As part of design’s transformation towards sustainable practices, growing interest has been directed towards the inclusion of more-than- human perspectives. This workshop seeks to engage questions of giving voice to our microbiomes—the plethora of critters who co- constitute us as embodied and social beings but are most often invisible in both human experience and design practices. The aim is to experiment with collective and experiential ways of making tangibly present the microorganisms that live around on and within us and make us hosts of living assemblages, or what biologists refer to as holobionts. Beginning from past individual experiences, workshop participants are invited to collectively materialise, narrate, and perform more-than-human knowledge in the present. From these perspectives, we engage microbial-human interdependence, making it conceptually and methodically relatable by means of experimental design inquiry before re-narrating the collective experiences as microbial design futures.
conference workshop