The Double Bind of Design: an introduction to Gregory Bateson – RCA event Wednesday November 8, 6pm London / online
Our RCA event is next Wednesday November 8th.
We are happy to extend an public invitation to join the international research team of the joint AHRC-DFG funded ‘Enacting Gregory Bateson’s Ecological Aesthetics in Architecture and Design’ research project, for an introduction to the thinking of the ecological anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and a presentation of one of the key research themes of this two year project: The Double Bind of Design.
The evening will include an introductory talk by Dr Jon Goodbun on the thinking of the ecological anthropologist Gregory Bateson, whose colourful practice moved from anthropological field work in the 30s, participation in the foundational Macy conferences on cybernetics in the 40s, working as an ethnologist with patients diagnosed as schizophrenics and their therapists at the Palo Alto VA hospital in the 50s, moving on to the study of animal and ecosystemic communication, learning and evolution in Hawaii in the 60s, and culminating in an ultimately unfinished but incredibly rich project to describe the onto-epistemologcial form and structure of both our fundamental socio-ecological existence, and the pathological ‘epistemological errors’ of western thought which – now amplified by capitalism and advanced technology – are unfolding violently through the wider web of life upon which we ultimately depend. He asked, as we must ask too: How can we approach the possibility of future human adaptation to, and care of, this now severely damaged ecological condition, given that so much of our fundamental thinking and practice around design and the possibility of planning is still so badly damaged? It might be that whatever we do, if based upon a narrow western forms of ‘conscious purpose’, will only make things worse?
Following the introductory talk, the wider international research team of this project will introduce themselves and some of their particular research questions and projects in relation to this three day workshop on ‘The Double Bind of Design’. The team includes the PIs from the two lead institutions: Sri Lankan academic Dr Dulmini Perera from the architectural history and theory department of Bauhaus University Weimar and Dr Ben Sweeting who runs the Radical Methodologies programme in the School of Architecture, University of Brighton. We are also joined by design theorist and designer Dr Joanna Boehnert, from Bath Spa University, and Professor Simon Sadler, art and architectural historian and Chair of the Department of Design at University of California Davis. Finally from Stuttgart University we have the bio-installation artist-architect Marie Davidova, and the two PhD researchers Stefanie Huthöfer and Claudia Valverdel.
Please sign up for the Wednesday 8th 6pm lecture here (online): Londoners: Come in person. Everyone else: watch on Zoom. Pls register here: https://lnkd.in/eYAppECU
Systems Community of Inquiry 