Betti Marenko

This article puts forward the notion of animistic design as an uncertainty-driven strategy to reimagine human–machine interaction as a milieu of human and nonhuman. Animistic design is suggested as capable of fostering affects, sensibilities and thoughts that capitalize on the uncertain, the unpredictable and the nonlinear, and their capacity to trigger creative pathways. Informed by post-human philosophies, theories of mediation and materiality, as well as by affect, agency and aesthesia, animistic design eschews the anthropomorphic and the cute playfulness often associated with animism. Instead, it proposes a practical–theoretical framework to articulate the nexus of digital innovation, interaction design practices, technical materialities and affective responses already emerging in the digital cohabitation of the human and the nonhuman. Using a ‘research through making’ approach, the article describes in detail a series of animistic design experiments and prototyping methods that explore ways of rethinking interaction as an open-ended and creative enterprise. Animistic design offers an investigative strategy that exploits degrees of collaboratively curated uncertainty and unpredictability to imagine forms of digital interaction, and to engender creative human–nonhuman relationships within a given digital milieu.

This article argues that our apprehension of the world is increasingly colored by animistic connotations. Traces of animism – the idea that objects and other nonhuman entities possess a soul, life force, and qualities of personhood – are evident in the way we talk to our computers, cars, and smartphones, and in our expectations that they will reply more or less instantaneously. As the Internet of Things becomes more mainstream, the fact that our phone communicates with our thermostat, car, washing machine, or bathroom scale is no longer a future scenario; it is increasingly a shared reality. Our way of experiencing everyday objects is changing to accommodate their shifting nature, purpose, and agency.

This paper addresses the visual discourse of psychopharmaceuticals, such as Prozac, in order to investigate the network of relationships of affects, advertising, design and the production of new identity practices. As psychopharmaceuticals enter the public sphere through television and print advertisements, as well as first person narratives increasingly promoted in the media, the cultural discourse surrounding their use and the identity of the users are also changing. Drawing from a Spinozist notion of affect, ‘the trace of one body upon another’, as well as from a semiotic analysis of advertisements, I intend to examine the identity practices and the type of embodiment emerging in, and envisioned by, the increasingly normalised object ‘psychopharmaceutical’. The centrality of affects in the constitution of subjectivity is increasingly relevant to contemporary critical theory (see the notion of ‘affective turn’, Clough). Addressing the network of affective investments we exchange with objects is crucial for an understanding of how embodied subjectivities mutate accordingly to the objects they interact with. Against the theoretical backdrop provided by what Nikolas Rose calls the ‘pharmaceutical biopolitics of the neurochemical self’, the analysis of packaging, colour, visual and textual language of their advertising suggests how new scripts of selfhood are inscribed in the relationship between users and psychopharmaceuticals. The ensuing dialogue among chemistry, affects and design creates narratives of the self as a myth-making operation in which psychopharmaceuticals perform as objects imbued with magic properties