The Human Being and Nature: A New Lexicon for Design Practices

The design culture, for several years, has carried out multi-level strategies to interpret nature in a collaborative perspective with the purpose to preserve environmental balances, re-think multi-species relationships (Tsing in The mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2015; Haraway in Staying with the trouble: making Kin in the Chthulucene: making Kin in the Chthulucene. Experimental futures. Duke University Press, Durham, 2016), and direct behaviours of co-existence on the planet. From John Ruskin to Ettore Sottsass and more recent post-anthropocentric theories, there are many design experiments carried out with the aim to explore the multiple relationships with nature (Latour in Facing Gaia: eight lectures on the new climatic regime, trans Catherine Porter. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2017). The fragile balance between the anthropic and plant world has become the object of observation, analysis and interpretation for researchers and designers who recognise—through the definition of products and strategies—new directions and approaches to “a perfect equivalence, not only cognitive, but also and above all moral, between all species” (Coccia in Filosofia della casa. Lo spazio domestico e la felicità. Einaudi Editore, Torino, 2021, p. 111). The paper aims to explore the plural dimension of the human-nature relationship by defining eight categories of analysis useful to select contemporary design experiences. The eight categories—intersections, manipulations, grafts, adaptations, additions, transformations, osmosis and interpretations—allow describing the main directions of design research with the aim to highlight recurring elements, weaknesses and strategies. The critical interpretation outlines new design scenarios in which the complex relationships between humans and non-humans are made explicit (Marchesini in Alterità. L'identità come relazione. Mucchi Editore, Modena, 2016). But it is also meant to go through these antinomies from an interdisciplinary perspective to provide a space for in-depth analysis of contemporary design cultures. A narrative path intent on describing, analyzing and interpreting an ever-changing scenario inhabited by humankind and things, not without environmental conflicts, which focuses on the verification of collective behaviours in order to trace a hypothesis of real change.