From ANT to Material agency: a design and science research workshop

This paper studies a design workshop that investigates complex collaboration between fundamental physics and design. Our research focuses on how students create original artefacts that bridge the gap between disciplines that have very little in common. Our goal is to study the micro-evolutions of their projects. Elaborating first on Actor Network Theory (Latour, 1996; 2005) we study how students' projects evolved over time and through a diversity of inputs and media. Throughout this longitudinal study, we use then a semiotic and pragmatic approach to observe three "aesthetical formations": translation, composition, and stabilization. These formations suggest that the question of material agency developed in the field of archeology and cognitive science (Knappett & Malafouris, 2008) need to be considered in the design field (Renon, 2016) to explain metamorphoses from the brief to the final realizations.

A.-L Renon, A. de Montbron, Annie Gentes, J. Bobroff. From ANT to Material agency: a design and science research workshop. IASDR 2017 Re-research, Oct 2017, CINCINNATI, United States. ⟨hal-02174075⟩