Team: Vanessa Van/ Luchen Peng/ Qendresa Selimi/ Vanessa Van/ Zhaolu Song
Brief: Design a digital & physical object that prehends its surroundings.
Time: 01.02.2021- 05.02.2021
This week we had Tyler Fox as our collaborative guest lecturer to discuss design based on Object-Oriented Ontology.
Object-Oriented Ontology and Prehension
OOO (Object-Oriented Ontology) is a philosophical concept about the being of an object without the privilege of human subjectivity. Based on OOO, Tyler introduced us the term “prehension”, a concept from Alfred North Whitehead in the 20th century, which indicates a kind of prehension that can be perceived consciously or unconsciously by actual entities.
But what does OOO have to do with design? I found Yoko Ono, a conceptual artist involving collaboration and her exhibition THE RIVERBED. She put river stones carved with words like dream, remember and wish in the gallery. By holding stones on their laps, the audiences may concentrate on the words, let their negative feelings go, infuse emotions into the stones and then place them back. Not only the exhibition but also the stones will evolve over time by prehension.
Stone Piece (Galerie Lelong, 2015).
It reminded me of an ancient Chinese philosophy term “wanwulingtong”, which means the souls of all things can feel and connect with each other. They are both related to Animism, but the processing philosophy of Whitehead is more based on modern science while the eastern philosophy of the universe includes more imagination.
So, I thought about what if objects have a similar thinking process as humans, how they will respond to the world? Though it needs to be pointed that “prehending” isn’t “perceiving” that describes becoming aware or conscious of (something) of human’s brain activities.
The unequal relationship
Thinking about the most commonly used objects in daily life, our group focused on the calendar. What a calendar can prehend? Firstly, we did artefact analysis about the traditional printed calendars and digital calendars and to figure out their different features. We found the traditional printed calendar which is involved in the physical environment may contain more design opportunities.
Inspired by last week’s larping, we acted as a traditional printed calendar to prehend surroundings from its perspective. From larping, we realized that there is an unequal relationship between humans and the calendar which is just being treated as a tool.
“When I am acting as a digital calendar, I feel like I’m listening to the order from my owner” – Vanessa.
Calendar larping process. Participants: Vanessa and Luchen.
So, how to make the calendars deinstrumental and reshape the relationship between calendars and humans? The next blog will discuss our design process and my reflection on prehension and OOO.
References
Lindley, J., Akmal, H., Coulton, P. (2020) ‘Design Research and Object-Oriented Ontology’, Open Philosophy, 3(1), pp.11-41. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2020-0002.
Ono, Y. (2015) THE RIVERBED. Available at: https://www.galerielelong.com/exhibitions/yoko-ono (Accessed: 02 February 2021).
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