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by Michael Martin
Often a cosmology comes in the form of a creation story. The great religions of the ancient world all had their own creation stories. Despite their apparent differences, however, all these stories were based on the same essential guiding principles of the natural order, which regulates the universe and everything in it. At the heart of these traditions was a cosmology, a way of coming to understand one’s experience of reality that was based on the same truth, a natural order, or harmony, of the cosmos. A worldview by contrast relates to a particular philosophy of life or conception of the world that has formed the bedrock of traditional and modern societies as we have come to know and experience them.
Since the industrialisation and restructuring of society, humans have systemically misunderstood the nature of reality. Furthermore, by manipulating the world to bend it to their purposes, they have wrought havoc on the Earth, and the natural emergent order. As the 21st century unfolds it is becoming evident that the major problems of our time – biodiversity loss, climate change, energy crisis, food security, financial instability –cannot be understood in isolation, these systemic problems are different facets of one single crisis – a crisis of cosmology – brought about by theWestern mechanistic worldview that has dominated the world through colonising, industrialist-capitalist practices primarily of the Global North over the past several hundred years.
Furthermore, the brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world to subject it to our control prevent us from truly understanding it. The psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and philosopher, Iain McGilchrist, writes that the brain is divided into two hemispheres: the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend – and thus manipulate – the world; the right hemisphere is designed to com-prehend it – see it for what it is. Every animal, including humans, to survive must solve a conundrum: how to eat without being eaten. Using the analogy of a bird feeding in the wild, McGilchrist suggests a bird must be able to distinguish prey from the background on which it is situated, yet if the bird is to avoid becoming prey itself, it must at the same time pay another kind of attention to the world, which is opposite to the first: broad, open, sustained, vigilant. This applies to the human animal too. How can the human dispose it’s consciousness towards the world in two conflicting ways at once?
The answer, states McGilchrist, is in the evolution of two neuronal masses, separate enough to function independently and connected enough to work in unison with each other, each capable of supporting consciousness on its own.In other words, a bipartite brain. Like the human brain every animal’s nervous system is asymmetrical in nature, it is profoundly divided. As such the hemispheres pay different types of attention to the world, and they type of attention changes the nature of the world we experience.
Furthermore, these two ways of seeing the world are each vital to our survival – we need to simplify and stand apart to manipulate things, to design and build the foundations of society, and we need to live in it, to belong to it to understand the complexity of what it is we are designing for and with –this division of attention works to our advantage when we use both. So how we attend to something, or not, matters a great deal – it can create or destroy, humanise or de-humanise – so much so that when the latter happens, we no longer are aware that there is a problem at all, for you do not see what you cannot see.
In the pursuit of progress, we have objectified the world to understand, control and manipulate it, and in doing so we have fragmented our collective human experience to the point where the prevailing Western scientific paradigm has us trapped, reflexively imprisoned, in what McGilchrist describes as a hall of mirrors. Reason and rationality, the cornerstones upon which modern Westernised societies have been built, have powerfully characterised the nature of human relations with other species and the natural world. It seems we have reached a tipping point where we urgently need to transform both how we think about the world, and what we make of ourselves.
One of the oldest forms of tradition is that of the law of a culture, or tribe, Chthonic law. It emerged through experience, oral tradition and the memory of peoples living in close harmony to the Earth. ThePueblo native American scholar of indigenous native science, Gregory Cajete, states the current global crisis stems from a narrow view of who we are, and what the Earth is. It seems in forgetting these laws we are forgetting what it means to be human. Furthermore, Cajete describes native science as a metaphor for a wide range of tribal processes of perceiving, thinking, acting, and coming to know that have evolved through human experience with the natural world. It includes metaphysics, philosophy and spirituality, art and architecture, practical technologies and agriculture, farming, hunting, ritual, and ceremony practiced by indigenous peoples past and present. In its essential form it is a map of natural reality drawn from the experience of thousands of human generations; it is the collective heritage of human experience with the natural world. It is a deeply relational process of coming to understand, or coming to know, that metaphorically entails a journey, a quest for knowledge and understanding.
Furthermore, Cajete suggests native science encompasses knowledges that are part of an indigenous mind-set, which is essentially relational and participatory, and it is this participation that provides the grounding for the way of coming know the nature of life and the relationships therein. It is an all-encompassing task, and it is a deeply creative participatory process, that is founded on an ancient human covenant with animals, plants, places, the natural forces of the earth, and it is rarely explicated. Also, indigenous scholars use the term science and knowledge interchangeably. To understand the foundations of native science, one must become open to the role of sensation, feeling, perception, imagination, and spirit, as well as logic, and rational empiricism. Its most akin to a deeper expression of what Western science calls environmental science, or ecology – deep ecology.
Ecology, from the Greek oikos, meaning home, is the scientific study of relationships, between plants, animals and micro-organisms, and their natural environment, or ecosystems, the home to all life on earth. A conception of life based a new kind of thinking – thinking in terms of relationships, patterns, and context. From an ecological perspective, design consists of shaping flows of energy and materials for human purposes, and a set of ecological design principles reflect the principles of organisation that nature has evolved over billions of years to sustain the web of life. The great challenge of our time is to make and nurture sustainable communities, and we can learn many lessons from living systems for they are essentially communities of plants, animals and micro-organisms that have sustained life for billions of years.
The environmentalist, writer and philosopher,Edward Goldsmith, advocates for an ecological worldview based on two fundamental principles. The first is the natural world is the basic source of all wealth and will only dispense these benefits if we preserve its critical order. The second is that the purpose of the behavioural pattern of an ecological society must be to preserve the critical order of the natural world.This suggests a relationship built on respect, reciprocity, and reverence.Furthermore, Goldsmith writes that the inspiration must come from the world view of vernacular, traditional societies, in particular the Chthonic world view of the earliest period in humanity when people everywhere knew how to live well, and in harmony with the natural world.
Similarly, the academic, environmental activist and writer, David Orr, suggests that the modern society is built on a culture of fast knowledge that rests on assumptions of progress, and only that can be measured is true knowledge. In the pursuit of progress and modernity, fast knowledge has undermined long-term sustainability, and for two fundamental reasons. The first being the rate at which our collective learning happens slowly, over time. The second reason being we have created power structures that hold at bay alternative paradigms, and worldviews, that might slow the speed of change to manageable rates, resulting in social traps in which the benefits (of fast knowledge) occur in the near-term future while the costs are deferred to others later. Orr argues that the only knowledge we can count on for our longevity as a species has been acquired over a long period of time and through cultural maturation – slow knowledge.
Slow knowledge is knowledge shaped to fit a particular ecological and cultural context, and its purpose is resilience.Every human culture that has artfully adapted itself to the challenges and opportunities of a particular landscape have done so through the patient and painstaking accumulation of knowledge over many generations. The indigenous peoples of traditional societies are a striking example of this. Furthermore, fast knowledge is focussed on solving problems, slow knowledge has to do with avoiding problems in the first place. The current paradigm that shapes design as a problem-solving tool is the result of fast knowledge. The possibility that today’s ecological problems are design failures of the past is bad news for designers, as it points towards inherent flaws in our profession. How might it be to design our ways of life shaped by slow knowledge, its purpose not to solve problems, but to avoid them in the first place?
The anthropologist and academic, Arturo Escobar, posits that design is a conversation about possibilities, and every tool or technology is ontological in the sense that it inaugurates a set of rituals, ways of doing, and modes of being, contributing to shaping what it is to be human. Furthermore, he suggests that this extends beyond objects and tools, to institutions and discourses of human creation. In this sense it generates structures of possibility in our individual and collective human experience. Furthermore, Escobar argues that realising the potential of design requires a profound relational sensibility that brings together materiality, and empathy in the creation of novel assemblages of infrastructures, skills and knowledge, by way of imbuing design education with the tools for reflection in ways that make designers conscious of their own situatedness in the ecologies for which they design. In Designs for the Pluriverse Escobar argues designing involves understanding the dualist ontology of separation, control and appropriation that has become dominant in patriarchal capitalist modernity. Whilst inquiring into existing and potential rationalities, and modes of being that emphasise the profound relationality and interconnectedness of all that is, it recognises that all design creates a world-within-the-world in which we are designed by what we design. In this regard we are all designers, and we are all designed.
The academic in art theory and interdisciplinary studies, Susanne Witzgal, posits a relational way of designing or ‘sympoietic designing’ as designing with care, an ethical project based on new ecological thinking and new materialist approaches that enlighten perspectives on the process of making or designing. Witzgal describes it as a complex, twofold endeavour – firstly it comprises of the disposition and capacity of the maker to be deeply affected and guided by materials, and their essential properties, and secondly, the designer’s capacity and capability to consider, and assume responsibility for the extraction and use of materials, and making of things, as they have great affecting powers on interspecies.
The notion of sympoiesis, or making-with, provides a novel understanding of design. The term was first used by Beth Dempster, as a way of proposing a new conceptual understanding of life as complex, self-organising but collectively producing systems that do have not self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries, and that are evolutionary in their nature. Similarly the feminist scholar exploring human-animal relations, Donna J. Haraway, suggests nothing really makes itself, nothing is truly autopoietic or self-organising, and this is the radical implication of sympoiesis. Haraway takes the concept of sympoiesis further with examples of it in practice through describing the traditional practices of weavers of the Navajo Indians of North America.
At a fundamental level ‘weaving is a cosmological performance, knotting proper relationality and connectedness into the warp and weft of the fabric’, suggests Haraway. In this way Haraway likens weaving to a relational worlding, with human and nonhumans fibres from ordinary human beings, plants, soil, water, and sheep. Furthermore, the geometric patterns, repetition and invention in weaving of Dine, or ‘the people’, are their stories and knowledge; these patterns propose and embody world-making and world-sustaining relations. In this regard it is the act of weaving that ‘ties people and animals through patterns of care and response-ability’. It is a way of making kin, Harraway suggests, a relational worlding to nurture well-being on a damaged planet, and stay with the trouble.
The worldview of the modern, industrialised society and culture that seeks to dominate nature has its roots in the exploitation, degradation, and enslavement of our fellow humans. Inequality, inequity, and injustice are the hallmarks of civilisation. Furthermore, the increasingly complex nature of these problems, often leads to inaction, passivity, and denial, further normalising them. It seems until we can acknowledge the collective denial of the true cost of the ‘civilised’ societies, then how can we design regenerative cultures in which we can thrive together. Cultivating a design practice fit for purpose in the 21stcentury begins with not only recognising our interdependence on the living systems we have built our worlds, but also our intersectionality.
Leah Thomas, author, and co-founder of the Intersectional Environmentalist suggests our intersectional lives are at the centre of the environmental crises.Intersectionality is the term used to describe the ways in which systems of inequality based on gender, race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, and class intersect to create dynamics and effects that are mutually reinforcing. For example, addressing the problem of gender pay gap without considering other dimensions such as race, socio-economic and immigration status will likely reinforce inequalities. Intersectional Environmentalism posits we cannot save the planet without uplifting the voices of those most marginalised. Furthermore, environmental justice and social justice are fuelled by the undervaluing, commodification, and exploitation of all forms of life, and natural resources from the smallest grain to the oppressed peoples worldwide. Intersectional justice recognises discrimination and inequality as an outcome not of individuals but rather as systemic, institutional, and structural.
At the heart of intersectional justice is the understanding that one person’s disadvantage is another’s privilege, and it is these structural privileges and disadvantages that need to be dismantled through the fair and equal distribution of wealth, rights, power, and knowledge. If we are to recover our awareness of the fundamental human relationships that we have with the broader ecologies within which we are embedded, we must first recalibrate our relations with each other. The deepest, most powerful form of empathy is intimacy with another, and with connections that are made with life that are not constrained by the boundaries set by our rational mind. One must become open to the role of sensation, feeling, perception, and imagination, as well as logic, and empiricism. Might a cosmology for the times we live in enfold the radical equality of all beings as an imperative and be founded on an ancient human covenant with animals, plants, places, the natural forces of Earth, Water, Fire and Air, so that we might cultivate everyday practices and relationships built on respect, reciprocity, and reverence.
Michael Martin is a lecturer in Design Management at the University of the Arts London (UAL) and Assistant Editor of the Wild Alchemy Journal.
