The extraction of matter from the Earth is a foundational process that provides designers with the materials needed to create products and structures. However, the extractivist logic – often unnoticed, normalized or accepted without critique – simultaneously drives environmental degradation, social inequity, and contributes to climate change. Consequently, design operates as both a solution and a source of concern. This dissertation, Mineral Matterings: Diffractive Practices of Design, focuses on the relationship between designers and their materials, asking how design processes can generate critical curiosity, particularly by examining the entanglements between humans and mineral matter. Through site-specific engagements with past and future sites of extraction in southern Sweden, the research comprises two projects: “Walking with Minerals” and “Critical Clay”. The former involves guided sensory walks through a disused limestone quarry, inviting participants to experience minerals beyond their conventional role as resources. The latter traces alum shale from landscapes marked for future vanadium extraction, mapping its global entanglements and learning by processing its matter into materials and artifacts. Through these material-discursive practices, collectively termed “design matterings,” both projects demonstrate how direct material engagement can inform theory and practice alike. Through the lenses of geology, philosophy, the feminist posthumanities, and science and technology studies, with particular emphasis on Karen Barad’s agential realism, this dissertation introduces diffractive practices of design, an approach that is embodied and embedded, inviting designers to understand the world from within, as part of its becoming. Diffractive practices of design do not merely reflect existing dichotomies; they diffract them by emphasizing anthropo-decentric scales of time and place, offering multiple perspectives and relational understandings. These practices challenge the dominant extractivist logic by rendering imperceptible materialities and relations perceptible, thereby creating new meanings and nuanced differences. Allowing for a deeper attunement to the shared “mineralness” of humans and other-than-humans, diffractive practices of design actively participate in reconfiguring ethical and material design matterings and emphasize the role of design in the making and remaking of worlds.

Denna avhandling, med den svenska titeln Minerala Materialiseringar: Diffraktiva Designpraktiker (Mineral Matterings: Diffractive Practices of Design), undersöker platsbundna mineraler vid historiska och framtida utvinningsplatser i södra Sverige. Genom

ett teoretiskt ramverk som kombinerar geologi, filosofi och feministiska posthumanistiska perspektiv, särskilt Karen Barads arbete om agentiell realism, utforskar avhandlingen designprocesser som skapar en kritisk medvetenhet om de sammanflätade relationerna

mellan människa och mineral. Avhandlingen konceptualiserar diffraktiva designpraktiker som utforskar och synliggör intra-aktioner och främjar förkroppsligade sätt att relatera till mineraliskt material, vilket resulterar i en förståelse av design som både en del av och formgivare av världen. Dessa praktiker utmanar den traditionella extraktivistiska logiken genom att göra subtila relationer och materialiteter märkbara, och därigenom skapa nyanserade skillnader som leder till nya betydelser. Två huvudsakliga designprojekt utgör avhandlingens empiriska grund: Att Gå med Mineraler och Kritisk Lera. Mineralvandringarna är publika, guidade sensoriska vandringar i ett landskap som tidigare varit ett kalkstensbrott i sydvästra Skåne, där deltagarna uppmuntras att interagera med mineraler på alternativa sätt, bortom dess konventionella roll som resurs. Projektet Kritisk Lera följer alunskiffer och lera från sydöstra Skåne som prospekteras för utvinning av den kritiska råvaran vanadin och dess möjligheter och problematiska sammanflätningar med omvärlden kartläggs. Genom att lära direkt från dessa platsspecifika mineraler, artikulerar forskningen diffraktiva designpraktiker som utmanar linjära och människocentrerade berättelser om tid, rum och materialitet. Begreppet diffraktion, inspirerat av Barad och Donna Haraway, skrivs här fram som en kritiskt medveten metod för design. Diffraktiva designpraktiker reflekterar inte bara över befintliga dikotomier; de bryter upp dem genom att förkroppsliga nya förståelser för icke-mänskliga dimensioner av tid och rum samt den mineralitet som delas av människor och andra varelser (här används det engelska ordet mineralness). De empiriska projekten visar på kunskapande genom direkt engagemang med material, vilket främjar nya relationer och perceptioner som kan informera både teori och praktik. Avhandlingen understryker potentialen hos diffraktiva designpraktiker att skapa utrymmen för förändring inom dominerande tankesystem och sätt att designa. Genom att synliggöra

hur design är sammanflätat med extraktivistiska logiker, kan dessa praktiker bidra till ett mer ansvarstagande sätt att designa. På så sätt bidrar diffraktiva designpraktiker till att göra kännbart och synliggöra etiska och materiella frågor, och framhäver

designens roll i att skapa och omskapa världar. Avhandlingen öppnar för framtida forskning som fortsätter att utforska diffraktiva praktiker med andra materialiteter, i olika designkontexter och inom andra teoretiska områden, där direkt engagemang med material kan skapa nya etiska och relationella perspektiv.

A designer is somebody who points, who designates, and gives directions. Design thereby has a direction into the future. What directions are designers pointing out if design is coupled with posthumanism? Posthumanism has come into being in a landscape of both ideas and design. That which has previously been designed and produced is coming back and it can help us point out harmful inequalities if we sharpen our observational tools and concepts.

