Crafting the Anthropocene
Project Outline
Within the past few centuries, our world has become hyper-industrialized and digitized. We have lost the necessity to understand and work with our natural resources, seasons, and materials, as our ancestors once had. This disconnect, I believe, is at the core of our current global crises and as designers, we need to reestablish our connection and understanding of natural materials and processes in order to not exacerbate the environmental crises.
Project Outline
Within the past few centuries, our world has become hyper-industrialized and digitized. We have lost the necessity to understand and work with our natural resources, seasons, and materials, as our ancestors once had. This disconnect, I believe, is at the core of our current global crises and as designers, we need to reestablish our connection and understanding of natural materials and processes in order to not exacerbate the environmental crises.
Craft Thinking is a method of integrating embodied knowledge and material understanding back into the design process. It is an attempt to create design solutions which are more in tune with natural systems, with the understanding that we exist only in codependency with our surroundings and other non-human species.
It was partially born in response to the industry-wide ‘human centered’ model, which singles out the human as the most important agent, and negates to consider the larger context of our ecosystems and processes, which we are dependent on. Craft Thinking is a framework that can help us design consciously with the knowledge of natural systems and lessen our footprint on the planet.
Drawing from frameworks such as ‘Design Thinking’ by the Stanford Design School and ‘Designing for more than Humans’ by Ron Wakkery, I created this first iteration of the Craft Thinking framework and have since applied it on several design research projects. The key tools are thinking with the hands and learning directly from materials, drawing from indigenous and holistic knowledge systems, and using embodying and imagining as ways of understanding.
Research Workshop
In order to open up the discussion and practice to more participants, I designed and facilitated a workshop where people from diverse backgrounds could discuss and make together. Each of the participants were given activity cards, clay, and sculpting tools. The activity cards guided them through a process of reflection, imagination and crafting, based on the ‘Craft Thinking’ framework. Once the participants gave their personal reflections, we discussed collectively and learned about each other’s traditions, memories, and speculations.
The workshop consisted of 7 participants including myself, all between the ages of 25 and 38. The participants were from diverse range of countries and cultures including Chile, America, South Korea, Mexico and Lebanon.
Step 1: Reflect on a traditional tool your grandparents (or ancestors) would use around a food ritual: preparing, preserving, cooking, eating.
Step 2: Reimagine the ways this ritual will change in the next hundred years, based on your Anthropocene card.
Step 3: Re-craft your tool based on the reimagined future ritual. What will change? What remains the same? What informs these changes?
keeping the prompt personal yet general to generate discussion, once we had time to think about our tools, we discussed it as a group. The memories we had around it, how it was used, and the materials it was made of.
After reflecting on personal craft traditions, the participants were prompted to choose an ‘Anthropocene Card’ at random and reflect on it in the context of their craft tradition. Participants were encouraged to think outside the box and come up with extreme scenarios.
Each of the ten Anthropocene Cards describe a unique crisis caused by human interventions; ie. over-farming, species extinction, nuclear wastes, and sea level rise.
We took a moment to imagine and envision future scenarios and discuss our visions of the future. In this step, I encouraged ‘sci-fi apocalyptic’ thinking and exaggeration as tools to spark our imagination. As we discussed our scenarios, I noticed some participants had difficulty with the abstraction of this phase.
The final phase was to craft a new version of the traditional tool based on the future scenario each participant came up with. As we got into the zone with crafting our clay, we discussed our design decisions and their impacts. Creating a real-life model of the tool created a layer of realness to the imagined future scenario.
Workshop Outcome & Insights
The outcome of the workshop was a series of speculative tools based around a global future scenario and indigenous traditions. Each participant drew crucial elements from their cultural traditions in order to form the new tool. Some were quite complicated and others were simple.
Next Steps
See results when this workshop is conducted with different generations
Craft using different materials with different properties
Find a better way of introducing the Anthropocene conflict, that would make it easier for participants to imagine a future scenario
Key Insights
Since we were all coming from different cultures, we spent a lot of time describing our tools and memories of the tool, which was great because it helped us relate to the stories
Most of the tools were based on nostalgic rituals
Many more ideas were generated within the group once we started making with our hands
Envisioning can be heightened by the process of physicalizing the vision
Most people had difficulty with the pairing of their tool/ritual with the crisis on their Anthropocene card
Many of the tools reflected the traditional tools in form but were exaggerated
