Companion prototyping

A plant digs itself into the soil over time.

“think about your own teaching, your own intersections, your own pedagogical situation, your own challenges…”

A teacher learns and unlearns across seasonal cycles of collective classroom makings.

“How do you prepare young people to face the world?… How can the fact that you are not the first educator to face contradictions and transformations sustain you?… Do you find yourself compelled to pretend you know who you are when the act of teaching actually changes you every day?…”

This is an entry on an exploratory collective design prototype for energy and agriculture. But in the context of this also being a contribution to our anthology as teachers in the Design+Change department, I wanted to share the above lines from poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ tribute to the teaching practices of Audre Lorde as a reflection in kind to the questions of learning that have been at the heart of my six years at the department, which includes the time of the research project discussed below.

The Regenerative Energy Communities research project discussed here was directly inspired by work of students and colleagues, and is indebted to a number of change practices, both locally and further afield. It is a project that is grounded by a practice that addresses a question one is always returning to in the classroom. The question of, as the final lines of Lorde’s poem on the teaching experience “Blackstudies” puts it,

“What will they carve for weapons?
What will they grow for food?”

☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆   ☆.。.:*・°

Electric Field is one of several small scale prototypes created by Miranda Moss, Daniel Gustafsson, Helen Pritchard and myself as part of our Regenerative Energy Communities research project. This three year research project began from a position of wanting to support a local university adjacent farm site with an energy infrastructure of one kind or another. In the care for practices of farming, food and community that we saw on this student-driven farm, we, as educators, artists, designers and technology geeks wanted to find a way to bring our passions into this space of grassroots community growing.

The prototyping of Electric Field grew out of a challenge of how might we design a microenergy prototype that would respect the principles and commitments of the farming community on the Brände Udde (“burnt point”) farm site. These include principles adapted from practices of permaculture and regenerative agriculture, such as those of no dig, no fertilizers or pesticides and always working to improve soil health. More specifically, they include both stated and unstated commitments on behalf of those on the farm to:

• use already existent, locally sourced biodegradable materials wherever possible (e.g., e-waste from recycling centres, materials from second hand stores, etc.),
• source materials from within a 6km radius of the farm wherever possible (e.g., a manageable biking distance),
• only bring materials onto the farm that are beneficial to soil health (e.g., no plastics or toxic materials – “If it can’t become food to your plants it shouldn’t be at the site!”),
• prioritise ongoing improvement of soil and biodiversity health in all activities on the farm (cleaning up, healing and restoring first!),
• support and sustain abolitionist multispecies communal flourishings in the form of energy giving outcomes (e.g., food sovereignty, social relations, and always asking what have you done about inequality today)?

With these propositions in mind, common energy starting points such as off the shelf solar panels and small scale 3d printed wind turbines were immediately removed from the menu, pushing us in new and unexpected directions with our prototyping work. It lead us to work on a mycelium based micro wind turbine focused around mycoremediation, as well as electricity-producing Microbial Fuel Cells that harvest electricity from electro-active bacteria.

In the case of Electric Field, it had us putting our love and interest in piezo sensors into dialogue with local biodegradable materials – namely, the common reeds (Phragmites Australis) dotted all around the Trummen lake that is just next to the farm and campus. Working to stay close as designers to the regenerative guidelines and commitments of the farm community resulted in us

• harvesting common reeds from the local lake outside of the farm to act as organic regenerative material for the wind-catching function of the turbine (with harvesting of these reeds being an already extant conservation effort for the lake’s health),
• scavenging for wood materials from the offshoots of the university’s wood workshop,
• visiting the local thrift second hand store to pickup discarded landline telephones and children’s toys in order to disassemble them for piezo sensors (with the side effect of being able to recycle e-waste better once disassembled),
• making use of surplus beeswax (instead of glue) harvested from the farm,
• sourcing and preparing mushroom dowel plugs for the mycoremediation element of the piece aimed at soil health,
• using fellow geek and low-energy artist Ralf Schreiber’s ultra low powered analogue synthesizers (what we dubbed as “feral circuits”) to sonify the unstable amounts of energy produced by Electric Field,
• running workshops and creating zines for sharing this knowledge with others!

