Industrial Design

This module was a collaboration between students from the MA programmes Industrial Design and Interaction Design.

Our reference point for this project was the S-bend pipe, invented in 1775 by Alexander Cummings. The S-trap was instrumental in separating humans from their bodily waste.
Ecological theorist Timothy Morton writes:
For some time we may have thought that the U-bend in the toilet was a convenient curvature of ontological space that took whatever we flush down it into a totally different dimension called Away, leaving things clean over here. Now we know better: instead of the mythical land AWAY, we know the waste goes to the Pacific Ocean or the wastewater treatment facility... There is no Away on this surface, no here and no there.
Hyperobjects, University of Minnesota Press, 2013

In this project we attempt to “straighten” the S-bend and to confront our waste, to integrate the here and the there. In doing so we interrogate the future of this archaic device and analyse the reasons it has remained largely unchanged in over a century. Why do India's deprived communities still defecate outdoors? Why do we insist on infantilising our bathroom products? Is promoting the genderless public toilet an sufficient outcome? And when did the nappy become such a contentious object?

Beyond Human-Centred Design

A human-centred design approach fails to look beyond the immediate human “user”, towards other-than-human participants such as microbes, bacteria, plants, animals, ecologies, AI’s etc. that might be affected by a product or service especially in times of impending climate catastrophe. For example, to find solutions that benefit an entire ecosystem like a forest and not just foresters, it is questionable whether a human-centred approach can ever lead to solutions that are relevant on a planetary scale. Human-centred design, used to gain an economic advantage, all too often seeks easy solutions that satisfy users within dys/functional systems in a world of finite resources.

Design plays an important role in servicing these systems and therefore becomes part of the problem. Once you move beyond human-centred perspectives a whole range of under explored possibilities for new forms of engagement become possible. Emergent fields like Convivial Design, Pluriversal Design or Sympoietic Design might play a role in developing approaches that focus on metabolism and processes instead of objects and services – a closely intertwined network between humans and other-than-human entities.

In this project, the students explored how designing for other than human-to-human worlds can be used to explore new forms of cohabitation and interaction. The goal was to expand on the paradigm of human-centred design and present alternative and engaging design visions, environments, objects and services around the focus point of the ecological relationship that form around faeces.

Lecturers:
Lukas Franciszkiewicz
Rasa Weber