Designing

towards the unknown: engaging with material and aesthetic uncertainty

Danielle Wilde, Jenny Underwood

Keywords : craft, embodied design, new materials, new aesthetics, disability

ABSTRACT :
New materials with new capabilities demand new ways of approaching design. The Poetic Kinaesthetic
Interface project (PKI) engages with this problematic directly. In PKI we are designing towards
unknown outcomes, using unknown materials. The impossibility and uncertainty of this aim is proving
as useful as it is disruptive. At its most potent, it is destabilising expectations, aesthetics and processes;
keeping us design researchers, our collaborators and, where relevant, participants, in a state of
unknowing that is opening up the research potential to far-ranging possibilities.

In this article we unpack our shifting landscape of disruption in terms of the evolution of our project.
Phase I of PKI was driven by two guiding research questions. The first is socially and politically potent:
“How might design be leveraged to give someone the feeling of being in somebody else’s body,
someone with perhaps very different physical abilities and constraints?”; The second, practice-
oriented: “How can the breadth of experiences that advanced materials might eventually afford be
understood and mindfully leveraged?”. These questions are explored in parallel in, with and through a
participatory, embodied design process that crafts our inquiry in the form of graspable, wearable and
otherwise embody-able artefacts at varying aesthetic and conceptual resolutions.

Our objectives with PKI are trifold: (1) To develop new aesthetics of embodied interactions that
challenge notions around terms such as: ability, disability, body typical and normative or normal; (2)
To expand the ways that we, as design researchers, engage with technological and material potential;
and (3) To investigate ways that emergent, embodied design research might enable productive cross-
fertilisation of civic imaginaries and advanced materials research. Partners come from scientific and
design backgrounds, as well as performance and disability. Participants come from diverse publics at
cultural and community events, specialist fora and pop-up happenings.

In PKI our making leans heavily on textile crafts, interaction and participatory design, using the social
familiarity of crafts to enable us to reach a broad audience. Making-as-thinking and participant
engagement – at early stages of development – are crucial disruptors for our design processes. It is
unclear, for example, to what resolution our artefacts ultimately need to be developed for us to arrive
at some kind of material and aesthetic certainty. Or if, indeed, certainty is even required. What is clear
is that constantly destabilising our beliefs and habits as designer–researchers is proving as fruitful as
it is challenging.

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