Often a cosmology comes in the form of a creation story. The great religions of the ancient world all had their own creation stories. Despite their apparent differences, however, all these stories were based on the same essential guiding principles of the natural order, which regulates the universe and everything in it. At the heart of these traditions was a cosmology, a way of coming to understand one’s experience of reality that was based on the same truth, a natural order, or harmony, of the cosmos. A worldview by contrast relates to a particular philosophy of life or conception of the world that has formed the bedrock of traditional and modern societies as we have come to know and experience them.
Since the industrialisation and restructuring of society, humans have systemically misunderstood the nature of reality. Furthermore, by manipulating the world to bend it to their purposes, they have wrought havoc on the Earth, and the natural emergent order. As the 21st century unfolds it is becoming evident that the major problems of our time – biodiversity loss, climate change, energy crisis, food security, financial instability –cannot be understood in isolation, these systemic problems are different facets of one single crisis – a crisis of cosmology – brought about by theWestern mechanistic worldview that has dominated the world through colonising, industrialist-capitalist practices primarily of the Global North over the past several hundred years.
Furthermore, the brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world to subject it to our control prevent us from truly understanding it. The psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and philosopher, Iain McGilchrist, writes that the brain is divided into two hemispheres: the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend – and thus manipulate – the world; the right hemisphere is designed to com-prehend it – see it for what it is. Every animal, including humans, to survive must solve a conundrum: how to eat without being eaten. Using the analogy of a bird feeding in the wild, McGilchrist suggests a bird must be able to distinguish prey from the background on which it is situated, yet if the bird is to avoid becoming prey itself, it must at the same time pay another kind of attention to the world, which is opposite to the first: broad, open, sustained, vigilant. This applies to the human animal too. How can the human dispose it’s consciousness towards the world in two conflicting ways at once?
The answer, states McGilchrist, is in the evolution of two neuronal masses, separate enough to function independently and connected enough to work in unison with each other, each capable of supporting consciousness on its own.In other words, a bipartite brain. Like the human brain every animal’s nervous system is asymmetrical in nature, it is profoundly divided. As such the hemispheres pay different types of attention to the world, and they type of attention changes the nature of the world we experience.
Furthermore, these two ways of seeing the world are each vital to our survival – we need to simplify and stand apart to manipulate things, to design and build the foundations of society, and we need to live in it, to belong to it to understand the complexity of what it is we are designing for and with –this division of attention works to our advantage when we use both. So how we attend to something, or not, matters a great deal – it can create or destroy, humanise or de-humanise – so much so that when the latter happens, we no longer are aware that there is a problem at all, for you do not see what you cannot see.
In the pursuit of progress, we have objectified the world to understand, control and manipulate it, and in doing so we have fragmented our collective human experience to the point where the prevailing Western scientific paradigm has us trapped, reflexively imprisoned, in what McGilchrist describes as a hall of mirrors. Reason and rationality, the cornerstones upon which modern Westernised societies have been built, have powerfully characterised the nature of human relations with other species and the natural world. It seems we have reached a tipping point where we urgently need to transform both how we think about the world, and what we make of ourselves.
One of the oldest forms of tradition is that of the law of a culture, or tribe, Chthonic law. It emerged through experience, oral tradition and the memory of peoples living in close harmony to the Earth. ThePueblo native American scholar of indigenous native science, Gregory Cajete, states the current global crisis stems from a narrow view of who we are, and what the Earth is. It seems in forgetting these laws we are forgetting what it means to be human. Furthermore, Cajete describes native science as a metaphor for a wide range of tribal processes of perceiving, thinking, acting, and coming to know that have evolved through human experience with the natural world. It includes metaphysics, philosophy and spirituality, art and architecture, practical technologies and agriculture, farming, hunting, ritual, and ceremony practiced by indigenous peoples past and present. In its essential form it is a map of natural reality drawn from the experience of thousands of human generations; it is the collective heritage of human experience with the natural world. It is a deeply relational process of coming to understand, or coming to know, that metaphorically entails a journey, a quest for knowledge and understanding.
Furthermore, Cajete suggests native science encompasses knowledges that are part of an indigenous mind-set, which is essentially relational and participatory, and it is this participation that provides the grounding for the way of coming know the nature of life and the relationships therein. It is an all-encompassing task, and it is a deeply creative participatory process, that is founded on an ancient human covenant with animals, plants, places, the natural forces of the earth, and it is rarely explicated. Also, indigenous scholars use the term science and knowledge interchangeably. To understand the foundations of native science, one must become open to the role of sensation, feeling, perception, imagination, and spirit, as well as logic, and rational empiricism. Its most akin to a deeper expression of what Western science calls environmental science, or ecology – deep ecology.
Ecology, from the Greek oikos, meaning home, is the scientific study of relationships, between plants, animals and micro-organisms, and their natural environment, or ecosystems, the home to all life on earth. A conception of life based a new kind of thinking – thinking in terms of relationships, patterns, and context. From an ecological perspective, design consists of shaping flows of energy and materials for human purposes, and a set of ecological design principles reflect the principles of organisation that nature has evolved over billions of years to sustain the web of life. The great challenge of our time is to make and nurture sustainable communities, and we can learn many lessons from living systems for they are essentially communities of plants, animals and micro-organisms that have sustained life for billions of years.
The environmentalist, writer and philosopher,Edward Goldsmith, advocates for an ecological worldview based on two fundamental principles. The first is the natural world is the basic source of all wealth and will only dispense these benefits if we preserve its critical order. The second is that the purpose of the behavioural pattern of an ecological society must be to preserve the critical order of the natural world.This suggests a relationship built on respect, reciprocity, and reverence.Furthermore, Goldsmith writes that the inspiration must come from the world view of vernacular, traditional societies, in particular the Chthonic world view of the earliest period in humanity when people everywhere knew how to live well, and in harmony with the natural world.
Similarly, the academic, environmental activist and writer, David Orr, suggests that the modern society is built on a culture of fast knowledge that rests on assumptions of progress, and only that can be measured is true knowledge. In the pursuit of progress and modernity, fast knowledge has undermined long-term sustainability, and for two fundamental reasons. The first being the rate at which our collective learning happens slowly, over time. The second reason being we have created power structures that hold at bay alternative paradigms, and worldviews, that might slow the speed of change to manageable rates, resulting in social traps in which the benefits (of fast knowledge) occur in the near-term future while the costs are deferred to others later. Orr argues that the only knowledge we can count on for our longevity as a species has been acquired over a long period of time and through cultural maturation – slow knowledge.
Slow knowledge is knowledge shaped to fit a particular ecological and cultural context, and its purpose is resilience.Every human culture that has artfully adapted itself to the challenges and opportunities of a particular landscape have done so through the patient and painstaking accumulation of knowledge over many generations. The indigenous peoples of traditional societies are a striking example of this. Furthermore, fast knowledge is focussed on solving problems, slow knowledge has to do with avoiding problems in the first place. The current paradigm that shapes design as a problem-solving tool is the result of fast knowledge. The possibility that today’s ecological problems are design failures of the past is bad news for designers, as it points towards inherent flaws in our profession. How might it be to design our ways of life shaped by slow knowledge, its purpose not to solve problems, but to avoid them in the first place?
The anthropologist and academic, Arturo Escobar, posits that design is a conversation about possibilities, and every tool or technology is ontological in the sense that it inaugurates a set of rituals, ways of doing, and modes of being, contributing to shaping what it is to be human. Furthermore, he suggests that this extends beyond objects and tools, to institutions and discourses of human creation. In this sense it generates structures of possibility in our individual and collective human experience. Furthermore, Escobar argues that realising the potential of design requires a profound relational sensibility that brings together materiality, and empathy in the creation of novel assemblages of infrastructures, skills and knowledge, by way of imbuing design education with the tools for reflection in ways that make designers conscious of their own situatedness in the ecologies for which they design. In Designs for the Pluriverse Escobar argues designing involves understanding the dualist ontology of separation, control and appropriation that has become dominant in patriarchal capitalist modernity. Whilst inquiring into existing and potential rationalities, and modes of being that emphasise the profound relationality and interconnectedness of all that is, it recognises that all design creates a world-within-the-world in which we are designed by what we design. In this regard we are all designers, and we are all designed.
The academic in art theory and interdisciplinary studies, Susanne Witzgal, posits a relational way of designing or ‘sympoietic designing’ as designing with care, an ethical project based on new ecological thinking and new materialist approaches that enlighten perspectives on the process of making or designing. Witzgal describes it as a complex, twofold endeavour – firstly it comprises of the disposition and capacity of the maker to be deeply affected and guided by materials, and their essential properties, and secondly, the designer’s capacity and capability to consider, and assume responsibility for the extraction and use of materials, and making of things, as they have great affecting powers on interspecies.
The notion of sympoiesis, or making-with, provides a novel understanding of design. The term was first used by Beth Dempster, as a way of proposing a new conceptual understanding of life as complex, self-organising but collectively producing systems that do have not self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries, and that are evolutionary in their nature. Similarly the feminist scholar exploring human-animal relations, Donna J. Haraway, suggests nothing really makes itself, nothing is truly autopoietic or self-organising, and this is the radical implication of sympoiesis. Haraway takes the concept of sympoiesis further with examples of it in practice through describing the traditional practices of weavers of the Navajo Indians of North America.
At a fundamental level ‘weaving is a cosmological performance, knotting proper relationality and connectedness into the warp and weft of the fabric’, suggests Haraway. In this way Haraway likens weaving to a relational worlding, with human and nonhumans fibres from ordinary human beings, plants, soil, water, and sheep. Furthermore, the geometric patterns, repetition and invention in weaving of Dine, or ‘the people’, are their stories and knowledge; these patterns propose and embody world-making and world-sustaining relations. In this regard it is the act of weaving that ‘ties people and animals through patterns of care and response-ability’. It is a way of making kin, Harraway suggests, a relational worlding to nurture well-being on a damaged planet, and stay with the trouble.
The worldview of the modern, industrialised society and culture that seeks to dominate nature has its roots in the exploitation, degradation, and enslavement of our fellow humans. Inequality, inequity, and injustice are the hallmarks of civilisation. Furthermore, the increasingly complex nature of these problems, often leads to inaction, passivity, and denial, further normalising them. It seems until we can acknowledge the collective denial of the true cost of the ‘civilised’ societies, then how can we design regenerative cultures in which we can thrive together. Cultivating a design practice fit for purpose in the 21stcentury begins with not only recognising our interdependence on the living systems we have built our worlds, but also our intersectionality.
Leah Thomas, author, and co-founder of the Intersectional Environmentalist suggests our intersectional lives are at the centre of the environmental crises.Intersectionality is the term used to describe the ways in which systems of inequality based on gender, race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, and class intersect to create dynamics and effects that are mutually reinforcing. For example, addressing the problem of gender pay gap without considering other dimensions such as race, socio-economic and immigration status will likely reinforce inequalities. Intersectional Environmentalism posits we cannot save the planet without uplifting the voices of those most marginalised. Furthermore, environmental justice and social justice are fuelled by the undervaluing, commodification, and exploitation of all forms of life, and natural resources from the smallest grain to the oppressed peoples worldwide. Intersectional justice recognises discrimination and inequality as an outcome not of individuals but rather as systemic, institutional, and structural.
At the heart of intersectional justice is the understanding that one person’s disadvantage is another’s privilege, and it is these structural privileges and disadvantages that need to be dismantled through the fair and equal distribution of wealth, rights, power, and knowledge. If we are to recover our awareness of the fundamental human relationships that we have with the broader ecologies within which we are embedded, we must first recalibrate our relations with each other. The deepest, most powerful form of empathy is intimacy with another, and with connections that are made with life that are not constrained by the boundaries set by our rational mind. One must become open to the role of sensation, feeling, perception, and imagination, as well as logic, and empiricism. Might a cosmology for the times we live in enfold the radical equality of all beings as an imperative and be founded on an ancient human covenant with animals, plants, places, the natural forces of Earth, Water, Fire and Air, so that we might cultivate everyday practices and relationships built on respect, reciprocity, and reverence.
