People – Nature – Future Talk Series:
In this talk, Dr. Lora Koycheva offers an anthropological perspective on the currently dominant human-centered design paradigm and traces ways to dislodge it from its all-too-occidental grounding. She examines how speculative methods and an anthropological approach unfold in a nascent global initiative (Green Like a Robot), aimed at imagining, prototyping, and enacting how (ro)bots might help herald and implement such a paradigm shift.
The centrality of the human has long dominated explanatory models and creative endeavors that shape our collective experience of being human, particularly within the occidental tradition. Moreover, this tradition often relies on a well-tested heuristic mechanism — dichotomous relations — to construct the world and organize its models: nature–culture, human–animal, human–machine, animate–inanimate. Yet with the advent of the Anthropocene and the rise of robotic technologies, new heuristics, methods, vocabularies, and responses to worldmaking are not only necessary but also open up possibilities for alternative modes of existence.
Dr. Lora Koycheva is a Visiting Scholar at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich.
This presentation was part of a talk series organized and hosted by the former non-profit organization Symbio(s)cene. The series accompanied the exhibition People – Nature – Future.
Recording from 19 January 2022:
