DeepSummary
The transcript begins with Marshall Poe introducing the New Books Network and its improved website with features like an enhanced search engine and listener accounts for saving episodes. Bryan Topher then welcomes Simone Ferracina to discuss his book 'Ecologies of Inception: Design Potentials on a Warming Planet'.
Ferracina explains the concept of 'ecologies of inception', which examines how objects relate to and enable each other's potentials within constellations or environments. He discusses how this challenges the prevailing 'technical tabula rasa' approach of starting design from scratch with raw materials. Instead, he argues for recognizing the embodied histories, labors, and environmental impacts in existing materials.
Ferracina highlights the need to decouple design from extractive and exploitative practices, advocating for reuse, care, and maintenance across generations. He touches on ideas like understanding materials as 'fragments of other landscapes' and foregrounding the often unseen damages of recycling processes. Ferracina concludes by mentioning his future research into 'ecologies of suspension' and a project documenting a self-sufficient farming culture.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- Ferracina critiques the prevalent 'technical tabula rasa' approach in design of starting from raw materials, arguing instead for recognizing the relational potentials in existing objects and materials.
- He introduces the concept of 'ecologies of inception' to frame how objects enable each other's potentials within constellations or environments.
- Ferracina advocates recognizing the embodied histories, labor and environmental damages present in materials and designing practices of reuse, care and maintenance across generations.
- He challenges assumptions that materials are blank slates to impose form upon, instead viewing them as 'fragments of other landscapes' to negotiate with respectfully.
- Ferracina argues for transitioning away from extractive, wasteful design practices towards models of environmental stewardship in light of climate crisis.
- His future work explores ideas like 'ecologies of suspension' between use cycles and documenting self-sufficient communities' sustainable practices.
- The book aims to unpack assumptions underlying concepts like recycling to show how they perpetuate unsustainable mindsets of disregarding embodied harms.
- Ferracina emphasizes recognizing design's violence in setting inclusion/exclusion boundaries and making hierarchies of use/disuse.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “How do we radically transform design practices so that they become forms of environmental stewardship and care, as opposed to drivers of planet destroying activities?“ by Simone Ferracina
- “Why do materials mostly come into the picture as a way to translate or embody a design that's already there, that precedes them? Why do we assume that form is imparted by a designer onto a formless substrate, as opposed to negotiated with that which already exists in has form or passed down from one generation to the next?“ by Simone Ferracina
- “I use, what would you mention this kind of archaeological understanding of materials, particularly through the work of Kilmore and Jane Hutton, really to start thinking of materials as something, and J. Hutton calls them beautifully, and I can never say better, fragments of other landscapes.“ by Simone Ferracina
- “It's really understanding the beginning to understanding materials as something that doesn't just show up on our doorstep and it doesn't matter where it comes from, but often comes from afar, often causes incredible environmental damage, often causing social damage associated with that.“ by Simone Ferracina
- “So it is very hard to put a price on these things, particularly when we have a really decreasing carbon budget, and we should try to hold on as much as possible to what we have.“ by Simone Ferracina
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Episode Information
New Books in Environmental Studies
Marshall Poe
7/8/23