Michael Martin is a lecturer in Design Management at the University of the Arts London (UAL) and Assistant Editor of the Wild Alchemy Journal.
by Michael Martin
Often a cosmology comes in the form of a creation story. The great religions of the ancient world all had their own creation stories. Despite their apparent differences, however, all these stories were based on the same essential guiding principles of the natural order, which regulates the universe and everything in it. At the heart of these traditions was a cosmology, a way of coming to understand one’s experience of reality that was based on the same truth, a natural order, or harmony, of the cosmos. A worldview by contrast relates to a particular philosophy of life or conception of the world that has formed the bedrock of traditional and modern societies as we have come to know and experience them.
Since the industrialisation and restructuring of society, humans have systemically misunderstood the nature of reality. Furthermore, by manipulating the world to bend it to their purposes, they have wrought havoc on the Earth, and the natural emergent order. As the 21st century unfolds it is becoming evident that the major problems of our time – biodiversity loss, climate change, energy crisis, food security, financial instability –cannot be understood in isolation, these systemic problems are different facets of one single crisis – a crisis of cosmology – brought about by theWestern mechanistic worldview that has dominated the world through colonising, industrialist-capitalist practices primarily of the Global North over the past several hundred years.
Furthermore, the brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world to subject it to our control prevent us from truly understanding it. The psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and philosopher, Iain McGilchrist, writes that the brain is divided into two hemispheres: the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend – and thus manipulate – the world; the right hemisphere is designed to com-prehend it – see it for what it is. Every animal, including humans, to survive must solve a conundrum: how to eat without being eaten. Using the analogy of a bird feeding in the wild, McGilchrist suggests a bird must be able to distinguish prey from the background on which it is situated, yet if the bird is to avoid becoming prey itself, it must at the same time pay another kind of attention to the world, which is opposite to the first: broad, open, sustained, vigilant. This applies to the human animal too. How can the human dispose it’s consciousness towards the world in two conflicting ways at once?
The answer, states McGilchrist, is in the evolution of two neuronal masses, separate enough to function independently and connected enough to work in unison with each other, each capable of supporting consciousness on its own.In other words, a bipartite brain. Like the human brain every animal’s nervous system is asymmetrical in nature, it is profoundly divided. As such the hemispheres pay different types of attention to the world, and they type of attention changes the nature of the world we experience.
Furthermore, these two ways of seeing the world are each vital to our survival – we need to simplify and stand apart to manipulate things, to design and build the foundations of society, and we need to live in it, to belong to it to understand the complexity of what it is we are designing for and with –this division of attention works to our advantage when we use both. So how we attend to something, or not, matters a great deal – it can create or destroy, humanise or de-humanise – so much so that when the latter happens, we no longer are aware that there is a problem at all, for you do not see what you cannot see.
In the pursuit of progress, we have objectified the world to understand, control and manipulate it, and in doing so we have fragmented our collective human experience to the point where the prevailing Western scientific paradigm has us trapped, reflexively imprisoned, in what McGilchrist describes as a hall of mirrors. Reason and rationality, the cornerstones upon which modern Westernised societies have been built, have powerfully characterised the nature of human relations with other species and the natural world. It seems we have reached a tipping point where we urgently need to transform both how we think about the world, and what we make of ourselves.
One of the oldest forms of tradition is that of the law of a culture, or tribe, Chthonic law. It emerged through experience, oral tradition and the memory of peoples living in close harmony to the Earth. ThePueblo native American scholar of indigenous native science, Gregory Cajete, states the current global crisis stems from a narrow view of who we are, and what the Earth is. It seems in forgetting these laws we are forgetting what it means to be human. Furthermore, Cajete describes native science as a metaphor for a wide range of tribal processes of perceiving, thinking, acting, and coming to know that have evolved through human experience with the natural world. It includes metaphysics, philosophy and spirituality, art and architecture, practical technologies and agriculture, farming, hunting, ritual, and ceremony practiced by indigenous peoples past and present. In its essential form it is a map of natural reality drawn from the experience of thousands of human generations; it is the collective heritage of human experience with the natural world. It is a deeply relational process of coming to understand, or coming to know, that metaphorically entails a journey, a quest for knowledge and understanding.
Furthermore, Cajete suggests native science encompasses knowledges that are part of an indigenous mind-set, which is essentially relational and participatory, and it is this participation that provides the grounding for the way of coming know the nature of life and the relationships therein. It is an all-encompassing task, and it is a deeply creative participatory process, that is founded on an ancient human covenant with animals, plants, places, the natural forces of the earth, and it is rarely explicated. Also, indigenous scholars use the term science and knowledge interchangeably. To understand the foundations of native science, one must become open to the role of sensation, feeling, perception, imagination, and spirit, as well as logic, and rational empiricism. Its most akin to a deeper expression of what Western science calls environmental science, or ecology – deep ecology.
Ecology, from the Greek oikos, meaning home, is the scientific study of relationships, between plants, animals and micro-organisms, and their natural environment, or ecosystems, the home to all life on earth. A conception of life based a new kind of thinking – thinking in terms of relationships, patterns, and context. From an ecological perspective, design consists of shaping flows of energy and materials for human purposes, and a set of ecological design principles reflect the principles of organisation that nature has evolved over billions of years to sustain the web of life. The great challenge of our time is to make and nurture sustainable communities, and we can learn many lessons from living systems for they are essentially communities of plants, animals and micro-organisms that have sustained life for billions of years.
The environmentalist, writer and philosopher,Edward Goldsmith, advocates for an ecological worldview based on two fundamental principles. The first is the natural world is the basic source of all wealth and will only dispense these benefits if we preserve its critical order. The second is that the purpose of the behavioural pattern of an ecological society must be to preserve the critical order of the natural world.This suggests a relationship built on respect, reciprocity, and reverence.Furthermore, Goldsmith writes that the inspiration must come from the world view of vernacular, traditional societies, in particular the Chthonic world view of the earliest period in humanity when people everywhere knew how to live well, and in harmony with the natural world.
Similarly, the academic, environmental activist and writer, David Orr, suggests that the modern society is built on a culture of fast knowledge that rests on assumptions of progress, and only that can be measured is true knowledge. In the pursuit of progress and modernity, fast knowledge has undermined long-term sustainability, and for two fundamental reasons. The first being the rate at which our collective learning happens slowly, over time. The second reason being we have created power structures that hold at bay alternative paradigms, and worldviews, that might slow the speed of change to manageable rates, resulting in social traps in which the benefits (of fast knowledge) occur in the near-term future while the costs are deferred to others later. Orr argues that the only knowledge we can count on for our longevity as a species has been acquired over a long period of time and through cultural maturation – slow knowledge.
Slow knowledge is knowledge shaped to fit a particular ecological and cultural context, and its purpose is resilience.Every human culture that has artfully adapted itself to the challenges and opportunities of a particular landscape have done so through the patient and painstaking accumulation of knowledge over many generations. The indigenous peoples of traditional societies are a striking example of this. Furthermore, fast knowledge is focussed on solving problems, slow knowledge has to do with avoiding problems in the first place. The current paradigm that shapes design as a problem-solving tool is the result of fast knowledge. The possibility that today’s ecological problems are design failures of the past is bad news for designers, as it points towards inherent flaws in our profession. How might it be to design our ways of life shaped by slow knowledge, its purpose not to solve problems, but to avoid them in the first place?
The anthropologist and academic, Arturo Escobar, posits that design is a conversation about possibilities, and every tool or technology is ontological in the sense that it inaugurates a set of rituals, ways of doing, and modes of being, contributing to shaping what it is to be human. Furthermore, he suggests that this extends beyond objects and tools, to institutions and discourses of human creation. In this sense it generates structures of possibility in our individual and collective human experience. Furthermore, Escobar argues that realising the potential of design requires a profound relational sensibility that brings together materiality, and empathy in the creation of novel assemblages of infrastructures, skills and knowledge, by way of imbuing design education with the tools for reflection in ways that make designers conscious of their own situatedness in the ecologies for which they design. In Designs for the Pluriverse Escobar argues designing involves understanding the dualist ontology of separation, control and appropriation that has become dominant in patriarchal capitalist modernity. Whilst inquiring into existing and potential rationalities, and modes of being that emphasise the profound relationality and interconnectedness of all that is, it recognises that all design creates a world-within-the-world in which we are designed by what we design. In this regard we are all designers, and we are all designed.
The academic in art theory and interdisciplinary studies, Susanne Witzgal, posits a relational way of designing or ‘sympoietic designing’ as designing with care, an ethical project based on new ecological thinking and new materialist approaches that enlighten perspectives on the process of making or designing. Witzgal describes it as a complex, twofold endeavour – firstly it comprises of the disposition and capacity of the maker to be deeply affected and guided by materials, and their essential properties, and secondly, the designer’s capacity and capability to consider, and assume responsibility for the extraction and use of materials, and making of things, as they have great affecting powers on interspecies.
The notion of sympoiesis, or making-with, provides a novel understanding of design. The term was first used by Beth Dempster, as a way of proposing a new conceptual understanding of life as complex, self-organising but collectively producing systems that do have not self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries, and that are evolutionary in their nature. Similarly the feminist scholar exploring human-animal relations, Donna J. Haraway, suggests nothing really makes itself, nothing is truly autopoietic or self-organising, and this is the radical implication of sympoiesis. Haraway takes the concept of sympoiesis further with examples of it in practice through describing the traditional practices of weavers of the Navajo Indians of North America.
At a fundamental level ‘weaving is a cosmological performance, knotting proper relationality and connectedness into the warp and weft of the fabric’, suggests Haraway. In this way Haraway likens weaving to a relational worlding, with human and nonhumans fibres from ordinary human beings, plants, soil, water, and sheep. Furthermore, the geometric patterns, repetition and invention in weaving of Dine, or ‘the people’, are their stories and knowledge; these patterns propose and embody world-making and world-sustaining relations. In this regard it is the act of weaving that ‘ties people and animals through patterns of care and response-ability’. It is a way of making kin, Harraway suggests, a relational worlding to nurture well-being on a damaged planet, and stay with the trouble.
The worldview of the modern, industrialised society and culture that seeks to dominate nature has its roots in the exploitation, degradation, and enslavement of our fellow humans. Inequality, inequity, and injustice are the hallmarks of civilisation. Furthermore, the increasingly complex nature of these problems, often leads to inaction, passivity, and denial, further normalising them. It seems until we can acknowledge the collective denial of the true cost of the ‘civilised’ societies, then how can we design regenerative cultures in which we can thrive together. Cultivating a design practice fit for purpose in the 21stcentury begins with not only recognising our interdependence on the living systems we have built our worlds, but also our intersectionality.
Leah Thomas, author, and co-founder of the Intersectional Environmentalist suggests our intersectional lives are at the centre of the environmental crises.Intersectionality is the term used to describe the ways in which systems of inequality based on gender, race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, and class intersect to create dynamics and effects that are mutually reinforcing. For example, addressing the problem of gender pay gap without considering other dimensions such as race, socio-economic and immigration status will likely reinforce inequalities. Intersectional Environmentalism posits we cannot save the planet without uplifting the voices of those most marginalised. Furthermore, environmental justice and social justice are fuelled by the undervaluing, commodification, and exploitation of all forms of life, and natural resources from the smallest grain to the oppressed peoples worldwide. Intersectional justice recognises discrimination and inequality as an outcome not of individuals but rather as systemic, institutional, and structural.
At the heart of intersectional justice is the understanding that one person’s disadvantage is another’s privilege, and it is these structural privileges and disadvantages that need to be dismantled through the fair and equal distribution of wealth, rights, power, and knowledge. If we are to recover our awareness of the fundamental human relationships that we have with the broader ecologies within which we are embedded, we must first recalibrate our relations with each other. The deepest, most powerful form of empathy is intimacy with another, and with connections that are made with life that are not constrained by the boundaries set by our rational mind. One must become open to the role of sensation, feeling, perception, and imagination, as well as logic, and empiricism. Might a cosmology for the times we live in enfold the radical equality of all beings as an imperative and be founded on an ancient human covenant with animals, plants, places, the natural forces of Earth, Water, Fire and Air, so that we might cultivate everyday practices and relationships built on respect, reciprocity, and reverence.
Michael Martin is a lecturer in Design Management at the University of the Arts London (UAL) and Assistant Editor of the Wild Alchemy Journal.
