Dr Ziyu Zhou - Future Matters

Future Matters is a project that proposed a speculative, material-centric design approach to engage discussions towards post-Anthropocene scenarios by rethinking the entanglement of human and non-human actors. With the non-anthropocentric view, the materials—the non-human actors, can be seen as active contributors to the design process itself. Materials become carriers of a wide variety of information and reshape the human and non-human relations as relational agencies.

Many pioneer design activities that de-center humanity rethink the relationship among different material actors to reflect on the 'Anthropocene' issues. Even though it is debatable whether the "Anthropocene "is the term to describe the current geological era, the idea of an epoch massively influenced by one species is inspiring new theories and ideas across all scientific and creative fields. While Bruno Latour is using the idea of an Anthropocene to develop his ideas about "being terrestrial "and living in the "critical zone "(Latour 2018), Donna Harraway develops her own concept of a "chthulucene" focussed on an interspecies - entanglement (Harraway, 2016), while Jason Moore breaks down the idea of the human species as the name-giving factor to the capitalistic system, the "capitalocene" era (Moore, 2014). Nonetheless, how the term will be discussed, the common idea is the consideration of the actions and influence of the human species on their non-human surroundings and the connections with the non-human.

Methods like the Actor-Network Theory (Callon M. 1986, Latour, 1988) help describe and analyze these complex networks' connections and correlations. Decentering the human in the constitution of the world and the systems they live in also enables a design approach that considers more than human actors as "active" in the process. Focusing the design process on non-humans and including post-humanist and neo-materialistic theory into the design process to tackle the topic of the Anthropocene in speculative and experimental projects is a currently emerging phenomenon across disciplines. With the collection of evidence in the real world, materials in this context are seen as “actors” to define the relations and anticipate non-anthropocentric scenarios in near or far future.

This led us to the experimentation of a practical workshop, as the main research activity, to experiment with the critical outcomes that might be produced by combining the material-centric design approach and the way of thinking and understanding the non-human actors indicated by Actor-Network Theory.

The first "Future Matters" workshop was in January 2022, and there are two parts included in our method: 1). Using the Actor Network Theory to explain the idea of non-anthropocentric thinking in entangled networks as the knowledge input of the workshop; 2). Establishing the idea of a timeline as a tool to visualize and discuss the ideas of material, or non-human-actors in an evolutionary and time-based process rather than a static phenomenon.

Our preliminary findings have been shared in an open-source publication available in the DRS Library. To access this publication, please click the button below for download.

The "Future Matters" Project is still ongoing. If you are interested in working together, please feel free to reach out to me.

Download this publication

Citation:

Zhou, Z., Brück, V., and Holzbach, M. (2022) A material-centric approach in non-anthropocentric design, in Lockton, D., Lenzi, S., Hekkert, P., Oak, A., Sádaba, J., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao, 25 June - 3 July, Bilbao, Spain. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.518