Pfeiffer, Katherine;
(2024)
Redeeming Making? Biodesign and the
Hope for Better Production.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
Preview |
Text
Pfeiffer_10189288_Thesis_sig_removed.pdf Download (4MB) | Preview |
Abstract
This PhD engages with an emerging community of designers that look to promote the use of biological systems or living organisms within design. Biodesign is an increasingly influential discipline within material, product, and systems design. Generally, biodesigners see themselves as instigating a revolution in production that promises to change the composition of our material world—and our relationship to it. This research specifically focuses on biodesigners in the UK through a 19 month ethnographic project. As encountered within the field, UK-based biodesigners oscillate between feelings of hopefulness and hopelessness about the future, based on bifurcated understandings of professional and personal capabilities. While they experience the same frustrations around acting ethically as other sustainably-minded consumers, as producers of a new material world, they understand their personal agencies are radically expanded through materials and systems. Such augmented agency sets up new ethical challenges to negotiate, including how to be ‘good’ in entangled worlds? This PhD starts with the education and systems thinking frameworks that biodesigners adopt and their crafting practices before it moves on to discuss their values, vision, and current material outputs. The final chapters introduce the messy realities of bio-entrepreneurship within capitalism and the continual possibilities for failure in the face of relations which bind or breakdown. Such a flow follows, in a way, the journey that biodesigners experience: from education, to experiments, to production, and (hopefully) to impactful change. In doing so, it also traces the making and unmaking of a distinctive ethical personhood through challenges, contingency, and compromise.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Redeeming Making? Biodesign and the Hope for Better Production |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2023. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Anthropology |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10189288 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