Often a cosmology comes in the form of a creation story. The great religions of the ancient world all had their own creation stories. Despite their apparent differences, however, all these stories were based on the same essential guiding principles of the natural order, which regulates the universe and everything in it. At the heart of these traditions was a cosmology, a way of coming to understand one’s experience of reality that was based on the same truth, a natural order, or harmony, of the cosmos. A worldview by contrast relates to a particular philosophy of life or conception of the world that has formed the bedrock of traditional and modern societies as we have come to know and experience them.
Since the industrialisation and restructuring of society, humans have systemically misunderstood the nature of reality. Furthermore, by manipulating the world to bend it to their purposes, they have wrought havoc on the Earth, and the natural emergent order. As the 21st century unfolds it is becoming evident that the major problems of our time – biodiversity loss, climate change, energy crisis, food security, financial instability –cannot be understood in isolation, these systemic problems are different facets of one single crisis – a crisis of cosmology – brought about by theWestern mechanistic worldview that has dominated the world through colonising, industrialist-capitalist practices primarily of the Global North over the past several hundred years.
Furthermore, the brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world to subject it to our control prevent us from truly understanding it. The psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and philosopher, Iain McGilchrist, writes that the brain is divided into two hemispheres: the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend – and thus manipulate – the world; the right hemisphere is designed to com-prehend it – see it for what it is. Every animal, including humans, to survive must solve a conundrum: how to eat without being eaten. Using the analogy of a bird feeding in the wild, McGilchrist suggests a bird must be able to distinguish prey from the background on which it is situated, yet if the bird is to avoid becoming prey itself, it must at the same time pay another kind of attention to the world, which is opposite to the first: broad, open, sustained, vigilant. This applies to the human animal too. How can the human dispose it’s consciousness towards the world in two conflicting ways at once?
The answer, states McGilchrist, is in the evolution of two neuronal masses, separate enough to function independently and connected enough to work in unison with each other, each capable of supporting consciousness on its own.In other words, a bipartite brain. Like the human brain every animal’s nervous system is asymmetrical in nature, it is profoundly divided. As such the hemispheres pay different types of attention to the world, and they type of attention changes the nature of the world we experience.
Furthermore, these two ways of seeing the world are each vital to our survival – we need to simplify and stand apart to manipulate things, to design and build the foundations of society, and we need to live in it, to belong to it to understand the complexity of what it is we are designing for and with –this division of attention works to our advantage when we use both. So how we attend to something, or not, matters a great deal – it can create or destroy, humanise or de-humanise – so much so that when the latter happens, we no longer are aware that there is a problem at all, for you do not see what you cannot see.
In the pursuit of progress, we have objectified the world to understand, control and manipulate it, and in doing so we have fragmented our collective human experience to the point where the prevailing Western scientific paradigm has us trapped, reflexively imprisoned, in what McGilchrist describes as a hall of mirrors. Reason and rationality, the cornerstones upon which modern Westernised societies have been built, have powerfully characterised the nature of human relations with other species and the natural world. It seems we have reached a tipping point where we urgently need to transform both how we think about the world, and what we make of ourselves.
One of the oldest forms of tradition is that of the law of a culture, or tribe, Chthonic law. It emerged through experience, oral tradition and the memory of peoples living in close harmony to the Earth. ThePueblo native American scholar of indigenous native science, Gregory Cajete, states the current global crisis stems from a narrow view of who we are, and what the Earth is. It seems in forgetting these laws we are forgetting what it means to be human. Furthermore, Cajete describes native science as a metaphor for a wide range of tribal processes of perceiving, thinking, acting, and coming to know that have evolved through human experience with the natural world. It includes metaphysics, philosophy and spirituality, art and architecture, practical technologies and agriculture, farming, hunting, ritual, and ceremony practiced by indigenous peoples past and present. In its essential form it is a map of natural reality drawn from the experience of thousands of human generations; it is the collective heritage of human experience with the natural world. It is a deeply relational process of coming to understand, or coming to know, that metaphorically entails a journey, a quest for knowledge and understanding.
Furthermore, Cajete suggests native science encompasses knowledges that are part of an indigenous mind-set, which is essentially relational and participatory, and it is this participation that provides the grounding for the way of coming know the nature of life and the relationships therein. It is an all-encompassing task, and it is a deeply creative participatory process, that is founded on an ancient human covenant with animals, plants, places, the natural forces of the earth, and it is rarely explicated. Also, indigenous scholars use the term science and knowledge interchangeably. To understand the foundations of native science, one must become open to the role of sensation, feeling, perception, imagination, and spirit, as well as logic, and rational empiricism. Its most akin to a deeper expression of what Western science calls environmental science, or ecology – deep ecology.
Ecology, from the Greek oikos, meaning home, is the scientific study of relationships, between plants, animals and micro-organisms, and their natural environment, or ecosystems, the home to all life on earth. A conception of life based a new kind of thinking – thinking in terms of relationships, patterns, and context. From an ecological perspective, design consists of shaping flows of energy and materials for human purposes, and a set of ecological design principles reflect the principles of organisation that nature has evolved over billions of years to sustain the web of life. The great challenge of our time is to make and nurture sustainable communities, and we can learn many lessons from living systems for they are essentially communities of plants, animals and micro-organisms that have sustained life for billions of years.
The environmentalist, writer and philosopher,Edward Goldsmith, advocates for an ecological worldview based on two fundamental principles. The first is the natural world is the basic source of all wealth and will only dispense these benefits if we preserve its critical order. The second is that the purpose of the behavioural pattern of an ecological society must be to preserve the critical order of the natural world.This suggests a relationship built on respect, reciprocity, and reverence.Furthermore, Goldsmith writes that the inspiration must come from the world view of vernacular, traditional societies, in particular the Chthonic world view of the earliest period in humanity when people everywhere knew how to live well, and in harmony with the natural world.
Similarly, the academic, environmental activist and writer, David Orr, suggests that the modern society is built on a culture of fast knowledge that rests on assumptions of progress, and only that can be measured is true knowledge. In the pursuit of progress and modernity, fast knowledge has undermined long-term sustainability, and for two fundamental reasons. The first being the rate at which our collective learning happens slowly, over time. The second reason being we have created power structures that hold at bay alternative paradigms, and worldviews, that might slow the speed of change to manageable rates, resulting in social traps in which the benefits (of fast knowledge) occur in the near-term future while the costs are deferred to others later. Orr argues that the only knowledge we can count on for our longevity as a species has been acquired over a long period of time and through cultural maturation – slow knowledge.
Slow knowledge is knowledge shaped to fit a particular ecological and cultural context, and its purpose is resilience.Every human culture that has artfully adapted itself to the challenges and opportunities of a particular landscape have done so through the patient and painstaking accumulation of knowledge over many generations. The indigenous peoples of traditional societies are a striking example of this. Furthermore, fast knowledge is focussed on solving problems, slow knowledge has to do with avoiding problems in the first place. The current paradigm that shapes design as a problem-solving tool is the result of fast knowledge. The possibility that today’s ecological problems are design failures of the past is bad news for designers, as it points towards inherent flaws in our profession. How might it be to design our ways of life shaped by slow knowledge, its purpose not to solve problems, but to avoid them in the first place?
The anthropologist and academic, Arturo Escobar, posits that design is a conversation about possibilities, and every tool or technology is ontological in the sense that it inaugurates a set of rituals, ways of doing, and modes of being, contributing to shaping what it is to be human. Furthermore, he suggests that this extends beyond objects and tools, to institutions and discourses of human creation. In this sense it generates structures of possibility in our individual and collective human experience. Furthermore, Escobar argues that realising the potential of design requires a profound relational sensibility that brings together materiality, and empathy in the creation of novel assemblages of infrastructures, skills and knowledge, by way of imbuing design education with the tools for reflection in ways that make designers conscious of their own situatedness in the ecologies for which they design. In Designs for the Pluriverse Escobar argues designing involves understanding the dualist ontology of separation, control and appropriation that has become dominant in patriarchal capitalist modernity. Whilst inquiring into existing and potential rationalities, and modes of being that emphasise the profound relationality and interconnectedness of all that is, it recognises that all design creates a world-within-the-world in which we are designed by what we design. In this regard we are all designers, and we are all designed.
The academic in art theory and interdisciplinary studies, Susanne Witzgal, posits a relational way of designing or ‘sympoietic designing’ as designing with care, an ethical project based on new ecological thinking and new materialist approaches that enlighten perspectives on the process of making or designing. Witzgal describes it as a complex, twofold endeavour – firstly it comprises of the disposition and capacity of the maker to be deeply affected and guided by materials, and their essential properties, and secondly, the designer’s capacity and capability to consider, and assume responsibility for the extraction and use of materials, and making of things, as they have great affecting powers on interspecies.
The notion of sympoiesis, or making-with, provides a novel understanding of design. The term was first used by Beth Dempster, as a way of proposing a new conceptual understanding of life as complex, self-organising but collectively producing systems that do have not self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries, and that are evolutionary in their nature. Similarly the feminist scholar exploring human-animal relations, Donna J. Haraway, suggests nothing really makes itself, nothing is truly autopoietic or self-organising, and this is the radical implication of sympoiesis. Haraway takes the concept of sympoiesis further with examples of it in practice through describing the traditional practices of weavers of the Navajo Indians of North America.
At a fundamental level ‘weaving is a cosmological performance, knotting proper relationality and connectedness into the warp and weft of the fabric’, suggests Haraway. In this way Haraway likens weaving to a relational worlding, with human and nonhumans fibres from ordinary human beings, plants, soil, water, and sheep. Furthermore, the geometric patterns, repetition and invention in weaving of Dine, or ‘the people’, are their stories and knowledge; these patterns propose and embody world-making and world-sustaining relations. In this regard it is the act of weaving that ‘ties people and animals through patterns of care and response-ability’. It is a way of making kin, Harraway suggests, a relational worlding to nurture well-being on a damaged planet, and stay with the trouble.
The worldview of the modern, industrialised society and culture that seeks to dominate nature has its roots in the exploitation, degradation, and enslavement of our fellow humans. Inequality, inequity, and injustice are the hallmarks of civilisation. Furthermore, the increasingly complex nature of these problems, often leads to inaction, passivity, and denial, further normalising them. It seems until we can acknowledge the collective denial of the true cost of the ‘civilised’ societies, then how can we design regenerative cultures in which we can thrive together. Cultivating a design practice fit for purpose in the 21stcentury begins with not only recognising our interdependence on the living systems we have built our worlds, but also our intersectionality.
Leah Thomas, author, and co-founder of the Intersectional Environmentalist suggests our intersectional lives are at the centre of the environmental crises.Intersectionality is the term used to describe the ways in which systems of inequality based on gender, race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, and class intersect to create dynamics and effects that are mutually reinforcing. For example, addressing the problem of gender pay gap without considering other dimensions such as race, socio-economic and immigration status will likely reinforce inequalities. Intersectional Environmentalism posits we cannot save the planet without uplifting the voices of those most marginalised. Furthermore, environmental justice and social justice are fuelled by the undervaluing, commodification, and exploitation of all forms of life, and natural resources from the smallest grain to the oppressed peoples worldwide. Intersectional justice recognises discrimination and inequality as an outcome not of individuals but rather as systemic, institutional, and structural.
At the heart of intersectional justice is the understanding that one person’s disadvantage is another’s privilege, and it is these structural privileges and disadvantages that need to be dismantled through the fair and equal distribution of wealth, rights, power, and knowledge. If we are to recover our awareness of the fundamental human relationships that we have with the broader ecologies within which we are embedded, we must first recalibrate our relations with each other. The deepest, most powerful form of empathy is intimacy with another, and with connections that are made with life that are not constrained by the boundaries set by our rational mind. One must become open to the role of sensation, feeling, perception, and imagination, as well as logic, and empiricism. Might a cosmology for the times we live in enfold the radical equality of all beings as an imperative and be founded on an ancient human covenant with animals, plants, places, the natural forces of Earth, Water, Fire and Air, so that we might cultivate everyday practices and relationships built on respect, reciprocity, and reverence.
