Bring it To The Table

Abstract: The thesis is intending to answer the question: Do tools and objects have the ability to support capacities for imagining alternative ways of living the present and through that also the future? How do we imagine our future? What is necessary for us and how do we want to live our everyday? It is important to rest for a moment and have a conversation about this questions in order to adapt old concepts of the world towards drastically changing conditions. Most of us, mainly in the modern western society, know that we can no longer maintain this lifestyle in the future. We know that we have to react as soon as possible and find alternative ways of living together. Yet it seems that we are paralysed to initiate action towards new ways of thinking. Where does this inactivity come from? It is hard to find new ways of thinking, especially when conventional norms, rules and structures of the current system do not provide any room for new forms of development. Is it possible that we are trapped in this system and the web of stories that hold it together? Is it possible that we are so used to the structures of the everyday, that we see them as set truths and do not question them anymore? The work investigates where these conditions come from and how non-human stakeholders in form of our everyday objects impact human culture and core beliefs. Through designing a disobedient tool that supports the capacity for alternative thinking towards more playful, imaginative presents and futures I want to try to questioning established systems embedded in our everyday tools, tools which embody our relations to each other and to the living and non-living inhabitants of our surroundings.