By Designing for Interdependence: A Poetics of Relating (Designing in Dark Times)

Designing for Interdependence challenges the dominant design paradigm that centres humanity in its practice. This book puts forward an ecocentric mode of designing that privileges a harmonious relationship between all life forms that share our planet. There is a ‘gathering’ performed by design. Design devises, which implies creating divisions, arranging partitions, material and sensible, including some and excluding others. Thus, a particular form of togetherness is inscribed in, by and through things that tends to maintain the ways in which we relate to (some) others. The norm of devising through design has been human ― done by humans and for humans. If, in the best case, there is a togetherness enacted through design, it is most clearly for humans and a few other beings. Martin Avila challenges this fundamental aspect of the dominant design paradigm, namely anthropocentrism in its modern guise. He uses three case studies of projects developed in Argentina as examples of some of the political-ecological implications of an ecocentric paradigm which can help us to imagine alternative modes of relating to local environments and alternative modes of inter-species cohabitation. In order to imagine how we may participate with others to sustain the habitability of the places where we live, these three projects frame some of the challenges and opportunities of a ‘poetics of relating’. A poetics of relating that engages in cross-species meaning-making, emphasizes the dynamics of the overlaps of psychological, social and environmental ecologies, and engages with some of the forms and tensions of cohabitation in a period characterized by biodiversity loss.