Michael Martin is a lecturer in Design Management at the University of the Arts London (UAL) and Assistant Editor of the Wild Alchemy Journal.
by Michael Martin
Often a cosmology comes in the form of a creation story. The great religions of the ancient world all had their own creation stories. Despite their apparent differences, however, all these stories were based on the same essential guiding principles of the natural order, which regulates the universe and everything in it. At the heart of these traditions was a cosmology, a way of coming to understand one’s experience of reality that was based on the same truth, a natural order, or harmony, of the cosmos. A worldview by contrast relates to a particular philosophy of life or conception of the world that has formed the bedrock of traditional and modern societies as we have come to know and experience them.
Since the industrialisation and restructuring of society, humans have systemically misunderstood the nature of reality. Furthermore, by manipulating the world to bend it to their purposes, they have wrought havoc on the Earth, and the natural emergent order. As the 21st century unfolds it is becoming evident that the major problems of our time – biodiversity loss, climate change, energy crisis, food security, financial instability –cannot be understood in isolation, these systemic problems are different facets of one single crisis – a crisis of cosmology – brought about by theWestern mechanistic worldview that has dominated the world through colonising, industrialist-capitalist practices primarily of the Global North over the past several hundred years.
Furthermore, the brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world to subject it to our control prevent us from truly understanding it. The psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and philosopher, Iain McGilchrist, writes that the brain is divided into two hemispheres: the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend – and thus manipulate – the world; the right hemisphere is designed to com-prehend it – see it for what it is. Every animal, including humans, to survive must solve a conundrum: how to eat without being eaten. Using the analogy of a bird feeding in the wild, McGilchrist suggests a bird must be able to distinguish prey from the background on which it is situated, yet if the bird is to avoid becoming prey itself, it must at the same time pay another kind of attention to the world, which is opposite to the first: broad, open, sustained, vigilant. This applies to the human animal too. How can the human dispose it’s consciousness towards the world in two conflicting ways at once?
The answer, states McGilchrist, is in the evolution of two neuronal masses, separate enough to function independently and connected enough to work in unison with each other, each capable of supporting consciousness on its own.In other words, a bipartite brain. Like the human brain every animal’s nervous system is asymmetrical in nature, it is profoundly divided. As such the hemispheres pay different types of attention to the world, and they type of attention changes the nature of the world we experience.
Furthermore, these two ways of seeing the world are each vital to our survival – we need to simplify and stand apart to manipulate things, to design and build the foundations of society, and we need to live in it, to belong to it to understand the complexity of what it is we are designing for and with –this division of attention works to our advantage when we use both. So how we attend to something, or not, matters a great deal – it can create or destroy, humanise or de-humanise – so much so that when the latter happens, we no longer are aware that there is a problem at all, for you do not see what you cannot see.
In the pursuit of progress, we have objectified the world to understand, control and manipulate it, and in doing so we have fragmented our collective human experience to the point where the prevailing Western scientific paradigm has us trapped, reflexively imprisoned, in what McGilchrist describes as a hall of mirrors. Reason and rationality, the cornerstones upon which modern Westernised societies have been built, have powerfully characterised the nature of human relations with other species and the natural world. It seems we have reached a tipping point where we urgently need to transform both how we think about the world, and what we make of ourselves.
One of the oldest forms of tradition is that of the law of a culture, or tribe, Chthonic law. It emerged through experience, oral tradition and the memory of peoples living in close harmony to the Earth. ThePueblo native American scholar of indigenous native science, Gregory Cajete, states the current global crisis stems from a narrow view of who we are, and what the Earth is. It seems in forgetting these laws we are forgetting what it means to be human. Furthermore, Cajete describes native science as a metaphor for a wide range of tribal processes of perceiving, thinking, acting, and coming to know that have evolved through human experience with the natural world. It includes metaphysics, philosophy and spirituality, art and architecture, practical technologies and agriculture, farming, hunting, ritual, and ceremony practiced by indigenous peoples past and present. In its essential form it is a map of natural reality drawn from the experience of thousands of human generations; it is the collective heritage of human experience with the natural world. It is a deeply relational process of coming to understand, or coming to know, that metaphorically entails a journey, a quest for knowledge and understanding.
Furthermore, Cajete suggests native science encompasses knowledges that are part of an indigenous mind-set, which is essentially relational and participatory, and it is this participation that provides the grounding for the way of coming know the nature of life and the relationships therein. It is an all-encompassing task, and it is a deeply creative participatory process, that is founded on an ancient human covenant with animals, plants, places, the natural forces of the earth, and it is rarely explicated. Also, indigenous scholars use the term science and knowledge interchangeably. To understand the foundations of native science, one must become open to the role of sensation, feeling, perception, imagination, and spirit, as well as logic, and rational empiricism. Its most akin to a deeper expression of what Western science calls environmental science, or ecology – deep ecology.
Ecology, from the Greek oikos, meaning home, is the scientific study of relationships, between plants, animals and micro-organisms, and their natural environment, or ecosystems, the home to all life on earth. A conception of life based a new kind of thinking – thinking in terms of relationships, patterns, and context. From an ecological perspective, design consists of shaping flows of energy and materials for human purposes, and a set of ecological design principles reflect the principles of organisation that nature has evolved over billions of years to sustain the web of life. The great challenge of our time is to make and nurture sustainable communities, and we can learn many lessons from living systems for they are essentially communities of plants, animals and micro-organisms that have sustained life for billions of years.
The environmentalist, writer and philosopher,Edward Goldsmith, advocates for an ecological worldview based on two fundamental principles. The first is the natural world is the basic source of all wealth and will only dispense these benefits if we preserve its critical order. The second is that the purpose of the behavioural pattern of an ecological society must be to preserve the critical order of the natural world.This suggests a relationship built on respect, reciprocity, and reverence.Furthermore, Goldsmith writes that the inspiration must come from the world view of vernacular, traditional societies, in particular the Chthonic world view of the earliest period in humanity when people everywhere knew how to live well, and in harmony with the natural world.
Similarly, the academic, environmental activist and writer, David Orr, suggests that the modern society is built on a culture of fast knowledge that rests on assumptions of progress, and only that can be measured is true knowledge. In the pursuit of progress and modernity, fast knowledge has undermined long-term sustainability, and for two fundamental reasons. The first being the rate at which our collective learning happens slowly, over time. The second reason being we have created power structures that hold at bay alternative paradigms, and worldviews, that might slow the speed of change to manageable rates, resulting in social traps in which the benefits (of fast knowledge) occur in the near-term future while the costs are deferred to others later. Orr argues that the only knowledge we can count on for our longevity as a species has been acquired over a long period of time and through cultural maturation – slow knowledge.
Slow knowledge is knowledge shaped to fit a particular ecological and cultural context, and its purpose is resilience.Every human culture that has artfully adapted itself to the challenges and opportunities of a particular landscape have done so through the patient and painstaking accumulation of knowledge over many generations. The indigenous peoples of traditional societies are a striking example of this. Furthermore, fast knowledge is focussed on solving problems, slow knowledge has to do with avoiding problems in the first place. The current paradigm that shapes design as a problem-solving tool is the result of fast knowledge. The possibility that today’s ecological problems are design failures of the past is bad news for designers, as it points towards inherent flaws in our profession. How might it be to design our ways of life shaped by slow knowledge, its purpose not to solve problems, but to avoid them in the first place?
The anthropologist and academic, Arturo Escobar, posits that design is a conversation about possibilities, and every tool or technology is ontological in the sense that it inaugurates a set of rituals, ways of doing, and modes of being, contributing to shaping what it is to be human. Furthermore, he suggests that this extends beyond objects and tools, to institutions and discourses of human creation. In this sense it generates structures of possibility in our individual and collective human experience. Furthermore, Escobar argues that realising the potential of design requires a profound relational sensibility that brings together materiality, and empathy in the creation of novel assemblages of infrastructures, skills and knowledge, by way of imbuing design education with the tools for reflection in ways that make designers conscious of their own situatedness in the ecologies for which they design. In Designs for the Pluriverse Escobar argues designing involves understanding the dualist ontology of separation, control and appropriation that has become dominant in patriarchal capitalist modernity. Whilst inquiring into existing and potential rationalities, and modes of being that emphasise the profound relationality and interconnectedness of all that is, it recognises that all design creates a world-within-the-world in which we are designed by what we design. In this regard we are all designers, and we are all designed.
The academic in art theory and interdisciplinary studies, Susanne Witzgal, posits a relational way of designing or ‘sympoietic designing’ as designing with care, an ethical project based on new ecological thinking and new materialist approaches that enlighten perspectives on the process of making or designing. Witzgal describes it as a complex, twofold endeavour – firstly it comprises of the disposition and capacity of the maker to be deeply affected and guided by materials, and their essential properties, and secondly, the designer’s capacity and capability to consider, and assume responsibility for the extraction and use of materials, and making of things, as they have great affecting powers on interspecies.
The notion of sympoiesis, or making-with, provides a novel understanding of design. The term was first used by Beth Dempster, as a way of proposing a new conceptual understanding of life as complex, self-organising but collectively producing systems that do have not self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries, and that are evolutionary in their nature. Similarly the feminist scholar exploring human-animal relations, Donna J. Haraway, suggests nothing really makes itself, nothing is truly autopoietic or self-organising, and this is the radical implication of sympoiesis. Haraway takes the concept of sympoiesis further with examples of it in practice through describing the traditional practices of weavers of the Navajo Indians of North America.
At a fundamental level ‘weaving is a cosmological performance, knotting proper relationality and connectedness into the warp and weft of the fabric’, suggests Haraway. In this way Haraway likens weaving to a relational worlding, with human and nonhumans fibres from ordinary human beings, plants, soil, water, and sheep. Furthermore, the geometric patterns, repetition and invention in weaving of Dine, or ‘the people’, are their stories and knowledge; these patterns propose and embody world-making and world-sustaining relations. In this regard it is the act of weaving that ‘ties people and animals through patterns of care and response-ability’. It is a way of making kin, Harraway suggests, a relational worlding to nurture well-being on a damaged planet, and stay with the trouble.
The worldview of the modern, industrialised society and culture that seeks to dominate nature has its roots in the exploitation, degradation, and enslavement of our fellow humans. Inequality, inequity, and injustice are the hallmarks of civilisation. Furthermore, the increasingly complex nature of these problems, often leads to inaction, passivity, and denial, further normalising them. It seems until we can acknowledge the collective denial of the true cost of the ‘civilised’ societies, then how can we design regenerative cultures in which we can thrive together. Cultivating a design practice fit for purpose in the 21stcentury begins with not only recognising our interdependence on the living systems we have built our worlds, but also our intersectionality.
Leah Thomas, author, and co-founder of the Intersectional Environmentalist suggests our intersectional lives are at the centre of the environmental crises.Intersectionality is the term used to describe the ways in which systems of inequality based on gender, race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, and class intersect to create dynamics and effects that are mutually reinforcing. For example, addressing the problem of gender pay gap without considering other dimensions such as race, socio-economic and immigration status will likely reinforce inequalities. Intersectional Environmentalism posits we cannot save the planet without uplifting the voices of those most marginalised. Furthermore, environmental justice and social justice are fuelled by the undervaluing, commodification, and exploitation of all forms of life, and natural resources from the smallest grain to the oppressed peoples worldwide. Intersectional justice recognises discrimination and inequality as an outcome not of individuals but rather as systemic, institutional, and structural.
At the heart of intersectional justice is the understanding that one person’s disadvantage is another’s privilege, and it is these structural privileges and disadvantages that need to be dismantled through the fair and equal distribution of wealth, rights, power, and knowledge. If we are to recover our awareness of the fundamental human relationships that we have with the broader ecologies within which we are embedded, we must first recalibrate our relations with each other. The deepest, most powerful form of empathy is intimacy with another, and with connections that are made with life that are not constrained by the boundaries set by our rational mind. One must become open to the role of sensation, feeling, perception, and imagination, as well as logic, and empiricism. Might a cosmology for the times we live in enfold the radical equality of all beings as an imperative and be founded on an ancient human covenant with animals, plants, places, the natural forces of Earth, Water, Fire and Air, so that we might cultivate everyday practices and relationships built on respect, reciprocity, and reverence.
Michael Martin is a lecturer in Design Management at the University of the Arts London (UAL) and Assistant Editor of the Wild Alchemy Journal.
