"The Words We Do Not Yet Have." A Creative Inquiry Into Human-Plant Relationships

Authors

Maliheh Ghajargar, Chapman UniversityFollow

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

10-8-2024

Abstract

Climate change, loss of plant biodiversity, and ocean pollution signal the drastic changes in our ecology that call us to attend to the needs of more than human forms of life on Earth. Sustainable design and HCI research are responding to this call by offering methods and approaches to design more sustainable products and systems and recently, more than human design is building momentum. This agenda seeks to reform traditional design processes by decentering the creative agency of the dominant socio-economical group of humans and foregrounding those of diverse Others. In this paper, I focus on plants as a nonhuman form of life. Through synthesizing multiple research methods, such as fieldwork in nature, autoethnographic writings, drawing, "outpainting" with Generative AI (genAI), visual and thematic analysis, I propose a more than human creative process. In pursuit of that purpose, I use the notion of "transcorporeality," developed by feminist Stacy Alaimo [2], as a lens to develop designers’ capacities to attend to the material configuration of human and nonhuman bodies. Decentering the designer’s creativity is an aspirational goal, which for various reasons is quite difficult to achieve fully, but the approach undertaken in this project, at a minimum, complicates the experience of human-centered design creativity. It does so by increasing perceptiveness and insight within what Alaimo refers to as "the literal contact zones" between human and nonhuman corporeality; leveraging that heightened capacity to synthesize the practices of traditional nature writing and autoethnographic writing to reveal and engage the enmeshment of the self in/as nature; and finally leveraging discursive text and my drawings as prompts for genAI’s outpainting technique, to experience how it extends, disrupts and reworks what I have done, revealing not only its own biases, but also many of my own.

Comments

This article was originally published in Mindtrek '24: Proceedings of the 27th International Academic Mindtrek Conference in 2024. https://doi.org/10.1145/3681716.3681729

Recommended Citation

Maliheh Ghajargar. 2024. "The Words We Do Not Yet Have." A Creative Inquiry Into Human-Plant Relationships. In Mindtrek '24: Proceedings of the 27th International Academic Mindtrek Conference. Association for Computing Machinery, Tampere, Finland. https://doi.org/10.1145/3681716.3681729

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Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.