The Habitat : A Posthumanist Design Project for Making Kin with Nonhuman

Abstract: ‘the habitat’ is a Design+Change project which originates from the will to create positive change in the current situation of climate and ecological emergency. The design project takes the Anthropocene and the materialization of nonhumans as starting point and develops further around the possibilities of forming non-anthropocentric and nonhuman-centered mentalities and world-making processes. It aims to highly emphasize the human dependence on nonhuman existence and well-being. Therefore, the ultimate purpose of the project is to de-center humans and challenge the human exceptionalist mentality. In order to achieve that; practices of making kin with nonhumans are explored and practiced throughout the project. This Design+Change project builds its framework within the theories of posthumanism by Braidotti (2013) (2017) and Barad (2008), the vitality of matter by Bennett (2010) and gets inspiration from multispecies ethnography and design, discusses the possibilities of making kin (Haraway, 2016) with nonhumans. Building on the theoretical framework, my own lived experiences of sharing my domestic environment and my attempts to interact, and interconnect with fungi persons, strive to show interdependencies of life, the assemblages weaved in intertangled lives of humans and nonhumans and to overcome human exceptionalist mindsets and lifestyles. ‘the habitat’ seeks to also question the dichotomies of nature/culture, animate/inanimate. The discussion of the nonhuman agency has also been essential throughout the design project.  ‘the habitat’ displays a journey, an intimate autoethnographic mental expedition, rather than being a monolithic and finished product. It presents my bare attempts and generates discussions from them. At the end of the project, it wraps itself up in the form of an archive, a map, and a record of the journey for the audience to walk through.