Often a cosmology comes in the form of a creation story. The great religions of the ancient world all had their own creation stories. Despite their apparent differences, however, all these stories were based on the same essential guiding principles of the natural order, which regulates the universe and everything in it. At the heart of these traditions was a cosmology, a way of coming to understand one’s experience of reality that was based on the same truth, a natural order, or harmony, of the cosmos. A worldview by contrast relates to a particular philosophy of life or conception of the world that has formed the bedrock of traditional and modern societies as we have come to know and experience them.
Since the industrialisation and restructuring of society, humans have systemically misunderstood the nature of reality. Furthermore, by manipulating the world to bend it to their purposes, they have wrought havoc on the Earth, and the natural emergent order. As the 21st century unfolds it is becoming evident that the major problems of our time – biodiversity loss, climate change, energy crisis, food security, financial instability –cannot be understood in isolation, these systemic problems are different facets of one single crisis – a crisis of cosmology – brought about by theWestern mechanistic worldview that has dominated the world through colonising, industrialist-capitalist practices primarily of the Global North over the past several hundred years.
Furthermore, the brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world to subject it to our control prevent us from truly understanding it. The psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and philosopher, Iain McGilchrist, writes that the brain is divided into two hemispheres: the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend – and thus manipulate – the world; the right hemisphere is designed to com-prehend it – see it for what it is. Every animal, including humans, to survive must solve a conundrum: how to eat without being eaten. Using the analogy of a bird feeding in the wild, McGilchrist suggests a bird must be able to distinguish prey from the background on which it is situated, yet if the bird is to avoid becoming prey itself, it must at the same time pay another kind of attention to the world, which is opposite to the first: broad, open, sustained, vigilant. This applies to the human animal too. How can the human dispose it’s consciousness towards the world in two conflicting ways at once?
The answer, states McGilchrist, is in the evolution of two neuronal masses, separate enough to function independently and connected enough to work in unison with each other, each capable of supporting consciousness on its own.In other words, a bipartite brain. Like the human brain every animal’s nervous system is asymmetrical in nature, it is profoundly divided. As such the hemispheres pay different types of attention to the world, and they type of attention changes the nature of the world we experience.
Furthermore, these two ways of seeing the world are each vital to our survival – we need to simplify and stand apart to manipulate things, to design and build the foundations of society, and we need to live in it, to belong to it to understand the complexity of what it is we are designing for and with –this division of attention works to our advantage when we use both. So how we attend to something, or not, matters a great deal – it can create or destroy, humanise or de-humanise – so much so that when the latter happens, we no longer are aware that there is a problem at all, for you do not see what you cannot see.
In the pursuit of progress, we have objectified the world to understand, control and manipulate it, and in doing so we have fragmented our collective human experience to the point where the prevailing Western scientific paradigm has us trapped, reflexively imprisoned, in what McGilchrist describes as a hall of mirrors. Reason and rationality, the cornerstones upon which modern Westernised societies have been built, have powerfully characterised the nature of human relations with other species and the natural world. It seems we have reached a tipping point where we urgently need to transform both how we think about the world, and what we make of ourselves.
One of the oldest forms of tradition is that of the law of a culture, or tribe, Chthonic law. It emerged through experience, oral tradition and the memory of peoples living in close harmony to the Earth. ThePueblo native American scholar of indigenous native science, Gregory Cajete, states the current global crisis stems from a narrow view of who we are, and what the Earth is. It seems in forgetting these laws we are forgetting what it means to be human. Furthermore, Cajete describes native science as a metaphor for a wide range of tribal processes of perceiving, thinking, acting, and coming to know that have evolved through human experience with the natural world. It includes metaphysics, philosophy and spirituality, art and architecture, practical technologies and agriculture, farming, hunting, ritual, and ceremony practiced by indigenous peoples past and present. In its essential form it is a map of natural reality drawn from the experience of thousands of human generations; it is the collective heritage of human experience with the natural world. It is a deeply relational process of coming to understand, or coming to know, that metaphorically entails a journey, a quest for knowledge and understanding.
Furthermore, Cajete suggests native science encompasses knowledges that are part of an indigenous mind-set, which is essentially relational and participatory, and it is this participation that provides the grounding for the way of coming know the nature of life and the relationships therein. It is an all-encompassing task, and it is a deeply creative participatory process, that is founded on an ancient human covenant with animals, plants, places, the natural forces of the earth, and it is rarely explicated. Also, indigenous scholars use the term science and knowledge interchangeably. To understand the foundations of native science, one must become open to the role of sensation, feeling, perception, imagination, and spirit, as well as logic, and rational empiricism. Its most akin to a deeper expression of what Western science calls environmental science, or ecology – deep ecology.
Ecology, from the Greek oikos, meaning home, is the scientific study of relationships, between plants, animals and micro-organisms, and their natural environment, or ecosystems, the home to all life on earth. A conception of life based a new kind of thinking – thinking in terms of relationships, patterns, and context. From an ecological perspective, design consists of shaping flows of energy and materials for human purposes, and a set of ecological design principles reflect the principles of organisation that nature has evolved over billions of years to sustain the web of life. The great challenge of our time is to make and nurture sustainable communities, and we can learn many lessons from living systems for they are essentially communities of plants, animals and micro-organisms that have sustained life for billions of years.
The environmentalist, writer and philosopher,Edward Goldsmith, advocates for an ecological worldview based on two fundamental principles. The first is the natural world is the basic source of all wealth and will only dispense these benefits if we preserve its critical order. The second is that the purpose of the behavioural pattern of an ecological society must be to preserve the critical order of the natural world.This suggests a relationship built on respect, reciprocity, and reverence.Furthermore, Goldsmith writes that the inspiration must come from the world view of vernacular, traditional societies, in particular the Chthonic world view of the earliest period in humanity when people everywhere knew how to live well, and in harmony with the natural world.
Similarly, the academic, environmental activist and writer, David Orr, suggests that the modern society is built on a culture of fast knowledge that rests on assumptions of progress, and only that can be measured is true knowledge. In the pursuit of progress and modernity, fast knowledge has undermined long-term sustainability, and for two fundamental reasons. The first being the rate at which our collective learning happens slowly, over time. The second reason being we have created power structures that hold at bay alternative paradigms, and worldviews, that might slow the speed of change to manageable rates, resulting in social traps in which the benefits (of fast knowledge) occur in the near-term future while the costs are deferred to others later. Orr argues that the only knowledge we can count on for our longevity as a species has been acquired over a long period of time and through cultural maturation – slow knowledge.
Slow knowledge is knowledge shaped to fit a particular ecological and cultural context, and its purpose is resilience.Every human culture that has artfully adapted itself to the challenges and opportunities of a particular landscape have done so through the patient and painstaking accumulation of knowledge over many generations. The indigenous peoples of traditional societies are a striking example of this. Furthermore, fast knowledge is focussed on solving problems, slow knowledge has to do with avoiding problems in the first place. The current paradigm that shapes design as a problem-solving tool is the result of fast knowledge. The possibility that today’s ecological problems are design failures of the past is bad news for designers, as it points towards inherent flaws in our profession. How might it be to design our ways of life shaped by slow knowledge, its purpose not to solve problems, but to avoid them in the first place?
The anthropologist and academic, Arturo Escobar, posits that design is a conversation about possibilities, and every tool or technology is ontological in the sense that it inaugurates a set of rituals, ways of doing, and modes of being, contributing to shaping what it is to be human. Furthermore, he suggests that this extends beyond objects and tools, to institutions and discourses of human creation. In this sense it generates structures of possibility in our individual and collective human experience. Furthermore, Escobar argues that realising the potential of design requires a profound relational sensibility that brings together materiality, and empathy in the creation of novel assemblages of infrastructures, skills and knowledge, by way of imbuing design education with the tools for reflection in ways that make designers conscious of their own situatedness in the ecologies for which they design. In Designs for the Pluriverse Escobar argues designing involves understanding the dualist ontology of separation, control and appropriation that has become dominant in patriarchal capitalist modernity. Whilst inquiring into existing and potential rationalities, and modes of being that emphasise the profound relationality and interconnectedness of all that is, it recognises that all design creates a world-within-the-world in which we are designed by what we design. In this regard we are all designers, and we are all designed.
The academic in art theory and interdisciplinary studies, Susanne Witzgal, posits a relational way of designing or ‘sympoietic designing’ as designing with care, an ethical project based on new ecological thinking and new materialist approaches that enlighten perspectives on the process of making or designing. Witzgal describes it as a complex, twofold endeavour – firstly it comprises of the disposition and capacity of the maker to be deeply affected and guided by materials, and their essential properties, and secondly, the designer’s capacity and capability to consider, and assume responsibility for the extraction and use of materials, and making of things, as they have great affecting powers on interspecies.
The notion of sympoiesis, or making-with, provides a novel understanding of design. The term was first used by Beth Dempster, as a way of proposing a new conceptual understanding of life as complex, self-organising but collectively producing systems that do have not self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries, and that are evolutionary in their nature. Similarly the feminist scholar exploring human-animal relations, Donna J. Haraway, suggests nothing really makes itself, nothing is truly autopoietic or self-organising, and this is the radical implication of sympoiesis. Haraway takes the concept of sympoiesis further with examples of it in practice through describing the traditional practices of weavers of the Navajo Indians of North America.
At a fundamental level ‘weaving is a cosmological performance, knotting proper relationality and connectedness into the warp and weft of the fabric’, suggests Haraway. In this way Haraway likens weaving to a relational worlding, with human and nonhumans fibres from ordinary human beings, plants, soil, water, and sheep. Furthermore, the geometric patterns, repetition and invention in weaving of Dine, or ‘the people’, are their stories and knowledge; these patterns propose and embody world-making and world-sustaining relations. In this regard it is the act of weaving that ‘ties people and animals through patterns of care and response-ability’. It is a way of making kin, Harraway suggests, a relational worlding to nurture well-being on a damaged planet, and stay with the trouble.
The worldview of the modern, industrialised society and culture that seeks to dominate nature has its roots in the exploitation, degradation, and enslavement of our fellow humans. Inequality, inequity, and injustice are the hallmarks of civilisation. Furthermore, the increasingly complex nature of these problems, often leads to inaction, passivity, and denial, further normalising them. It seems until we can acknowledge the collective denial of the true cost of the ‘civilised’ societies, then how can we design regenerative cultures in which we can thrive together. Cultivating a design practice fit for purpose in the 21stcentury begins with not only recognising our interdependence on the living systems we have built our worlds, but also our intersectionality.
Leah Thomas, author, and co-founder of the Intersectional Environmentalist suggests our intersectional lives are at the centre of the environmental crises.Intersectionality is the term used to describe the ways in which systems of inequality based on gender, race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, and class intersect to create dynamics and effects that are mutually reinforcing. For example, addressing the problem of gender pay gap without considering other dimensions such as race, socio-economic and immigration status will likely reinforce inequalities. Intersectional Environmentalism posits we cannot save the planet without uplifting the voices of those most marginalised. Furthermore, environmental justice and social justice are fuelled by the undervaluing, commodification, and exploitation of all forms of life, and natural resources from the smallest grain to the oppressed peoples worldwide. Intersectional justice recognises discrimination and inequality as an outcome not of individuals but rather as systemic, institutional, and structural.
At the heart of intersectional justice is the understanding that one person’s disadvantage is another’s privilege, and it is these structural privileges and disadvantages that need to be dismantled through the fair and equal distribution of wealth, rights, power, and knowledge. If we are to recover our awareness of the fundamental human relationships that we have with the broader ecologies within which we are embedded, we must first recalibrate our relations with each other. The deepest, most powerful form of empathy is intimacy with another, and with connections that are made with life that are not constrained by the boundaries set by our rational mind. One must become open to the role of sensation, feeling, perception, and imagination, as well as logic, and empiricism. Might a cosmology for the times we live in enfold the radical equality of all beings as an imperative and be founded on an ancient human covenant with animals, plants, places, the natural forces of Earth, Water, Fire and Air, so that we might cultivate everyday practices and relationships built on respect, reciprocity, and reverence.
