Sensing Common Grounds

Sensing Common Grounds critically examines the disciplinary legacies and material futures of collaborative speculation. What narratives, prototypes, materials, and media contain knowledge (and non-knowledge) of future scenarios? How are we to cut across disciplines and foreground embodied knowledges and transdisciplinary encounters in search of nuanced proposals for knowing through making? The edited volume brings together positions at the intersection of critical design and critical humanities—as a means to sense and unearth new common ground. The essays address topics and materials as diverse as air pollution, seaweed, paraffin, energy transition, epigenetic memory, robotic worldmaking, and atmospheric metabolisms. Their methodological proposals range from co-speculation, norm criticism, speculative material historiographies, scalar translation, and playful inquiry to critical genealogies of design and creativity.

Léa Perraudin is an environmental media scholar and a postdoc at the “Matters of Activity” Cluster of Excellence, HU Berlin. Martin Müller is a scholar in the fields of media studies and the cultural history of knowledge. He is a project leader at “Matters of Activity.”