“An Emerging Posthumanist Design Landscape” is an overflowing designated area for examples and thinking on compositions of design and critical posthumanism. It is a landscape in the making, yet scarred by previous design cultures and histories. As design researchers operating out of Scandinavian academia, we invite readers/travelers to meander through an emerging hybrid landscape and to make a few selected stops at the sites of our own recent design interventions. We articulate concepts, frictions, and opportunities sprouted in a sprawling and increasingly populated landscape of design and posthumanism. Posthumanist thinking questions and recharges fundamental design concepts and methods/approaches, e.g.: Who are the actors of posthumanist design? Where does it take place? What do we design? What materials do we use? How do we work? When does design take place? Why are compositions of design and critical posthumanism important undertakings? The responses to these questions sketch trajectories for further travels and the co-creation of an emerging posthumanist design landscape.

This presentation shares my insights gathered from a series of curated mineral walks in a disused limestone quarry in Limhamn, Malmö, near the coast of the southwestern edge of Sweden. As a trained industrial designer and PhD candidate within design, my entry point is to explore human-mineral relations from designerly and curatorial approaches. In my work I am drawing from a theoretical framework of feminism new materialism and critical posthumanism, in order to critically and creatively examine the role of the designer and the connections between design and global extractivism. In the disused limestone quarry, walking has become a method for situated knowledge production emerging from the mineral encounters in this transformational site itself, like the sediment layered walls which expose not only the boundary between geological periods but also evokes philosophical conversations about the boundaries between life and non-life. Contrary to the regular guided tours at this site (from the perspectives of geology, biology and industrial history), the mineral walk starts from the hypothesis that minerals are not lifeless. My insights suggest that, when not merely considered as ‘resources’ or ‘threats’, to humans, then walking and thinking with rocks, stones and minerals as vital (Bennett 2010), has a potential to extend our ethical and political response (Springgay et. al., 2017). Walking as a method puts focus on human-nature entanglements, with the aim to establish that nature is not a mere background as ecofeminist Val Plumwood put it (1993) or located somewhere out there, but always the very substance of ourselves, what Stacy Alaimo calls the transcorporeal (2010). The walk and this presentation, explores this common ground, “the petric in the human and the anthropomorphic in the stone” (Cohen, 2015), because as Fausto- Sterling puts it, “culture can shape bones” and “bone-structure can shape cultures” (Åsberg et. al., 2011). 

This text is a dialogic conjunction of working practices developed in and around specific quarries, with Karin Reisinger tracing the material and life-worlds of iron ore in Malmberget and Petra Lilja the limestone in Limhamn, both in Sweden. We walk and think with humans and non-humans such as rocks, stones and minerals through our respective practices and pedagogies of design and architecture. Our practices take place in and around quarries, extractive sites of mining. We come in after the machines, when it is time to think about how to move forwards, to deal with the losses, to repair and care and to find strategies of surviving and coming together in educational situations. Dealing with the large-scale spatial changes, we are deeply aware that we are participating in massive earthly and material movements. With this paper we also share connections between theory and practice, based on a feminist–materialist framework. These connections lead us to the various applied practices of sensing interdependency, experiencing embeddedness and extending the frame while zooming in and to its epistemological reverberations.

All practices of design are dependent on materials and an anthropocentric way of thinking matter as mere resource, dominates. This paper attempts to counteract that mode of thinking about matter, by walking and thinking with stones, minerals and fossils, rendering matter as vibrant, arguing that a multi-scalar type of thinking is required to understand the complex issues and effects of the so-called Anthropocene. The Mineral Walk is presented as a cartographic mapping of encounters and spatio-temporal scales of a disused limestone quarry. Its sedimented walls serve as an explanatory tool that challenges linear, humancentric timescales and boundaries between human/nature, mind/ body, life/ death, past/ future; dualisms that permeates academic disciplines as well as design practices. Through the concepts introduced, this paper contributes to a formulation of a practical and theoretical framework for thinking matter otherwise. It opens up for a more entangled understanding of, and care for, human-matter relations.  

Through moving images and an audible collage of texts, this presentation will unearth learnings from a disused limestone quarry in the south of Sweden. The mineral walks undertaken here, curated and guided by two designers and researchers, are situated and materially immersed explorations of our relations to more-than-human entities like rocks, stones and minerals, asking: How do the ways in which we think matter, material and time, predetermine, limit, or enable the way we then construct our relations to place, to objects as well as communities of human and nonhuman earth others? Without the driving beat of progression in this post-industrial site, we reorienting our attention to more-than-human world-makings, through walking in silence, noticing the fossilized strata as transformations from living organisms to geological sedimented rock over deep timescales, trying to grasp the vibrancy inherent in the mineral.

This research project explores the connections and controversies between human-centeredness in design and ultimately human survival on Earth. Drawing from posthuman theory in combination with metadesign and speculative design tools, Petra Lilja will ideate ways that the designer can engage with and acknowledge other-than-human actors to equalize current hierarchies and promote more caring coexistence.

The paradigm of human exceptionality has set in motion a machinery of global effects of which design, by adding to mass-production and consumption, can be argued to be a principal cog. As one response to environmental decay and increasing material scarcity on Earth, scientists and the space industry are investing in the potential of asteroid mining, planetary engineering and in-space manufacturing to meet the demands of our growing population. Designers are now challenged by these entangled environmental and technological changes to focus on complex socio-technical systems, not only on global but at multiplanetary scale.

By juxtaposing the need to acknowledge mankind’s dependency on other species with the extreme conditions for humans on Mars, this project initially seeks to critically explore what a speculative Martian future can teach us regarding how to cultivate caring coexistence between species. What stories of circularity can humans as “consumers” learn from “producing” organisms in order to add to instead of just take from the ecological system? This research project will explore multispecies-inclusive narratives with the aim to find designerly strategies and processes for engaging and empowering scales of actors and knowledges otherwise unaddressed.