Telesthetic Prehension (1/2)

Brief: Design a digital & physical object that prehends its surroundings.

Teammates: David Han, Eda Erdal, Sylvester Liu

More Than Human Centred Design

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence, being and reality. Bogost (2012) explains that Object-Oriented Ontology puts things at the center of study, it indicates that everything exists equally. In Design Research, Lindley et al. (2020) suggest that OOO helps drive the ideation process and can be used in a generative mode, it is committed to moving to a more expansive' More Than Human' Centred Design approach. With doubts and confusion about this theory, we started the "telesthetic prehension" project with Dr Tyler Fox from the University of Washington.

Telesthetic Prehension

Introduced by Tyler, Prehension means a non cognitive grasp of experience, every object in the world is experiencing. From my understanding, telesthetic prehension means objects sensing the environment though remote media, and how can we externalize these reactions.

Our group started research with exploring 4 different types of entities( balloon, plant, printer, sun) through Artefact Analysis( Figure 1). In time, we chose the plant as our project target with the most possibilities for inquiry.

Figure 1: Artefact Analysis, Created by team

I was considering how actants and their multiple perspectives are mapped into a constellation relating to a plant( Figure 2).

Figure 2: the diagram shows a possible constellation map of plant, from the perspective itself, plants are affected by natural environmental variations, from the perspective of human, plants are interpreted by humans as commodities, either given meaning, grafted or migrated.

Ruthless Commercialization of Plant

David and Sylvester ’interviewed‘ plants in different scenarios e.g.in parks, on roads, by rivers and even in supermarkets. They both pointed out that it was a tricky task to attempt to understand how plants sense their environments whilst unconsciously adding human consciousness on them.

A fake interview with plants—photographed by David and Sylvester, edited by Eda and Svaney.

In the name of protecting the environment or boosting the cultural significance, the Plantation was built for the Anthropocene (Haraway, 2016) . Humans have either migrated or grafted plants, changing their growing conditions. Subsequently, plants were given further "profound" meaning, and were used as commodities. A rose carrying the symbol of love was dyed blue and sprinkled with glitter, from whence its value went from 2 pounds in the plantation to 10 pounds selling to an elegant gentleman.

An Arduino Spring Onion

During this process, humans may have protected the plants, or harmed them, of which we do not know. Whereas how would plants react to these behaviours? Our first prototype -Arduino Spring Onion showed an experiment to uncover this "passive apprehension".

Figure 3: Sketch storyboard by Svaney

Figure 4: Arduino design by Sylvester

This first prototype would demonstrate the different states of a spring onion when a person approaches or cuts it by flashing an LED, or displaying text on the screen.

In the modeling procedure, due to my limited knowledge of coding, I invited one of my friends Cheese, who majored in MA Creative Computing in CCI, to help us to achieve our goals in the most efficient way.