Negotiating with the Garden
2023 - (ongoing)
[design research]
Description
Negotiating with the Garden is an ongoing project developing at my garden. The project entails making a pollinator-friendly garden and surrendering to nature, through which I acknowledge the temporality of the garden and become familiar with the local ecosystem. I explore opportunities for technological intervention where the designed object becomes a positive part of the ecosystem and gives up human mastery of nature.
The research process encompassed a few small activities that consider how different technologies could inform me of different temporal qualities of the garden.
Currently, I am focusing on a speculative ritual of “making pottery with bees” where I invite red mason bees (Osmia bicornis) who use mud to build their cavity nest. A human and bees share the same resource of mud, where the human make pottery with it, while the bees need it for their nest. A pottery wheel designed for this particular ritual serves as a mud-foraging source for the bees by stopping its rotation while bees are around. The project investigates the possibility of technology with its control distributed over more-than-human actors.
*The project was initially started as a master thesis project at Industrial Design master’s program at Eindhoven University of Technology (Supervisor: Miguel Bruns)