As highlighted in our wiki-to-pdf zine that describes the regenerative methods and components involved, Electric Field can be understood as a farming for energy alternatives. It is composed of and composes material mappings, stories and kinetic explorations. It is that rare breed – electricity as beneficial waste product! As a small-scale DIY/learn it together with others micro energy wind turbine it attempts to facilitate opportunities for hands-on learning and experimenting with energy and regeneration. And it can be done in one’s own locale and community, with one’s own local materials, practices, dreams and regenerative micro energy fantasies.

Electric Field foraging and prototyping in Växjö, Sweden

Electric Field instruction guide and “Wind as regeneration” workshop in Luleå, Sweden

Electric Field exhibited for Elin Wägner week exhibition in Växjö, Sweden, and as created in children’s workshop using local flora at the Energy Giveaway exhibition in Zurich, Switzerland

Electric Field and our other regenerative energy prototypes are a small attempt at working to imagine energy alternatives that take biodiversity, soil health and non-extractive uses of land and minerals as core propositions for creative experimentation with energy. Most importantly, as we continue to work towards in our project, it is an attempt to address the question of How can we make space for communities to feel that both food (farming) and energy (electricity + electronics) are not something that is done to us, but that we do?

Through sourcing regenerative materials that are grown directly from soil and also foraged from various local sites and ecosystems, we have found ourselves and those who have participated in the making of them forming a different relation to matter and energy. It has been a challenging but inspiring shift to imagine energy (and also art and design) communities starting from soil and ecosystem health rather than modes of control and monitoring of energy use.

Working on the prototypes has brought us into contact with a range of what we might call emergent energy communities – though notably not what are perhaps typically thought of as energy communities. Beyond those involved on the farm site, we have gotten to know Växjö’s secondhand communities, where many of the materials have been sourced from. We began the project with regular interfacing with the municipality’s recycling center (getting both our compost and disregarded electronics from the same place). When harvesting the reeds from the lake ecosystem, walkers around the lake regularly stopped to ask questions about what we are doing, creating further potential spaces of collective learning and knowledge sharing (something that the farmers have also experienced with the walkers at this popular lake). Each potential community, human and more than human, potentially opening onto one another and a plurality of possible knowledges and relations.

In terms of what is happening in our prototypes, we have found it helpful to speak of them as companion prototypes. At the “Fertility and Fertilizers” workshop on soil sensing held together with designers Nadia Campo Woytuk and Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, our colleague, farmer and workshop participant Zeenath Hasan reflected afterwards on how an experiment of using beetroots in the workshop as an alternative form of sensor to measure pH levels in the soil could be understood as a form of companion sensing. A sensing similar to practices of companion planting and its use of interspecies nutrient strategies such as biofertilizers and the integration of livestock grazing in cropping systems, which are so central to agroecology, regenerative agriculture and many cultures of growing. Asking Zeenath later by text what a practice of companion sensing could be in a context of soil health, they responded, “‘companion sensing’ – a proposal to sense with companion species. An inter-species sensibility if you will. […] A way to practice vital politics of co-existing through intensifying” (https://regenerative-energy-communities.org/field-notes/soil-sensing-workshop-reflections-pt-2).

As Donna Haraway describes in their writing on companions species, whether one is speaking of an unruly mycelium mold or Australian Shepherd Dog, an understanding of other species as companions opens onto generative constellations of “the human and nonhuman, the organic and technological, carbon and silicon, freedom and structure, history and myth, the rich and the poor, the state and the subject, diversity and depletion, modernity and postmodernity, and nature and culture”. A companionship that, as Lewis et al. make clear in their writing on “Making Kin with Machines”, involves an “ethical-ontological orientation” towards acknowledging the “kinship networks that extend to animals and plants, wind and rocks”, and further on into the evolving technologies of the present:

“The agency of stones connects directly to the question of AI, as AI is formed from not only code, but from materials of the earth. To remove the concept of AI from its materiality is to sever this connection. Forming a relationship to AI, we form a relationship to the mines and the stones. Relations with AI are therefore relations with exploited resources. If we are able to approach this relationship ethically, we must reconsider the ontological status of each of the parts which contribute to AI, all the way back to the mines from which our technology’s material resources emerge.”

