Action 4
Caring with + Caring for
Designing for the non-human: Creating for non-humans with the same care and attention as when designing for humans. Identify the privilege in that. What does mutually beneficial design look like? Here my mom felt healing and joy from bringing something for birds.
Designing with moms: If we were always to design with moms what would our design output look like? There will maternal instincts of care infused in all design projects?
Materiality of relationality: what material properties allow for fostering relationships and impromptu connections. What about the materials that I foraged made it easy to make small object for care.
Consider rules of foraging: “Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them. Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life. Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer. Never take the first. Never take the last. Take only what you need. Take only that which is given. Never take more than half. Leave some for others. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm. Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken. Share. Give thanks for what you have been given. Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken. Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.”- Kimerrer
Death and Caring : Inspiration from the Japanese practice of Kintsugi that also applies here. The following is from my reflection of Daniela Rosner’s Critical Fabulation that was informed significantly from this action and the subsequent class discussion.
I loved Rosner’s thought of repair and signs of repair like Kinstugi as a prolonging of a process instead of a final step of a process when a thing is made whole again at last- the object is fixed, the work is done. The legacy of the narrative built through the breaking is prolonged within the scars of the crack. The narrative of continuity is furthered as the mark of repair opens up the possibility of further disrepair and repair, shifting the aesthetic of an artifact and with that its embodied histories ad infinitum, until the artifact disintegrates into the smallest sediments of dust and blows away.
Kintsugi then is also a mode of imbuing care into an artifact- in anthropocentric terms, a sort of surgical prolonging of life as well as a blaring recognition and acceptance of the mortality of an artifact- everything breaks- everything dies. Rosner talks about Kintsugi’s power of suggesting competing possibilities. She mentions possible relationships between beauty and breakdown, consumption and mending, overlooking and recollecting. I’ll add preservation and death to that list which is reminiscent of Tony Fry’s mention of permanence and sacrifice.
I consider Kintsugi as care, thus caring as attentiveness to preserve, to ensure survival as well as caring towards death and post death- caring for hospice, for burial, for anatomical disintegration towards nutrition for earth’s regeneration. Perhaps, the blown away sediments of dust left of an artifact become food for micro-airborne creatures?