Significance
Why Is It Important to Think about Place and Senses?
Earth is in the midst of an acute crisis, defined by mass extinctions, climate change, biodiversity loss, migration, homogenisation, and urbanisation.
Human oppression of non-human lifeforms is endemic. To sustain growth, exploitation occurs en masse with complete disregard for non-human lives, needs, capabilities, and cultures.
- Potential of place to re-orient values and actions towards climate justice and ecocentrism
Understanding places must involve knowledge of the subjectivities of multiple agents: interspecies relationships, traditions, cultures, and communities. These are often hidden, counter-intuitive, and subject to human biases for organisms and environments with recognisable physical features, behaviours, societies, needs, and lifespans.
- It is useful to slow down and pay close attention or study scientifically but this is not enough
- It is also necessary to structure the environment to give the oppressed political powers that correspond and express their capabilities, based on human understanding and their own actions/resistance
Understanding Multispecies Places
Language is a barrier to interspecies communication. Knowledge of non-human subjectivities, capabilities, and needs support informed design decisions, but exists across multiple disciplines. Technical language and disciplinary blindness limit accessibility to non-experts. Uniting information facilitates exploration, identification of commonalities, and synthesis.
Because knowledge is incomplete, unrelated, or incompatible, these links must be porous and indiscriminate towards discipline.
Designing for Places
Place-sensitive design requires consideration of multi-species capabilities.
Towards a Framework for Multispecies Places
Backlinks