Elastic design. Tools for alternative understandings

Abstract

Imagine stretching an elastic measurement tape. Unexpectedly, a space for speculative thoughts is genuinely expanding your mind. This practice-based project in speculative design explores possibilities for disrupting everyday constructs of reality, which are apparent in regulations of time, space and matter. These constructs underpin notions of predictability and universal validity. Hybridity and complexity challenge these concepts associated with scientific objectivity, instrumental rationality, and economic efficiency. Both notions are prevalent tropes in art and design practice, pointing out the discrepancy between the rigid order of classical science versus unruly reality. This ideological tension is constructively deployed in eight experimental projects that are located in the field of metrology, the science of measurement. By manipulating measuring devices, industrial standards and protocol compliance attention is drawn to alternative ways of engaging with the world. The practice-based component is a toolkit that consists of reconfigured measuring devices called Tools for Alternative Understandings, which use elasticity as a material and conceptual agent to provoke unconventional models of thought. With the intention to reconfigure established modes of knowledge production the toolkit provokes a shift towards material and performative modes of knowing beyond the representation a list thinking within modern Western culture. Such experimentation may trigger a change for more creative and viable futures fostering flexible approaches for meaning making. The practice is framed as an experimental laboratory that interrogates the regulations determined by current systems of measurement and representation. The experiments are guided by a theoretical framework that builds on material-semiotic approaches emphasizing the entanglement between human and non-human agencies as co-productive constituents in the construction of reality. Such ideas are inherent in the work of Karen Barad, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour. In drawing on Barad s reconceptualisation of measurement through the indeterminacy found in quantum physics, elasticity is presented as the fundamental component of the project. The application of Elastic Design is discussed using three foci the unlocking, redirecting and material re-entangling of rational procedures, and ideological concepts to cultivate alternative experiences of reality. Additional strategies associated with new materialism, science and technology studies, conceptual art and speculative design figure as supplements to my research methodology.