Weathering with Storms and Grounds as a More-than-Human Design Practice: Encountering Winds, Soils and Rocks

Abstract

This chapter brings into dialogue two design practices that pay attention to more-than-human phenomena related to storms and grounds in urban environments, including uncontrollable wind occurrences and the irreversible depletion and degradation of soils and rocks. We explore the idea of weathering with, using design as a form of enquiry to meet with winds, soils and rocks. As we weather with these phenomena, we critically engage with a type of more-than-human design practice that can 1) work with temporalities and scales differing from those of humans, 2) shed light on the situated, embodied, and political aspects of the acceleration of changes in weather patterns and the extraction of soils and the blasting of bedrocks, and 3) explore ways to challenge established narratives and worldviews by leaning into post-anthropocentric worlds. We discuss designerly interventions including a meeting with a weather monument, a walk on a soon-to-be-blasted bedrock, the writing of gut feelings in response to ground extraction, and a participative more-than-human karaoke. These explorative design practices of weathering with anthropo-influenced storm and ground phenomena emerge from a critical field of design research, not as practices to solve the complexity of such phenomena, but as ways to enquire about human’s smallnesses and weaknesses in the face of the current polycrises.