Decentering Design: Practice in a More-than-Human world
Decentering Design: Practice in a More-than-Human world.
This lecture is an invitation to embark on a journey beyond human-centered thinking and into the more-than-human realm. By challenging the prevalent anthropocentric perspective that objectifies our surroundings, we aim to understand the environment as a dynamic shared reality of both human and other than human individuals. Together, we form a socio-ecological community in which the activities and relationships of each individual contribute to shaping reality. The worlding of the world is inherently a “becoming-with,” a collaborative endeavor across species, where the interconnected actions of countless beings continuously give rise to the world.
Internalizing this perspective is not easy. To succeed we must rewire our very being and train our attention unwaveringly on matters that are more than human. Focusing on historic estates and old marshalling yards, this presentation explores various strategies, insights, and exercises designed to do this and foster a deeper awareness of and care for the more-than-human world. This approach emphasizes our embodied existence and its inescapable contextual nature, leading to a more enriched, ethical, and interconnected way of seeing and creating in concord with all other ways of being within the more-than-human community to which we inherently belong.
About Bert De Roo
Bert De Roo (BE), graduated as an engineer-architect from UGent, Belgium, and has been working as a freelance architect since 2015, engaging in both self-initiated projects and collaborations with various Ghent-based offices. He is a researcher at HOGENT Howest, within the research center Futures through Design and the Disobedient Practices research group. His work spans a variety of projects focusing on historic estates and more-than-human design. For the latter, he has developed a design approach that reimagines our surroundings as a socio-ecological community and suggests tools for designers to engage that community. He tutored the Embassy MTH program, exploring the more-than-human community at the Arsenaalsite in Ghent. Together with the Decentering Design team he organizes a diversity of workshops delving into the human centeredness of language or speculating the overlap between human and other-than-human realities amongst others.
Date and location:
- Monday December 16th 2024
- 13h30 - 15h00
- Aula E-B05, Agoralaan, Gebouw E, 3590 Diepenbeek
Registration
- Please register here
- For PhD students and postdocs, we would like to draw your attention to the cancellation and no-show policy of UHasselt.
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