Betti Marenko

Our relationship with objects is far less clear-cut than a rational materialism predicated upon a subject/object distinction would have us believe. On the contrary, it is a messy and unpredictable one, electrified by emotional investments, often anxiety-ridden, never innocent or neutral, and always implicated in powerful identity-forming practices. This essay examines instances of contemporary animism in our relationship with object-relics by mapping the symbolic and affective investments these objects are charged with. The hypothesis is that their borderline ontological status defies simple categorization and that it might be better examined through the lens of a neo-animist paradigm able to express the complex, relational and negotiated engagement between us and the material world. The belief in the thaumaturgical power of object-relics is a persistent if irrational cultural topos that, precisely because it operates transversally and adheres to a wide array of commodities, can be the entry point for an investigation into how the meaning of things around us is generated and produces tangible effects in the making (and unmaking) of subjectivities. It is my intention to question the distinction between animate and inanimate objects, to privilege instead their opaque and enigmatic status, and the way in which they act as clusters of excess of meaning, as strange attractors of a surplus of significance quintessentially irreducible

The subtitle to this ‘Introduction’ might well be How to catalyse an encounter between philosophy and design, as one of the main drivers of this project has been how to bring to the fore possible connections between the two practices that this book interrogates: Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, as the practice of creating concepts, and design, as the practice of materialising possibilities. Deleuze’s work offers a way of thinking about the encounter between philosophy and design, as they are both concerned with expressing the creation of the not yet in impactful ways. Furthermore, for Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy?, a creative philosophy is pitched as dealing in use, profit, interest, value and success, and certainly not truth. ‘We will not say of so many books of philosophy that they are false’, they write, ‘for that is to say nothing, but rather that they lack importance or interest, precisely because they do not create any concept’. This language brings us close to that used in design, especially when its creative influence is articulated in terms of innovation. An interesting, important, successful philosophy deals not in truth or falsity, but in engaging with different creative activities in many different registers having multiple layers of affect. This should declare our editorial intentions by providing the overall intellectual framework to which this book intends to abide: that if there is a way of designing that both affects and is affected by Deleuze’s philosophy, it will be found at the intersection of said practices.

My paper intends to investigate ideas of radical design as manifestation of possible virtual future(s) by drawing on Deleuze’s philosophy. The notion of speculative design is amply articulated in the work of current practitioners and theorists and it will be addressed by using Deleuze’s ideas on virtuality and becoming as main theoretical backdrop, as well as articulated through pertinent case studies. Moreover, another aspect of Deleuze’s oeuvre will be addressed: the centrality of affects in the constitution of subjectivity, which is increasingly relevant to contemporary critical theory (see also Patricia Clough’s notion of ‘affective turn’). This is explored in order to address its relevance for an object-based notion of future. Drawing from a Spinozist notion of affect, “the trace of one body upon another”, I intend to examine the affects emerging, and circulating, in the triangulation of future-ing, subjectivities and the materialiaty of designed objects. Hence, this paper looks at the network and circulation of affects engaged in, and emerging from, a practice of future-designing that is potentially liberating as well as constitutive of new forms of subjectivities. Can speculative design be seen as a material interrogation into, and embodiment of, a Deleuzian-inspired ontology of becoming? Where can evidence of this be found in the work of current practioners? Can design play this role?

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.