2023

MFA Thesis

Introduction

“The city looks the same, but the really tall grass in my garden and my dog’s unruly hair reminds me of the three months that have passed.” One of my friends reflected on her quarantine experience through the bodies of other living beings like grass and her dog. The missing actions of “maintenance”, in this case for plants and dogs, exposed the trained mindset of shaping nature into human-desired forms. Indeed, the original, natural growth path of these other living beings becomes surprisingly unfamiliar and unexpected in human occupied spaces. 

The realization of the constructed urgency of shaping the cityscape and expanding desire to own an increasing number of new products sparks the even more urgent question of how to co-habit and co-create with other living beings that humans share the same biosphere with. Exciting questions arose during this thought experiment: why is human-centric design problematic? What are the new definitions of design, making, material, process and result? What are practical ways that designers can apply to move towards a multi-species designing future?

In this paper, I specifically investigate these questions with design and artworks in the domestic space where the sense of ownership of beings  reaches its maximum. At the same time,  co-living and chair co-creating experiment with mushrooms in my household is carried out for me to gain embodied knowledge on how to live with other earthlings. This paper is in this case constructed by my thought and design experiments in phases of Urgency, Surrender, Negotiation and Action. With discoveries of problems in anthropocentric design methods, this paper is a starting point of proposing a concurring design model that considers different species’ experience beyond human-centered analysis.