Cosmotechnic Encounters: Designing with foodwaste, landscapes, and livelihoods

Cosmotechnic Encounters: Designing with foodwaste, landscapes, and livelihoods

Markus Wernli and Kam-Fai Chan consider circularity in organic waste, drawing on Daoist cosmotechnics, design research, anthropology, and diverse economies. They suggest cosmotechnic designing with the world, concluding that designing with shapelessness, integral to systemic design with situatedness and mutualistic care, “is essentially about symbiotic survivability or sympoiesis in cosmotechnics.”

Contra-Innovation: Expanding the innovation imperative in the context of futuring, defuturing and fictioning

Contra-Innovation: Expanding the innovation imperative in the context of futuring, defuturing and fictioning

Dulmini Perera and Tony Fry present a powerful approach to enable systemic critique of innovation propositions and their potential outcomes. The paper takes the form of presenting three “historico-fictions” from the US, China, and Cuba to distinguish these value frames within selected histories of dominant systems. Perera and Fry suggest a “second order design fiction” to bring forth pluralistic expansions of meaning and enable participants in design conversations to recognize many possible positions that might challenge acceleration, defuturing, or sustainment.