ALT Seminar title: Mineral Matterings: Encountering Minerals through design This thesis problematizes an extractivist relation to matter underpinned by dualisms that separates humans from ‘nature’ and which allows for the treatment of matter as mere resource to be exploited. I suggest that critical mapping –exposing design’s invisibilities in terms of abstract and distanced sites of extraction and production– can help diagnosing and understanding this destructive kind of anthropocentrism that underpins the design field as well, and Western modernity and culture at large. Creative approaches like attentively encountering other-than-human worlds and exploring minerals as agential matter and trans-corporeal enactments, emerged in my search to understand mineral matter otherwise. These approaches were developed through two design projects: Mineral Walk and Creative Critical Clay, both situated in sites of past, present or future mineral extraction.

ALT In this seminar, Dominika Lisy will be probed by a critical reading committee about her work during the past 60% of her PhD to explore the progress and potential future directions. Dominika’s work is examining human-robot-relationality through a figuration of the skin. The idea is to understand how to draw ethical boundaries between what it means to be human when robotic devices are entering in various aspects of life and how this impacts what kind or relations are possible. This work touches upon aspects such as empathy used in the field of social robotics, the framework of new materialism, and the feminist creative practice of figurations to understand the experience of relating through the skin.