See contribution “Lost in Space with Frankenstein Shadow” by SLSA member Patricia Olynyk.
Bio/Matter/Techno/Synthetics: Design Futures for the More than Human (B/M/T/S) captures and disseminates the design and intellectual work of women who create, make, and ideate at the
intra-section of nature, artifice, and technology. Their desires to propagate, generate, calibrate, fabricate, interrogate, and animate all manner of things motivates this collection of essays. The women of (B/M/T/S) have charted critical paths to design inspiration and material productivity from positions both embedded and tangential to their disciplines. Future-ready visions and historically grounded critiques are offered across two dozen texts written by designers and thinkers who, living in a world of both abundance and trauma, take seriously their responsibility to make, ethically. Operating in ever more complex aesthetic, ethical, environmental, and socio-political contexts, and practicing at the intersection of art, architecture, landscape architecture, environmental design, material studies, emerging technologies, digital fabrication, media studies, robotics, and critical theory, the women of (B/M/T/S) redefine the very origins, principles, and values of design. Despite the propensity in contemporary discourse to identify one hegemonic theory, this collaborative project convenes the work of twenty-eight women who interrogate the heterogenous origins, methods, and tactics of their respective disciplines. Collectively (B/M/T/S) challenges the singular nature of ideas founded in parametricism, object-oriented ontology, parafictional realism, post-digital representations, or corporate functionalism. In exchange, it seeks the confluence of critical, aesthetic, and ethical thought in future speculations on the biological, the material, the technological, and their synthesis.
The papers collected in this edited volume speak to bio-design, speculative biology, green walls and pavers, design by decay, biogenic materials, waste as food, sentient materials, photogrammetrees, robotics, nanotechnology, alliesthesia, digital weaving, chemical droplets, and even Frankenstein. (B/M/T/S) grounds the reader in the production and representation of emergent ecologies, non-human agency, machine learning, and responsive computation, cultivating an interdisciplinary framework for guiding the much-needed synthesis of biology, material studies, and emerging digital technologies in design.
Contributed by Patricia Olynyk olynyk@wustl.edu
