Johanna Mehl @ Symposium by CollActive Materials: Sensing Common Grounds. Towards Collaborative Speculation

Sensing Common Grounds. Towards Collaborative Speculation

Symposium by CollActive Materials

14.+15. November 2024

How to sense the common grounds of critical humanities and design research? What could be the means for nuanced encounters of knowing and making? While the 2000s were mostly characterized by various forms of differentiation at the disciplinary level and a division of labor between academic fields, the »design turn« (Schäffner 2010) has sparked a vivid exchange between critical thinking and critical designing. In the meantime, the promise of making has emerged as a common denominator of basic research, which now aims at integrative design as the art of the possible. This is by no means a flight of fancy but rather a joint effort to design and negotiate possible futures through the reality of the current ecological predicament.

The symposium »Sensing Common Grounds. Towards Collaborative Speculation«, organized by Léa Perraudin and Martin Müller, asked about the ›how‹, foregrounding the methodologies of such speculations and projections: How to relate speculative design proposals to critical diagnoses of the present and attempts at historical speculation? How specifically can collaborative speculation in inter- and transdisciplinary contexts enable us to sense »what is in the air«? What narratives, prototypes, materials and media hold knowledge (and non-knowledge) of these scenarios? How to unlearn and unmake the predominant modes of world-making by cutting across disciplines, foregrounding embodied knowledges, situated inquiry and extra-academic encounters?

The symposium brought together committed researchers at the intersection of design and the humanities – for sensing and unearthing such new common grounds. The contributions attended to topics and materials as diverse as air pollution, seaweed, paraffin, energy transition, epigenetic memory, robotic worldmaking, atmospheric metabolisms and by means of co-speculation, norm-critique, speculative material histories, scalar translation, post-anthropocentric knowledge production and playful inquiry. In three panels, two impulse talks and a public roundtable event, the speakers examined and critically discussed the disciplinary legacies and critical futures of collaborative speculation. The outcomes of this experimental gathering will be published in an edited volume with Spector Books Leipzig in 2025.

The event is part of the closing activities of CollActive Materials, an experimental laboratory of the Berlin Clusters of Excellence »Matters of Activity« (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and »Science of Intelligence« (Technische Universität Berlin), funded by the Berlin University Alliance.

More information and program