Design for Collaborative Survival: An Inquiry into Human-Fungi Relationships
summary
The project argues for “collaborative survival,” building three field-ready provocations: a data-harvest collar that uses vibration motors to nudge wearers toward community-recorded mushroom sites; a soil-sampling walking stick with a bottom chamber that collects dirt for germination or DNA sequencing (works but becomes heavy in use); and a hand-substrate glove that repurposes soil-moisture sensors into a tactile mesh interface (less reliable electronically but succeeds at encouraging intimate, fingers-in-soil sensing). Materials choices and textile e-waste tradeoffs are explicitly questioned.
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chapters (6)
- 0:00Collaborative survival
- 1:29Mycological inquiry
- 3:36Design research methodology
- 5:59Initial material explorations
- 7:21The three provocations
- 11:39Reflections and future work
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