Michael Martin is a lecturer in Design Management at the University of the Arts London (UAL) and Assistant Editor of the Wild Alchemy Journal.
by Michael Martin
Often a cosmology comes in the form of a creation story. The great religions of the ancient world all had their own creation stories. Despite their apparent differences, however, all these stories were based on the same essential guiding principles of the natural order, which regulates the universe and everything in it. At the heart of these traditions was a cosmology, a way of coming to understand one’s experience of reality that was based on the same truth, a natural order, or harmony, of the cosmos. A worldview by contrast relates to a particular philosophy of life or conception of the world that has formed the bedrock of traditional and modern societies as we have come to know and experience them.
Since the industrialisation and restructuring of society, humans have systemically misunderstood the nature of reality. Furthermore, by manipulating the world to bend it to their purposes, they have wrought havoc on the Earth, and the natural emergent order. As the 21st century unfolds it is becoming evident that the major problems of our time – biodiversity loss, climate change, energy crisis, food security, financial instability –cannot be understood in isolation, these systemic problems are different facets of one single crisis – a crisis of cosmology – brought about by theWestern mechanistic worldview that has dominated the world through colonising, industrialist-capitalist practices primarily of the Global North over the past several hundred years.
Furthermore, the brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world to subject it to our control prevent us from truly understanding it. The psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and philosopher, Iain McGilchrist, writes that the brain is divided into two hemispheres: the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend – and thus manipulate – the world; the right hemisphere is designed to com-prehend it – see it for what it is. Every animal, including humans, to survive must solve a conundrum: how to eat without being eaten. Using the analogy of a bird feeding in the wild, McGilchrist suggests a bird must be able to distinguish prey from the background on which it is situated, yet if the bird is to avoid becoming prey itself, it must at the same time pay another kind of attention to the world, which is opposite to the first: broad, open, sustained, vigilant. This applies to the human animal too. How can the human dispose it’s consciousness towards the world in two conflicting ways at once?
The answer, states McGilchrist, is in the evolution of two neuronal masses, separate enough to function independently and connected enough to work in unison with each other, each capable of supporting consciousness on its own.In other words, a bipartite brain. Like the human brain every animal’s nervous system is asymmetrical in nature, it is profoundly divided. As such the hemispheres pay different types of attention to the world, and they type of attention changes the nature of the world we experience.
Furthermore, these two ways of seeing the world are each vital to our survival – we need to simplify and stand apart to manipulate things, to design and build the foundations of society, and we need to live in it, to belong to it to understand the complexity of what it is we are designing for and with –this division of attention works to our advantage when we use both. So how we attend to something, or not, matters a great deal – it can create or destroy, humanise or de-humanise – so much so that when the latter happens, we no longer are aware that there is a problem at all, for you do not see what you cannot see.
In the pursuit of progress, we have objectified the world to understand, control and manipulate it, and in doing so we have fragmented our collective human experience to the point where the prevailing Western scientific paradigm has us trapped, reflexively imprisoned, in what McGilchrist describes as a hall of mirrors. Reason and rationality, the cornerstones upon which modern Westernised societies have been built, have powerfully characterised the nature of human relations with other species and the natural world. It seems we have reached a tipping point where we urgently need to transform both how we think about the world, and what we make of ourselves.
One of the oldest forms of tradition is that of the law of a culture, or tribe, Chthonic law. It emerged through experience, oral tradition and the memory of peoples living in close harmony to the Earth. ThePueblo native American scholar of indigenous native science, Gregory Cajete, states the current global crisis stems from a narrow view of who we are, and what the Earth is. It seems in forgetting these laws we are forgetting what it means to be human. Furthermore, Cajete describes native science as a metaphor for a wide range of tribal processes of perceiving, thinking, acting, and coming to know that have evolved through human experience with the natural world. It includes metaphysics, philosophy and spirituality, art and architecture, practical technologies and agriculture, farming, hunting, ritual, and ceremony practiced by indigenous peoples past and present. In its essential form it is a map of natural reality drawn from the experience of thousands of human generations; it is the collective heritage of human experience with the natural world. It is a deeply relational process of coming to understand, or coming to know, that metaphorically entails a journey, a quest for knowledge and understanding.
Furthermore, Cajete suggests native science encompasses knowledges that are part of an indigenous mind-set, which is essentially relational and participatory, and it is this participation that provides the grounding for the way of coming know the nature of life and the relationships therein. It is an all-encompassing task, and it is a deeply creative participatory process, that is founded on an ancient human covenant with animals, plants, places, the natural forces of the earth, and it is rarely explicated. Also, indigenous scholars use the term science and knowledge interchangeably. To understand the foundations of native science, one must become open to the role of sensation, feeling, perception, imagination, and spirit, as well as logic, and rational empiricism. Its most akin to a deeper expression of what Western science calls environmental science, or ecology – deep ecology.
Ecology, from the Greek oikos, meaning home, is the scientific study of relationships, between plants, animals and micro-organisms, and their natural environment, or ecosystems, the home to all life on earth. A conception of life based a new kind of thinking – thinking in terms of relationships, patterns, and context. From an ecological perspective, design consists of shaping flows of energy and materials for human purposes, and a set of ecological design principles reflect the principles of organisation that nature has evolved over billions of years to sustain the web of life. The great challenge of our time is to make and nurture sustainable communities, and we can learn many lessons from living systems for they are essentially communities of plants, animals and micro-organisms that have sustained life for billions of years.
The environmentalist, writer and philosopher,Edward Goldsmith, advocates for an ecological worldview based on two fundamental principles. The first is the natural world is the basic source of all wealth and will only dispense these benefits if we preserve its critical order. The second is that the purpose of the behavioural pattern of an ecological society must be to preserve the critical order of the natural world.This suggests a relationship built on respect, reciprocity, and reverence.Furthermore, Goldsmith writes that the inspiration must come from the world view of vernacular, traditional societies, in particular the Chthonic world view of the earliest period in humanity when people everywhere knew how to live well, and in harmony with the natural world.
Similarly, the academic, environmental activist and writer, David Orr, suggests that the modern society is built on a culture of fast knowledge that rests on assumptions of progress, and only that can be measured is true knowledge. In the pursuit of progress and modernity, fast knowledge has undermined long-term sustainability, and for two fundamental reasons. The first being the rate at which our collective learning happens slowly, over time. The second reason being we have created power structures that hold at bay alternative paradigms, and worldviews, that might slow the speed of change to manageable rates, resulting in social traps in which the benefits (of fast knowledge) occur in the near-term future while the costs are deferred to others later. Orr argues that the only knowledge we can count on for our longevity as a species has been acquired over a long period of time and through cultural maturation – slow knowledge.
Slow knowledge is knowledge shaped to fit a particular ecological and cultural context, and its purpose is resilience.Every human culture that has artfully adapted itself to the challenges and opportunities of a particular landscape have done so through the patient and painstaking accumulation of knowledge over many generations. The indigenous peoples of traditional societies are a striking example of this. Furthermore, fast knowledge is focussed on solving problems, slow knowledge has to do with avoiding problems in the first place. The current paradigm that shapes design as a problem-solving tool is the result of fast knowledge. The possibility that today’s ecological problems are design failures of the past is bad news for designers, as it points towards inherent flaws in our profession. How might it be to design our ways of life shaped by slow knowledge, its purpose not to solve problems, but to avoid them in the first place?
The anthropologist and academic, Arturo Escobar, posits that design is a conversation about possibilities, and every tool or technology is ontological in the sense that it inaugurates a set of rituals, ways of doing, and modes of being, contributing to shaping what it is to be human. Furthermore, he suggests that this extends beyond objects and tools, to institutions and discourses of human creation. In this sense it generates structures of possibility in our individual and collective human experience. Furthermore, Escobar argues that realising the potential of design requires a profound relational sensibility that brings together materiality, and empathy in the creation of novel assemblages of infrastructures, skills and knowledge, by way of imbuing design education with the tools for reflection in ways that make designers conscious of their own situatedness in the ecologies for which they design. In Designs for the Pluriverse Escobar argues designing involves understanding the dualist ontology of separation, control and appropriation that has become dominant in patriarchal capitalist modernity. Whilst inquiring into existing and potential rationalities, and modes of being that emphasise the profound relationality and interconnectedness of all that is, it recognises that all design creates a world-within-the-world in which we are designed by what we design. In this regard we are all designers, and we are all designed.
The academic in art theory and interdisciplinary studies, Susanne Witzgal, posits a relational way of designing or ‘sympoietic designing’ as designing with care, an ethical project based on new ecological thinking and new materialist approaches that enlighten perspectives on the process of making or designing. Witzgal describes it as a complex, twofold endeavour – firstly it comprises of the disposition and capacity of the maker to be deeply affected and guided by materials, and their essential properties, and secondly, the designer’s capacity and capability to consider, and assume responsibility for the extraction and use of materials, and making of things, as they have great affecting powers on interspecies.
The notion of sympoiesis, or making-with, provides a novel understanding of design. The term was first used by Beth Dempster, as a way of proposing a new conceptual understanding of life as complex, self-organising but collectively producing systems that do have not self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries, and that are evolutionary in their nature. Similarly the feminist scholar exploring human-animal relations, Donna J. Haraway, suggests nothing really makes itself, nothing is truly autopoietic or self-organising, and this is the radical implication of sympoiesis. Haraway takes the concept of sympoiesis further with examples of it in practice through describing the traditional practices of weavers of the Navajo Indians of North America.
At a fundamental level ‘weaving is a cosmological performance, knotting proper relationality and connectedness into the warp and weft of the fabric’, suggests Haraway. In this way Haraway likens weaving to a relational worlding, with human and nonhumans fibres from ordinary human beings, plants, soil, water, and sheep. Furthermore, the geometric patterns, repetition and invention in weaving of Dine, or ‘the people’, are their stories and knowledge; these patterns propose and embody world-making and world-sustaining relations. In this regard it is the act of weaving that ‘ties people and animals through patterns of care and response-ability’. It is a way of making kin, Harraway suggests, a relational worlding to nurture well-being on a damaged planet, and stay with the trouble.
The worldview of the modern, industrialised society and culture that seeks to dominate nature has its roots in the exploitation, degradation, and enslavement of our fellow humans. Inequality, inequity, and injustice are the hallmarks of civilisation. Furthermore, the increasingly complex nature of these problems, often leads to inaction, passivity, and denial, further normalising them. It seems until we can acknowledge the collective denial of the true cost of the ‘civilised’ societies, then how can we design regenerative cultures in which we can thrive together. Cultivating a design practice fit for purpose in the 21stcentury begins with not only recognising our interdependence on the living systems we have built our worlds, but also our intersectionality.
Leah Thomas, author, and co-founder of the Intersectional Environmentalist suggests our intersectional lives are at the centre of the environmental crises.Intersectionality is the term used to describe the ways in which systems of inequality based on gender, race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, and class intersect to create dynamics and effects that are mutually reinforcing. For example, addressing the problem of gender pay gap without considering other dimensions such as race, socio-economic and immigration status will likely reinforce inequalities. Intersectional Environmentalism posits we cannot save the planet without uplifting the voices of those most marginalised. Furthermore, environmental justice and social justice are fuelled by the undervaluing, commodification, and exploitation of all forms of life, and natural resources from the smallest grain to the oppressed peoples worldwide. Intersectional justice recognises discrimination and inequality as an outcome not of individuals but rather as systemic, institutional, and structural.
At the heart of intersectional justice is the understanding that one person’s disadvantage is another’s privilege, and it is these structural privileges and disadvantages that need to be dismantled through the fair and equal distribution of wealth, rights, power, and knowledge. If we are to recover our awareness of the fundamental human relationships that we have with the broader ecologies within which we are embedded, we must first recalibrate our relations with each other. The deepest, most powerful form of empathy is intimacy with another, and with connections that are made with life that are not constrained by the boundaries set by our rational mind. One must become open to the role of sensation, feeling, perception, and imagination, as well as logic, and empiricism. Might a cosmology for the times we live in enfold the radical equality of all beings as an imperative and be founded on an ancient human covenant with animals, plants, places, the natural forces of Earth, Water, Fire and Air, so that we might cultivate everyday practices and relationships built on respect, reciprocity, and reverence.
Michael Martin is a lecturer in Design Management at the University of the Arts London (UAL) and Assistant Editor of the Wild Alchemy Journal.