With such insights in mind, as well as the many helpful contributions from collaborators and participants in the workshops we have held, we as artists and designers in the project would argue for modes of companion prototyping that deliberately work to cultivate and activate existent and emerging regenerative ties and reciprocal relations involved in soil and ecosystem health. Doing so with the kind of experimentalism that Kimmerer speaks of, an experimentalism that is attentive to the many processes and participants (human and more than human) that might constitute and participate in such forms of companion prototyping. In the case of our project, a mushroom wind turbine remediates the soil while powering an e-waste calabash gourd speaker whose music gives energy to the farmers working on the patch… Palpably tangible energy prototypes and their friends. The collective work of watering and tending hands, and the makings of worms, nematodes, the sun’s lightyear spanning waves. Prototypers and companions of sun, wind, water and dirt.

It has been a recurring theme for our research how working with regenerative materials and systems has a cascading effect in which the intersecting materials, scales, cycles and relations within these experiments highlight how much more there is to learn and unlearn. In such a regenerative approach, we have experienced a sense of art and design, as well as technology and energy, as being on the terms of something like a seasonal weather pattern, a mycelium spore taking hold, an unreliable water pump, a questioning workshop participant or other processual forms of collective making and companionship. For artists and designers, but also for many other disciplines and approaches, it is still common to default to starting from seeing things on one’s own terms, or a discipline’s terms, or the terms of the materials normally presented as what one should work with when it comes to a specific problem. Opening onto the terms of an ecosystem or collective conditions of a community supports and sustains other possibilities for relating and making.

At the same time, in these and other moments, we have also seen how design and art, in their working with materials and aesthetics, have a capacity to stimulate crossings of disciplines and imaginaries in the physical and meaningful encounters that engagements with materials and alternative perspectives and relations can support. The workshops have emphasised to us that designerly and artistic engagements with energy alternatives can help in the work of highlighting how energy is not simply a field for technologists and engineers. As we continue to explore together with others, design and art and many other fields of knowledge and practice need to be in the energy discussion. In taking inspiration from and crossing knowledges of energy with agriculture and further afield, we hope to highlight this way in which a plurality of approaches and participants can play intrinsic roles in the crucial need for energy innovation and communal solidarity practices in the face of destructive energy monocultures. Energy touches on all parts of life, and as such is something that those not normally considered in the energy innovation conversation should be empowered in and supported with a sense that they and others have a role to play in it.

Regenerative Energy Communities is itself indebted to the creative engagements of students and colleagues around us. It is a project that would not exist without the hands-on, feet-in tending and communal harvests of the Feminist Farmers and The Dirt. It is a descendant of wild learning adventures with students and colleagues in the “Design with a species” course (to name just one of the +Change courses). Energetic and feral companions for the collective question of how, in these challenging times, to design and cultivate practices of resistance, recovery, generosity, flourishing and joy.

☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆   ☆.。.:*・°

Sources

Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. 2017. “17th Floor: A pedagogical oracle from/with Audre Lorde”. Journal of Lesbian Studies, Vol. 21, No. 4, 375–390.

Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Prickly Paradim Press.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants. Penguin Books.

Lewis, Jason Edward, Noelani Arista, Archer Pechawis and Suzanne Kite. 2018. “Making Kin with the Machines”. Journal of Design and Science, Jul 16. https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/lewis-arista-pechawis-kite/release/1

Lorde, Audre. 1974. “Blackstudies”. In Lorde, New York Head Shop And Museum. Broadside.

West Coast Seeds. 2021. Guide to Companion Planting. https://www.westcoastseeds.com/pages/companion-planting