Bio/Matter/Techno/Synthetics

Design Futures for the More than Human
Franca Trubiano, Susan Kolber, Marta Llor, Maria Jose Fuentes, Amber Farrow

B/M/T/S articulates future ready visions for a field that is increasingly called upon to participate in ever more complex aesthetic, ethical, environmental and socio-political contexts by redefining the very origins, principles, and values of design. Despite the propensity of contemporary discourse to favor the search for a hegemonic theory, this collaborative project convenes the work of twenty-eight women, all of whom interrogate the origins, methods, and tactics of their respective disciplines.

Collectively, B/M/T/S challenges the common place nature of ideas founded in parametricism, object-oriented ontology, parafictional realism, post-digital representations, and corporate functionalism. In exchange, it seeks the confluence of critical, aesthetic, and ethical thought in future speculations on the biological, the material, the technological, and their synthesis. The twenty-three papers and five editorials collected in this volume speak to subjects of bio-design, speculative biology, green walls and pavers, design by decay, soilless soil, sentient materials, photogrammetrees, robotics, nanotechnology, thermal architecture and alliesthesia, digital weaving, chemical droplets, and even Frankenstein.

Individually and collaboratively, the essays in B/M/T/S question well-established disciplinary methods in favor of new ways for actualizing previously marginalized ideas, values, and practices. Committed to an ethics of synthesis, B/M/T/S explores the limits and potential of designing with multiplicity, metamorphosis, and hybridization. The book’s authors demonstrate a variety of reconciliatory practices for cross-pollinating ideas, materials, and technologies in their drive to design a future world that is always more than human, materially constituted, artificially charged, and synthetically embedded.