Erik Sandelin 80% Seminar

Design and Grace
This dissertation 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. In a world where human activities often violently constrict the lives of others, how can designers creatively cultivate, seemingly negative, acts of withdrawal, disentanglement and leaving be?

Through design experiments that recompose situations where humans consume other animals (eating, angling and shopping) I critically interrogate key notions of more-than-human design: entanglement, proximity, hybridity and care. The work 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 for carefully crafting vital, effective and beautiful nos and nots.

Discussant: Pelle Ehn, professor emeritus at the School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University.

Also present are supervisors Martín Ávila, professor of design at Konstfack, and Helena Pedersen, senior lecturer at Gothenburg University.