Often a cosmology comes in the form of a creation story. The great religions of the ancient world all had their own creation stories. Despite their apparent differences, however, all these stories were based on the same essential guiding principles of the natural order, which regulates the universe and everything in it. At the heart of these traditions was a cosmology, a way of coming to understand one’s experience of reality that was based on the same truth, a natural order, or harmony, of the cosmos. A worldview by contrast relates to a particular philosophy of life or conception of the world that has formed the bedrock of traditional and modern societies as we have come to know and experience them.
Since the industrialisation and restructuring of society, humans have systemically misunderstood the nature of reality. Furthermore, by manipulating the world to bend it to their purposes, they have wrought havoc on the Earth, and the natural emergent order. As the 21st century unfolds it is becoming evident that the major problems of our time – biodiversity loss, climate change, energy crisis, food security, financial instability –cannot be understood in isolation, these systemic problems are different facets of one single crisis – a crisis of cosmology – brought about by theWestern mechanistic worldview that has dominated the world through colonising, industrialist-capitalist practices primarily of the Global North over the past several hundred years.
Furthermore, the brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world to subject it to our control prevent us from truly understanding it. The psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and philosopher, Iain McGilchrist, writes that the brain is divided into two hemispheres: the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend – and thus manipulate – the world; the right hemisphere is designed to com-prehend it – see it for what it is. Every animal, including humans, to survive must solve a conundrum: how to eat without being eaten. Using the analogy of a bird feeding in the wild, McGilchrist suggests a bird must be able to distinguish prey from the background on which it is situated, yet if the bird is to avoid becoming prey itself, it must at the same time pay another kind of attention to the world, which is opposite to the first: broad, open, sustained, vigilant. This applies to the human animal too. How can the human dispose it’s consciousness towards the world in two conflicting ways at once?
The answer, states McGilchrist, is in the evolution of two neuronal masses, separate enough to function independently and connected enough to work in unison with each other, each capable of supporting consciousness on its own.In other words, a bipartite brain. Like the human brain every animal’s nervous system is asymmetrical in nature, it is profoundly divided. As such the hemispheres pay different types of attention to the world, and they type of attention changes the nature of the world we experience.
Furthermore, these two ways of seeing the world are each vital to our survival – we need to simplify and stand apart to manipulate things, to design and build the foundations of society, and we need to live in it, to belong to it to understand the complexity of what it is we are designing for and with –this division of attention works to our advantage when we use both. So how we attend to something, or not, matters a great deal – it can create or destroy, humanise or de-humanise – so much so that when the latter happens, we no longer are aware that there is a problem at all, for you do not see what you cannot see.
In the pursuit of progress, we have objectified the world to understand, control and manipulate it, and in doing so we have fragmented our collective human experience to the point where the prevailing Western scientific paradigm has us trapped, reflexively imprisoned, in what McGilchrist describes as a hall of mirrors. Reason and rationality, the cornerstones upon which modern Westernised societies have been built, have powerfully characterised the nature of human relations with other species and the natural world. It seems we have reached a tipping point where we urgently need to transform both how we think about the world, and what we make of ourselves.
One of the oldest forms of tradition is that of the law of a culture, or tribe, Chthonic law. It emerged through experience, oral tradition and the memory of peoples living in close harmony to the Earth. ThePueblo native American scholar of indigenous native science, Gregory Cajete, states the current global crisis stems from a narrow view of who we are, and what the Earth is. It seems in forgetting these laws we are forgetting what it means to be human. Furthermore, Cajete describes native science as a metaphor for a wide range of tribal processes of perceiving, thinking, acting, and coming to know that have evolved through human experience with the natural world. It includes metaphysics, philosophy and spirituality, art and architecture, practical technologies and agriculture, farming, hunting, ritual, and ceremony practiced by indigenous peoples past and present. In its essential form it is a map of natural reality drawn from the experience of thousands of human generations; it is the collective heritage of human experience with the natural world. It is a deeply relational process of coming to understand, or coming to know, that metaphorically entails a journey, a quest for knowledge and understanding.
Furthermore, Cajete suggests native science encompasses knowledges that are part of an indigenous mind-set, which is essentially relational and participatory, and it is this participation that provides the grounding for the way of coming know the nature of life and the relationships therein. It is an all-encompassing task, and it is a deeply creative participatory process, that is founded on an ancient human covenant with animals, plants, places, the natural forces of the earth, and it is rarely explicated. Also, indigenous scholars use the term science and knowledge interchangeably. To understand the foundations of native science, one must become open to the role of sensation, feeling, perception, imagination, and spirit, as well as logic, and rational empiricism. Its most akin to a deeper expression of what Western science calls environmental science, or ecology – deep ecology.
Ecology, from the Greek oikos, meaning home, is the scientific study of relationships, between plants, animals and micro-organisms, and their natural environment, or ecosystems, the home to all life on earth. A conception of life based a new kind of thinking – thinking in terms of relationships, patterns, and context. From an ecological perspective, design consists of shaping flows of energy and materials for human purposes, and a set of ecological design principles reflect the principles of organisation that nature has evolved over billions of years to sustain the web of life. The great challenge of our time is to make and nurture sustainable communities, and we can learn many lessons from living systems for they are essentially communities of plants, animals and micro-organisms that have sustained life for billions of years.
The environmentalist, writer and philosopher,Edward Goldsmith, advocates for an ecological worldview based on two fundamental principles. The first is the natural world is the basic source of all wealth and will only dispense these benefits if we preserve its critical order. The second is that the purpose of the behavioural pattern of an ecological society must be to preserve the critical order of the natural world.This suggests a relationship built on respect, reciprocity, and reverence.Furthermore, Goldsmith writes that the inspiration must come from the world view of vernacular, traditional societies, in particular the Chthonic world view of the earliest period in humanity when people everywhere knew how to live well, and in harmony with the natural world.
Similarly, the academic, environmental activist and writer, David Orr, suggests that the modern society is built on a culture of fast knowledge that rests on assumptions of progress, and only that can be measured is true knowledge. In the pursuit of progress and modernity, fast knowledge has undermined long-term sustainability, and for two fundamental reasons. The first being the rate at which our collective learning happens slowly, over time. The second reason being we have created power structures that hold at bay alternative paradigms, and worldviews, that might slow the speed of change to manageable rates, resulting in social traps in which the benefits (of fast knowledge) occur in the near-term future while the costs are deferred to others later. Orr argues that the only knowledge we can count on for our longevity as a species has been acquired over a long period of time and through cultural maturation – slow knowledge.
Slow knowledge is knowledge shaped to fit a particular ecological and cultural context, and its purpose is resilience.Every human culture that has artfully adapted itself to the challenges and opportunities of a particular landscape have done so through the patient and painstaking accumulation of knowledge over many generations. The indigenous peoples of traditional societies are a striking example of this. Furthermore, fast knowledge is focussed on solving problems, slow knowledge has to do with avoiding problems in the first place. The current paradigm that shapes design as a problem-solving tool is the result of fast knowledge. The possibility that today’s ecological problems are design failures of the past is bad news for designers, as it points towards inherent flaws in our profession. How might it be to design our ways of life shaped by slow knowledge, its purpose not to solve problems, but to avoid them in the first place?
The anthropologist and academic, Arturo Escobar, posits that design is a conversation about possibilities, and every tool or technology is ontological in the sense that it inaugurates a set of rituals, ways of doing, and modes of being, contributing to shaping what it is to be human. Furthermore, he suggests that this extends beyond objects and tools, to institutions and discourses of human creation. In this sense it generates structures of possibility in our individual and collective human experience. Furthermore, Escobar argues that realising the potential of design requires a profound relational sensibility that brings together materiality, and empathy in the creation of novel assemblages of infrastructures, skills and knowledge, by way of imbuing design education with the tools for reflection in ways that make designers conscious of their own situatedness in the ecologies for which they design. In Designs for the Pluriverse Escobar argues designing involves understanding the dualist ontology of separation, control and appropriation that has become dominant in patriarchal capitalist modernity. Whilst inquiring into existing and potential rationalities, and modes of being that emphasise the profound relationality and interconnectedness of all that is, it recognises that all design creates a world-within-the-world in which we are designed by what we design. In this regard we are all designers, and we are all designed.
The academic in art theory and interdisciplinary studies, Susanne Witzgal, posits a relational way of designing or ‘sympoietic designing’ as designing with care, an ethical project based on new ecological thinking and new materialist approaches that enlighten perspectives on the process of making or designing. Witzgal describes it as a complex, twofold endeavour – firstly it comprises of the disposition and capacity of the maker to be deeply affected and guided by materials, and their essential properties, and secondly, the designer’s capacity and capability to consider, and assume responsibility for the extraction and use of materials, and making of things, as they have great affecting powers on interspecies.
The notion of sympoiesis, or making-with, provides a novel understanding of design. The term was first used by Beth Dempster, as a way of proposing a new conceptual understanding of life as complex, self-organising but collectively producing systems that do have not self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries, and that are evolutionary in their nature. Similarly the feminist scholar exploring human-animal relations, Donna J. Haraway, suggests nothing really makes itself, nothing is truly autopoietic or self-organising, and this is the radical implication of sympoiesis. Haraway takes the concept of sympoiesis further with examples of it in practice through describing the traditional practices of weavers of the Navajo Indians of North America.
At a fundamental level ‘weaving is a cosmological performance, knotting proper relationality and connectedness into the warp and weft of the fabric’, suggests Haraway. In this way Haraway likens weaving to a relational worlding, with human and nonhumans fibres from ordinary human beings, plants, soil, water, and sheep. Furthermore, the geometric patterns, repetition and invention in weaving of Dine, or ‘the people’, are their stories and knowledge; these patterns propose and embody world-making and world-sustaining relations. In this regard it is the act of weaving that ‘ties people and animals through patterns of care and response-ability’. It is a way of making kin, Harraway suggests, a relational worlding to nurture well-being on a damaged planet, and stay with the trouble.
The worldview of the modern, industrialised society and culture that seeks to dominate nature has its roots in the exploitation, degradation, and enslavement of our fellow humans. Inequality, inequity, and injustice are the hallmarks of civilisation. Furthermore, the increasingly complex nature of these problems, often leads to inaction, passivity, and denial, further normalising them. It seems until we can acknowledge the collective denial of the true cost of the ‘civilised’ societies, then how can we design regenerative cultures in which we can thrive together. Cultivating a design practice fit for purpose in the 21stcentury begins with not only recognising our interdependence on the living systems we have built our worlds, but also our intersectionality.
Leah Thomas, author, and co-founder of the Intersectional Environmentalist suggests our intersectional lives are at the centre of the environmental crises.Intersectionality is the term used to describe the ways in which systems of inequality based on gender, race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, and class intersect to create dynamics and effects that are mutually reinforcing. For example, addressing the problem of gender pay gap without considering other dimensions such as race, socio-economic and immigration status will likely reinforce inequalities. Intersectional Environmentalism posits we cannot save the planet without uplifting the voices of those most marginalised. Furthermore, environmental justice and social justice are fuelled by the undervaluing, commodification, and exploitation of all forms of life, and natural resources from the smallest grain to the oppressed peoples worldwide. Intersectional justice recognises discrimination and inequality as an outcome not of individuals but rather as systemic, institutional, and structural.
At the heart of intersectional justice is the understanding that one person’s disadvantage is another’s privilege, and it is these structural privileges and disadvantages that need to be dismantled through the fair and equal distribution of wealth, rights, power, and knowledge. If we are to recover our awareness of the fundamental human relationships that we have with the broader ecologies within which we are embedded, we must first recalibrate our relations with each other. The deepest, most powerful form of empathy is intimacy with another, and with connections that are made with life that are not constrained by the boundaries set by our rational mind. One must become open to the role of sensation, feeling, perception, and imagination, as well as logic, and empiricism. Might a cosmology for the times we live in enfold the radical equality of all beings as an imperative and be founded on an ancient human covenant with animals, plants, places, the natural forces of Earth, Water, Fire and Air, so that we might cultivate everyday practices and relationships built on respect, reciprocity, and reverence.
Michael Martin is a lecturer in Design Management at the University of the Arts London (UAL) and Assistant Editor of the Wild Alchemy Journal.