Rehearsing rituals for unlearning: emerging design practices

15:00 - 16:00 (CET) Open Guest Lecture with Li Jönsson, Kristina Lindström and Åsa Ståhl [Room: AUD4] and

This lecture draws on decades of working with repairing, caring, composting and other worldmaking practices. Over the years, we have come to see these practices as ways of hospicing modernity (Machado de Oliveira 2021), cultivating the arts of living (Tsing et al 2017), and keeping possibilities open (Stengers 2023). We’ve been conducting our design research in the Un/Making Studio, a Tiny House on Wheels in Holding Surplus House and through gathering around Hope and Grief. Our participatory design approach has predominantly been involving publics.

Drawing on our more recent work in the research environment Design after Progress: Reimaging design histories and futures, we will turn these questions and challenges towards design practices and design education. We particularly seek to carefully untie design’s entanglement with progress and to craft concrete imaginaries of a more socio-ecologically just design after progress. This includes developing and articulating skills, competencies, capabilities, and concepts necessary for designing after progress. Along with others who work with education on regeneration, we want to emphasise the need for taking care of the losses and letting go in the transition and transformation processes. This entails not just adding, but also cherishing that which we want to hold on to and taking care of what we’re letting go of in various affective ways. The lecture is followed by a workshop where we will try out unlearning in design with the participants. Design should here be understood and taken in a broad and expanded way.

16:00 - 18:00 (CET) Workshop in room 4A56
Following the lecture, we will introduce participants to a pedagogical material developed for study circles engaging the public in hope, grief, and other affects in times marked by polycrisis. For this workshop, we invite participants to try out one part of this material that is centred around the making of rituals for saying farewell and welcoming in relation to design practices. Rituals are introduced as a way of learning and unlearning, which acknowledges the importance of collective and experiential learning, while at the same time building on the experiences of each and every one who is present.

About Feminist Technoscience in Practice
ETHOS Lab invites interested students, researchers, and practitioners to take part in a series of events titled ‘Feminist Technoscience in Practice’. The events focus on the practical application of digital and critical feminist methods. The events are rooted in technical practices but are tailored to accommodate any level of technical experience. Participation is open and free for anyone interested, but registration is required.

About the guests:
Li Jönsson is an Associate Professor at the School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University. She has an interdisciplinary approach to design that engages with a diverse set of critical and practical ideas and intersects design and feminist STS. She specialises in participatory and speculative methods that explore ways of opening up for more-than-human practices and imaginaries through design.

Kristina Lindström is an associate professor in design at the School of Arts and Communication, and co-director of the transdisciplinary research centre Imagining and Co-Creating Futures at Malmö University. She has a broad experience in working with design for public engagement and future-making, with a particular focus on affective dimensions of climate change and the transition towards post-carbon futures. Her current research is concerned with explorative pedagogical formats of unlearning in and through design.

Åsa Ståhl is a professor of design at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. Her research and educational work focus on world-making and holistic transformation through participatory design and alternative socio-ecological economies. Her current and recently concluded research includes “Design after Progress: Design Histories and Futures”, “Holding Surplus House”, “Earth Logic Design”, “Foresight through the Doughnut Model” and “Un/Making Matters”.