Abstract:
The word Terrapolis,1 coined by Donna Haraway, set me off to discover different perceptions of the world. Due to the inappropriate lenses used to understand complex systems, we face various environmental issues. Confronted with different systems and interlinkages between thinking and action, I unravel the consequences of our designed world. By analyzing the designer’s responsibility in the autopoietic system, I combine literature and science to find alternatives to the capitalistic, autopoietic status quo and challenge the current position.
My dissertation should enable designers to shift their professional outlook into a system that embraces complexity in advance and is suitable and sustainable for alternative futures and beings on this planet. The conceived results shall remain undefined and flexible, sympoietic. This thesis is primarily conceptual and does not attempt to draw definitive conclusions. How I perceive the world dictates how I act and function in it. External forces lure designers into autonomous and comfortable habits to keep the cycle of consumption running. Using symbiosis as a metaphor and a material reality, I refurbish the relationship between the designer and other species. I encourage the transformation from an individual to a cooperating, collective seeking being to become something new enable to transgress boundaries.
1 Haraway, Donna (2017): Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. p11
