Erik Sandelin 90% Doctoral Seminar – Design and Grace

Discussant: Patricia MacCormack, Anglia Ruskin University

Supervisors: Martín Ávila (Konstfack) and Helena Pedersen (Gothenburg University)

In a world where human activities often violently constrict the lives of others, how can designers creatively cultivate, seemingly negative, acts of withdrawal, foreclosure and leaving be? This dissertation employs and develops the concept of grace, actively not doing what you are able to do, to decouple action from force and passivity from resignation in design.

Design and Grace operates in the nexus of two emerging design landscapes: design and animals, and design and negation. It moves through four design experiments that recompose everyday situations where humans consume other animals: eating, angling and shopping. Manifested as placebos, pauses, poisons and pacts, these prototypes populate a palette of affirmative nos and nots in design. By working towards more supple human-animal relations, the experiments critically interrogate and enrich key notions of contemporary more-than-human design: entanglement, proximity, hybridity and care. I argue that designers need to develop careful disentanglements, hesitations, incompatibilities and self-bindings, to be able to oscillate between standing with the other in solidarity, and graciously leaving be.

Design and Grace tends to a friction at the core of design, that between proposing and imposing. It seeks to provide designers and design researchers with confidence, precision and generative exemplars in envisioning and manifesting vital, effective and beautiful nos and nots.

Please email erik.sandelin@konstfack.se to get access to the 90% manuscript.

Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. She is the author of Cinesexuality (Routledge 2008) and Posthuman Ethics (Routledge 2012) and the editor of The Animal Catalyst (Bloomsbury 2014), Deleuze and the Animal (EUP 2017), Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema (Continuum 2008) and Ecosophical Aesthetics (Bloomsbury 2018). Her newest book is The Ahuman Manifesto: Activisms for the End of the Anthropocene. She recently completed a Leverhulme Fellow researching and developing Death Activism and completing the monograph Death Activism for Bloomsbury. She is also the author of numerous journal articles and anthology chapters.

Erik Sandelin is a PhD candidate in Art, Technology and Design at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Erik is currently exploring gracious human withdrawals through meat-allergy, hypnosis, recreational fishing and Odysseus pacts in the supermarket. He is a co-founder of Malmö-based interaction design studio Unsworn.