Speculative

The chapter chronicles and reflects on the processes and the meanings behind GeoMerce, a speculative design project that revolves around the notion of phytomining. The work examines the design of Geomerce’s network of professionals, ranging from biologists, technologists, financial advisors, and how that enabled an exchange of voices and expertise.

Objects Agents is a 16-week speculative and interaction design course. Students design electronic objects that behave unpredictably when interacting with others (humans and otherwise), becoming ‘objects with sociology’. The course involves researching components, imagining speculative networks, hands-on prototyping and interaction design principles.

Degaussed North reimagines the concept of navigation in hyper-connected environments. Rather than guiding users to familiar destinations, it acts as a digital compass that leads them to areas with minimal interference, encouraging exploration of untouched, quiet spaces, the desire for solitude and escape from connectivity.

The paper explores the issue of participation in multispecies networks. It examines Geomerce and Vegetal Rescuers— design works that merge plant research with ethnographies on vegetal agency in contaminated landscapes. By tracking plants’ metabolic processes, it shows how weeds can co-create unexpected more-than-human worlds.

As part of BIO25, the research investigated the hyperaccumulator plant Thlaspi praecox, an endemic species that grows in Slovenja, within the Mežica Valley area. Activies involves laboratory work, on site field-work, and public engagement activities in the gallery, to explore the plant’ role in environmental and cultural remediation.

Geomerce’s landing at NRW-Forum in Düsseldorf explored the complex interactions between endemic ecotypes of Arabidopsis halleri and a contaminated site in North-Rhine-Westphalia, shedding light on how encounters between people and hyperaccumulating flora become formed through lab, field, and exhibit work.

GeoMerce draws a scenario in which agriculture blurs with finance and farming decisions are made according to both financial changes and scientific progress. By employing ISEs, the metal absorption process of hyperaccumulators is tracked and crossed with real-time data from the London Metal Exchange, resulting in multiple speculative visualizations and printed media.

Lenses provides a visual representation to the metal accumulation process of specific plants species. Multiple are cleared through a chemical laboratory process, to visualize their vascular lymphatic system, and casted into clear resin to become part of an archive.

The paper introduces a transdisciplinary methodology based on the tactic of “following” plant collectives. Building on post-humanism theories, sustainability is addressed as the implementation of a design attitude that involves learning by cultivating relations of multispecies reciprocity.

The project envisions a speculative future where the planet’s resources are no longer sufficient to meet our demands, and self-generated energy production methods emerge as the main viable approach. In such post-industrial context, even the simplest of electric devices is questioned: how much physical effort does it take to power up a light bulb?

The Pedalator is the second artifct of the Unplugged series. The project envisions a speculative future where the planet’s resources are no longer sufficient to meet our demands. In such post-industrial context, even the simplest of electric devices is questioned: how much physical effort does it take to power up a light bulb?