Theories: The underpinnings
The theories we build on as design practitioners
The ethos of our curiosities and the attitude through which we approach our work and how we might cross-pollinate feels worth teasing out for us. This ethos and these attitudes were incubated in the field of Transdisciplinary Design; it is founded on theories of
Aesthetics and material culture
The theories and stances taken by bell hooks, Michael McMillain, Elaine Scarry, Sherry Turkle, and Donald Winnicott have materialized my tacit ideas about how people and material things are related. They grounded Myriam’s personal worldviews in an intimate way. bell hooks and Michael McMillain write separately about accumulation and interaction with home things in Black domestic spaces as non-institutionalized, decolonizing processes, respectively. Elaine Scarry examines the anatomical workings of artifacts in the process of “achieving an understanding of political justice … first … [through] an understanding of making and unmaking” (Scarry, 1985). Sherry Turkle affirms the way early experiences with material things allow young people to “overdetermine” (Turkle, 2009) the way they see how things in the world relate to one another. Donald Winnicott founds the concept of “transitional objects” as play string or teddy bears (1953) that contribute to making visible the lamenting, anxious, healthy conceptions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ in infants. Overlie (2016) demonstrated the physical, structural arrangement of how people occupy space as an “aesthetic” form.
Embodiment
The theories around embodiment taken by Francisco J. Varela (1991, 2003) have largely influenced my understanding of how everyday reality is “enacted”. In this way, Ricardo uses embodiment, presence, and perception interchangeably. Varela influenced a generation of researchers and practitioners within fields of cognitive science, neuroscience, systems thinking, and social change. Ricardo has been drawn to the work of action researchers in systems change (Hayashi, 2017; Scharmer, 2016; Senge, 2004). Merleau-Ponty (1945) and Heidegger (1962) have investigated perception, phenomenology, and being.
Critical theory
Gloria Anzadúa studies the lived experience of people and examines social conditions through her establishment of Borderlands theory. She recounts her Mestiza consciousness born out of her positionality living at the Mexico-United States of America border. Veronica Arbon, indigenist researcher presents ways that, in a specifically situated context, Aboriginal knowledge creation has particularly deep ways of knowing and doing — in contrast to dominating, assimilative traps of Western knowledge and imperialistic, colonial, hegemonic, and racist systems (Arbon, 2008).
Eastern philosophy
One of the things Trungpa Rinpoche, Suzuki Roshi and Thich Nhat Hanh have in common is that they brought eastern philosophies and wisdom to the west — at times at the cost of threatening their very lives. Their wisdom pervades the work of creative practitioners of different generations across fields including the arts, cognitive science, and social change.
Methodologies for becoming
The fundamental understanding of becoming draws from the work of Otto Scharmer framed as a process of “emergence”, and Trungpa Rinpoche — for whom becoming seems to be the nature of who we (essentially) are.
Complexity
Each laying groundwork for ways into seeing, being, and working with complexity, Karen Barad, Robin M. Boylorn, Avery Gordon, Donna Haraway, Carol Rambo, disrupt stabilizing, false-dichotomies. They offer us the notion that people are complex. We have ways of articulating incomplete, partial, and layered accounts of relationships. These theories are embodied through dual awareness, double vision, diffraction, and the two-way mirror built on W.E.B. Dubois’ notion of double consciousness.
Intersubjectivity
As a contribution to relational ethics and critical reflexivity, Kathy-Ann C. Hernandez and Faith Wambura Ngunjiri demonstrate ways of negotiating ways to tell others’ stories, one’s “self-in-relation-to-others” (2015) and the ethical responsibilities of working with complexity.
The paper in which this blog originates is an attempt to extend our practice’s sibling-hood and set side by side multiple practitioners’ practices in order to surface the specific ways in which we relate. It is to present them as a collection that forms a family of sensibilities about working with materiality and embodiment. The qualities of the kind of practices we do, and the higher order approach or sensibility we apply to do the practice are what we outline here in this paper.
Works Cited
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands : The New Mestiza / La Frontera. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987.
Arbon, Veronica. “Indigenous Research: Aboriginal Knowledge Creation.” Ngoonjook, no. 32 (2008): 80–94.
Barad, Karen. “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart.” Parallax 20, no. 3 (2014): 168–87.
Boylorn, Robin M. “Chapter 7: “Sit With Your Legs Closed!” and Other Sayin’s from My Childhood.” In Handbook of Autoethnography, edited by Sikes, Pat, Stacy Holman Jones, Tony Adams, and Carolyn Ellis. Qualitative Research 15, no. 3 (2015): 173–175.
Depraz, Natalie, J. Varela, Francisco, and Pierre Vermersch. On Becoming Aware: A pragmatics of experiencing (Advances in Consciousness Research). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2003.
Gordon, Avery. Keeping Good Time : Reflections on Knowledge, Power, and People. Great Barrington Bks. 2004.
Hayashi, Arawana. “Social Presencing Theater — Arawana Hayashi at Wisdom Together Oslo 2017” (online video). Published December 24, 2017. Accessed April 28, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAlBvdYFRYo
Haraway, Donna J., and Thyrza Goodeve. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse : Feminism and Technoscience. 2nd Routledge ed., 2018.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 1962.
Hernandez, Kathy-Anna C and Faith Wambura Ngunjiri. “Chapter 12: Relationships and Communities in Autoethnography.” In Handbook of Autoethnography, edited by Sikes, Pat, Stacy Holman Jones, Tony Adams, and Carolyn Ellis. Qualitative Research 15, no. 3 (2015): 263–279
hooks, bell. “In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life.” In Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: The New Press. (1995): 54–64.
McMillan, Michael. “The West Indian Front Room: Reflections on a Diasporic Phenomenon.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 13, no. 1 (2009): 135–156.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge, 1945, 2012.
Nhat Hanh, Thich. Understanding Our Mind. New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.
Overlie, Mary. Standing in Space: The Six Viewpoints Theory & Practice. Montana: FellonPress, 2016.
Rambo, Carol. “Impressions of Grandmother: An Autoethnographic Portrait.” The Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Journal 34, no. 5 (2005): 521–28.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. New York, Oxf. U.P. N.Y. (1985): 278–326.
Scharmer, C. Otto. Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2016.
Suzuki, Shunryu. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice. Boulder: Shambhala, 2011.
Trungpa, Chogyam. True Perception: The Path of Dharma Art. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1996.
Turkle, Sherry. “Chapter 20: Sherry Turkle: Objects Inspire” In Object Reader, edited by Fiona Candlin, Raiford Guins. Place of Publication: Routledge, no. 1 (2009): 297–304.
Winnicott, D. W. (1953). “Transitional objects and transitional phenomena — a study of the first not-me possession”. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. 34: 89–97.
