Interview with Ron Wakkary

The concept of prosperity is often associated with economic growth and the success of a product on the market, neglecting or downplaying the impact on the environment and people according to a model that has long been considered unsustainable. What is your definition of prosperity and what do you think are the tools and approaches to develop it? I’ve not considered the term prosperity before the conference so I can’t say I have an interpretation for myself. The term I use is cohabitation, the idea of living together well. Some qualify this further with the word “thriving”, which I believe is a good addition, but the term is rich enough on its own. It takes more than compatibility or fair exchange to live together, to dwell in place among differences and similarities. It requires kinship and accepting entanglements to use posthumanist language. For me, it’s important that cohabitation is collective or at least requires others and some form of collective participation. It is also active in that to live with others requires being there together, creating shared places, and lastly it is temporal or durational–the length of time together defines in part the cohabitation. To prosper and to thrive can be seen as an individual matter, separate from place, even exclusively about the interiority of the mind or self. I don’t mean that as a critique but more as a comparison to highlight what cohabitation as a term brings. In terms of approach, I see cohabitation as the goal for designing or what I call designing-with to invoke a more-than-human context for designing. In other words, it can be a measure for the success of what and how well we design. If a thing is designed, how does it contribute to living well together throughout its life and after, well past human use (which we then call “waste”). Further, we can ask how the thing designed existed in the world but also what it took to create a thing and its effects on cohabitation. I want to be careful about methods, so we don’t view emerging techniques as fixed and immediately teachable. This is a necessary area of design research that is difficult given the fullness of the challenge to design from a decentered position and as a relational subject (as required by designing-with or posthumanist understandings of design). Nevertheless, there are compelling theoretical starting points that we have explored (along with other design researchers) such as noticing (Tsing 2015), translations (Latour 1999), landscape ethnography (Watts 2019), diffraction (Barad 2014; Haraway 1994), and learning to be affected (Lorimer 2015). The work is to move these methods from the analytical to generative considerations of design: the actions and commitments required of designers. I’ve conceptualized this as repertoires, to signal a more-than-human inflection on methods based on attunement and embodied actions. I have with others explored these in our practices in designing-with plants, pollination ecologies, textiles, networked devices, mycelium, and bioplastics . These are early explorations and as I said in the end of my keynote, I caution against rushing to instrumentalize what we know now into practice. This caution is inspired by Isabelle Stengers’ ideas of cosmopolitics (Stengers 2005) and slow science (Stengers 2018) that ask us to fully accept the challenges to know and further not to resolve differences so easily, especially in the context of neo-liberal pursuits. Rather to take the time (it will take time if done properly) and keep differences of knowing intact. The concept of ‘designing-with’ that you propose challenges the tradition of anthropocentric design. What was the main motivation that led you to develop this more relational and inclusive approach? What are the limits of traditional design and how can ‘designing-with’ overcome them? My motivation was to engage the community that I was doing much of my research in, namely human-computer interaction (HCI). On a high level, HCI is a fascinating enterprise to understand the relationship between humans and computers. Its starting points were between technical and human cognition but over time evolved to include social, philosophical, and political questions about human-technology relations. This has led to fascinating and constructive tensions in HCI between those who pursue a science of technology and generalizable models of users and those who focus on power in the relationships as a matter of race, gender, ethnicity or decoloniality, as examples. What fascinates me in these discussions of who we are putting at the center of our research or what is the appropriate technology, or which technological needs are addressed, is the relations between these questions and perspectives. How these concerns are connected, not only reveals what brings them together but what governs them or shapes them. What is “appropriate” for whom; whose “needs” are we concerned with; and which beings and matter are included in the question of “who”? In HCI, these relations are governed by human-centeredness. What is not said does not need to be said since we can readily assume we are talking about humans. Human-centered design or user-centered design is an instrumentalized or practical implementation of human exceptionalism. In design, and this instrumentalization goes well beyond HCI to include design and its many variants, the humanist notion of humans as the privileged actors in the world is how we conceive of (and educate) designers; and human concerns are privileged over others in constructs of users and consumers. In professional design or the corporate world of design, late-capitalism and consumerism merge tightly with human-centered design to form the governing force of what is design, its values, and its aims. It’s worth noting that Rosi Braidotti makes clear that despite the marketing rhetoric, corporate bodies and the global economy have long gotten over the exceptionalism of humans, flattening all life to be various sources of extraction whether human biology, labour across species, agriculture, or mining (Braidotti 2013). My earlier research was timid given all this but set the tone. It questioned the concepts of user and designer, i.e., who designs and what do we mean by use (and for whom)? I later adopted a counterfactual strategy of inverting the privilege of humans over technology inherent in most HCI and design to decenter designers and users to ask what it means to be a thing? This question cannot be answered but it revealed other approaches: how things can be designed to ask that question that points toward a decentered form of designing; and how the notion of things is “leaky” to cite Donna Haraway (Haraway 1985) or more vividly described by Nancy Tuana as having a “viscous porosity” (Tuana 2008). Whatever is designed is not discrete but becomes entangled, not in the sense of the social conditions of things, that is well researched, but in feminist and cyber-feminist realizations that reveal posthumanist and new materialist relations. I would trace these entanglements as best I could to of course find that humans are entangled with nonhuman actors and forces . This revealed to me the problematic of designing with a relational ontology, in which humans and nonhumans (myself, the things we designed, and other things, and the world) co-mingle, shaping each other into meanings and actions. And that a relational ontology made effects and meaning dynamic, changing or in a constant state of becoming to use another posthumanist term. It is from this point in my design research and writing of Things We Could Design (Wakkary 2021) the ideas of designing-with, much of what we have been discussing here, came to be articulated. Of course, there were others in my field (HCI) that were also exploring these concerns (Forlano 2017; Light, Powell, and Shklovski 2017). I don’t have the space here to discuss the limits of traditional design, but I can comment on how designing-with can inform directions. I will say that I increasingly came to see human-centered design as defuturing, to borrow Tony Fry’s term (Fry 1999), in that it was obscuring and precluding other more expansive possibilities for designing. Designing-with can be seen in this light. Designing-with can contribute to change in a variety of ways and along a continuum. At one end it asks for a radical change since the governing assumptions are very different than status quo and where our attention should be is also radically different. I tried to outline some starting concepts in Things We Could Design that we might get to in more detail later. It is in this sense aspirational but with some conceptual tools for making change. While radical change may be required, I want to be clear that this does not put all the efforts within human-centered design in opposition. For example, a common point of departure in efforts related to decoloniality, race, or gender in design and more-than-human is a critique of the modernist position of oppression, the privileging of white European male as the idealized and universalized human that determines all others to be less-than or “inhuman” as Kathryn Yusoff refers to the historically oppressed of European colonization (Yusoff 2018). This understanding of the historical and ongoing work necessary when invoking the notion of humans is part of my understanding and others in more-than-human concerns. Building on feminist thinkers and indigenous ways of knowing grounded in interdependencies, this position is expanded upon, made more generous to include other species but also seeing technologies in cyber-feminist terms and so a part of more-than-humans. The shared needs and urgencies in this relational and expansive sense are seen to be matters of concern of designing. In the end, more-than-human is inclusive of humans with all the inherent power relations and new ones as well. To move to the other end of the continuum, the most mini