer 43, 10587 Berlin

Registration: Please register beforehand to michelle.christensen@tu-berlin.de and f.conradi_ @udk-berlin.de!

Deeply entangled in a crisis of the Anthropocene, the need to radically reassemble relationships of ecologies and technologies is more vital than ever – to re/think socio-technical practices and re/design modes of convening with our companion species and environments. While the current conception, production and increasing automation of technology deeply reflects a Western knowledge paradigm deployed globally, there is a multiplicity of ontologies from which the relationship between nature and technology could be conceptualized and embodied.
Within the framework of this block-seminar, we will discuss critical perspectives on western-centric paradigms of understanding nature and technology, exploring pluriversal approaches to interspecies sustainability. Drawing on the approaches of speculative design and critical making, we will debate and prototype alternative human-nonhuman relationships, designing more-than-human technoecologies that attempt to make the prevailing paradigm tremble.

Literature:
– Haraway, D. (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto. Dogs, People and Significant Otherness. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press.
– Braidotti, R. (2006). ‘Posthuman, All Too Human. Towards a New Process Ontology’, Theory, Culture & Society. London/Thousand Oaks: SAGE. Vol. 23 (7–8), pp. 197–208.
– Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Michelle Christensen and Florian Conradi co-head the research group Design, Diversity and New Commons at the UdK Berlin in the framework of the Weizenbaum Institute. Currently, Michelle teaches as a visiting professor for Open Science & Critical Culture at the TU Berlin / ECDF, and Florian teaches as a visiting professor at the International Master’s Program in Integrated Design at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences in Dessau.Combining their backgrounds in political-, conflict-, gender-sociology and design in the form of critical practice, writing and teaching, they attempt to formulate the spaces in between these realms. Their research, teaching and experimental design practice focuses particularly on feminist / queer, beyond western-centric and postanthropocentric approaches to design, using practice-based methodologies and free / open technology practices (critical making, hacking and designing) to illicit critiques and counter-practices.