Mineral Matterings
Diffractive Practices of Design
Time: Fri 2024-11-29 13.30
Location: Mandelgren, Konstfack, LM Ericssons väg 14, 126 26 Hägersten, video conference
Video link: https://konstfack-se.zoom.us/j/63502413639
Language: English
Subject area: Art, Technology and Design
Doctoral student: Petra Lilja , Arkitektur, Konstfack, Konst Teknik och Design
Opponent: Professor Helen Pritchard, Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Basel FHNW
Supervisor: Professor in Design Martín Ávila, Konstfack; Docent Meike Schalk, Arkitektur och stad; Professor Ola Ståhl, Linnaeus University
QC 20241106
Abstract
The extraction of matter from the Earth is a foundational process that provides designers with the materials needed to create products and structures. However, the extractivist logic – often unnoticed, normalized or accepted without critique – simultaneously drives environmental degradation, social inequity, and contributes to climate change. Consequently, design operates as both a solution and a source of concern. This dissertation, Mineral Matterings: Diffractive Practices of Design, focuses on the relationship between designers and their materials, asking how design processes can generate critical curiosity, particularly by examining the entanglements between humans and mineral matter. Through site-specific engagements with past and future sites of extraction in southern Sweden, the research comprises two projects: “Walking with Minerals” and “Critical Clay”. The former involves guided sensory walks through a disused limestone quarry, inviting participants to experience minerals beyond their conventional role as resources. The latter traces alum shale from landscapes marked for future vanadium extraction, mapping its global entanglements and learning by processing its matter into materials and artifacts. Through these material-discursive practices, collectively termed “design matterings,” both projects demonstrate how direct material engagement can inform theory and practice alike. Through the lenses of geology, philosophy, the feminist posthumanities, and science and technology studies, with particular emphasis on Karen Barad’s agential realism, this dissertation introduces diffractive practices of design, an approach that is embodied and embedded, inviting designers to understand the world from within, as part of its becoming. Diffractive practices of design do not merely reflect existing dichotomies; they diffract them by emphasizing anthropo-decentric scales of time and place, offering multiple perspectives and relational understandings. These practices challenge the dominant extractivist logic by rendering imperceptible materialities and relations perceptible, thereby creating new meanings and nuanced differences. Allowing for a deeper attunement to the shared “mineralness” of humans and other-than-humans, diffractive practices of design actively participate in reconfiguring ethical and material design matterings and emphasize the role of design in the making and remaking of worlds.