“Playing with strings: conceptual material, connected design” – Jose Hopkins Brocq

Playing with concepts, when we trace lines between them, new possibilities are drawn from the spaces these lines shape. As ideas are being connected, strings become cables and lines; connectors and limits. In this sense, to play with concepts is to connect them, while creating intermediate spaces of new relational possibilities. This process of thinking and performing concepts is borrowed from Donna Haraway’s String figures, which “like stories, they propose and enact patters for participants to inhabit, somehow, on a vulnerable and wounded earth” [1].  These stories are multispecies narrations which “look for real stories that are also speculative tabulations and speculative realisms” [2]. Haraway then uses this concept to think with and expand it to more speculative fields and relations. In a play-like action, she then contracts the term string figures into the letters SF, perhaps the same way hands need to contract the string to tie new figures, to shape new shapes. These actions, the tying of string and concepts, will expand, the hands need to stretch the string and form new figures, new concepts; SF, therefore, transforms into a sign for “science fiction, speculative feminism, science fantasy, speculative fabulation, science fact, and also, string figures” [3]. Using this movement as an object and an action to think with, Haraway proposes new ways of playful and free conceptualization, of speculative thinking that is intrinsically embedded in the act of making, on connecting and materializing new shapes. This particular thinking can then be extrapolated to playful materializing, to something that can be thought as posthuman fictional design.

Furthermore, Haraway uses the frame of these new ways of thinking in order to build new relational paradigms. She builds on and with the concept of becoming-with, a series of dynamics and movements that expand the anthropometric relational becoming toward a process and relation of becoming with the non-human and a more-than-human. The flesh becomes multi-technical, multi-special, the self is understood as an ecology, a landscape. Therefore, these new relations are not necessarily talking about collaborations but about how “specific crossings form familiar worlds into uncomfortable and unfamiliar ones to weave something that might come unraveled”[4]. These reframed processes of thinking and making are also processes of materializing, of designing.

From this perspective, the action and processes of designing become the interrelation of more than human agents and it can, therefore, be understood within the posthuman which “does not involve the ‘death of the self’, nor the death of the liberal humanist subject, but the re-conception of the self as ‘unfinished’” [5]. In other words, the posthuman design is a process of thinking and materialization which is mobile and incomplete; in constant relational reconfiguration. Design becomes more than the re-materialization and configuration of matter but the framing of relational relations between matter in constant re-materialization. So, by extrapolating Haraway’s speculative, fictional and playful approach of the becoming-with to design processes, we can then start thinking of a re-materialization and re-organization of the material in new, incomplete-like with speculative agency. The space between the strings, between concepts, is no longer a space of binary relations and exclusive constructions, but a space of cooperative becomings where its processes of construction are chimeric and relational. So, when playing with designs, when we draw lines between possibilities, new possibilities emerge, not from the binary paradigm of functional – non-functional, reality-fiction, but from an interplay and relation of its parts.

References

• Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2016.
• Klitch, Rosemary. “The unfinished subject. Pedagogy and performance in the company of copies, robots, mutants and cyborgs”.” International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media, 2012: 155-170.
• Willis, Anne-Marie. “Ontological Designing – laying the ground.” In Design philosophy papers. Collection three, by Anne-Marie Willis, 80-98. London: Ravensbourne, 2007.