User account

Martín Ávila: Ecologizing Design
Ecologizing Design
(p. 228 – 240)

Martín Ávila

Ecologizing Design

PDF, 13 pages

  • art theory
  • ecology
  • contemporary art
  • global ecology

My language
English

Selected content
English

Martín Ávila

is Professor of Design at the Department of Design, Interior Architecture and Visual Communication at Konstfack in Stockholm where he has taught previously as a senior lecturer. The designer and design researcher obtained a PhD in design from HDK (School of Design and Crafts) in Gothenburg, Sweden, and his thesis Devices. On Hospitality, Hostility and Design published in 2012 was awarded the prize for design research by The Swedish Faculty for Design Research and Research Education in the same year. Therein he investigates the complex reciprocal relations between human and non-human actors as well as artificial devices and designs interventions within these networks, going beyond conventional user-centred approaches and cultivating ecologies as a design strategy. More recently he has continued this approach in his postdoctoral project Symbiotic tactics (2013–2016), which has been the first of its kind to be financed by the Swedish Research Council. www.martinavila.com
Other texts by Martín Ávila for DIAPHANES
Marietta Kesting (ed.), Maria Muhle (ed.), ...: Hybrid Ecologies

The notion of ecology not only figures centrally in current debates around climate change, but also traverses contemporary discourses in the arts, the humanities, and the social and techno sciences. In its present reformulation it refers to the multi-layered and multi-dimensional nexus of reciprocities between living processes, technological and media practices, i.e. to the complex relations of human and nonhuman agents. The book Hybrid Ecologies understands ecology as an ambivalent notion, whose multivalence opens up new fields of action and yet, thanks precisely to this openness and vast applicability, at the same time raises questions not least concerning its genealogy. The interdisciplinary contributions seek to explore the political and social effects that a rethinking of community in ecological and thus also in biopolitical terms may provoke, and which consequences the contemporary notion of ecology might entail for artistic and design practices in particular. The present publication is the result of the fifth annual program of the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies, which was conceived in cooperation with the Chair of Philosophy | Aesthetic Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

Content