HANNAH SECKENDORF

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Research | Strategy | Design | Navigating the design challenges of emerging mediums and emergent ideas.



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James Bridle
“What would it mean to build artificial intelligences and other machines that were more like octopuses, more like fungi, or more like forests? What would it mean — to us and for us — to live among them? And how would doing so bring us closer to the natural world, to the earthy which our technology has sundered, and sundered us from? … Such an undertaking is both urgent and fascinating. If we are to address the wholesale despoliation of the planet, and our growing helplessness in the face of vast computational power, then we must find ways to reconcile our technological prowess and sense of human uniqueness with an earthy sensibility and an attentiveness to the interconnectedness of all things. We must learn to live with the world, rather than seek to dominate it. In short, we must discover an ecology of technology.”

“Technology is the last field of study to discover its ecology. Ecology is the study of the place we find ourselves in, and the relationships between its inhabitants, while technology is the study of what we do there: techne, or craft. Putting it this way makes them sound like natural bedfellows, but the history of technology is largely one of willful blindness to the context and consequences of its enactment.”

“This is the grammar of animacy. Imagine seeing your grandmother standing at the stove in her apron and then saying of her, "Look, it is making soup. It has gray hair." We might snicker at such a mistake, but we also recoil from it. In English, we never refer to a member of our family, or indeed to any person, as it. That would be a profound act of disrespect. It robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reducing a person to a mere thing. So it is that in Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family.”

“The nature of life is not constancy, but change. The driver of change, at the level of the individual and and at the level of evolution, is the encounter with the other. Contrary to Darwinian notions of hierarchical descent, which posited mutation in individual branches as the driving force behind evolution, symbiosis assets that change and novelty come from without. We are who we are because of everything else.”

“… the most creative and profound solutions to the most serious, knotty, systemic problems that we face can only be addressed through the application of radical cognitive diversity: the entrainment of the widest possible range of embodied viewpoints and experiences that we can muster. We must also recognize that cognitive diversity extends beyond the human, that it inheres in the intelligence of non-human animals, the organization and agency of forests, fields and fungi, the vibrant efflorescence of slime moulds, gut bacteria, and even viruses.“ Themes
Interspecies Thinking, The More-than-human World, Designing with Nature, Nature as Client, Rewilding
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