Thinking Differently About Life: Design, Biomedicine and “Negative Capability"
- Submitting institution
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Glasgow School of Art
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 2706
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- Design as Future-Making
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Academic
- ISBN
- 978-0857858399
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This book chapter is part of the collection edited by Susan Yelavich and Barbara Adams, Design as Future-making (Bloomsbury, 2014). The book addresses the questions raised by the close relationship between design practices and the economic and social drives that embrace ‘innovation and newness.’ The contributors to this volume - from fields of practice such as fashion, product design, architecture, urbanism, and related critical disciplines such as anthropology and design theory - investigate through case studies and speculative design how design can inform sustainable futures. Addressing questions associated with ‘design with a social conscience,’ the particular aim of this book is to avoid universal solutions; instead to engage with the fragmented, localised nature of practices and beliefs.
In this chapter, product designer Elio Caccavale and bioethics researcher and sociologist Tom Shakespeare discuss their collaboration in the Material Beliefs research project. This research was an attempt to address abstract and complex issues arising in recent scientific research that cause anxiety due to lack of clear-cut moral signposts (such as birth surrogacy, or the development of hybrid bio-technological assemblages) through thought experiments in the form of tangible prototypes. One example of Caccavale’s design research products shown in this chapter is the Neuroscope, an interactive toy that might be described as a kind of ‘live’ kaleidoscope driven by rat neurons grown onto electrodes - and whose aim is to arouse doubts about interpretation in the user.
The overall aim of this collaboration, and Caccavale’s designed objects, is to invoke the state described by the poet Keats as ‘negative capability’; a quiet understanding that there are irresolvable experiences and problems in life. Objects such as the Neuroscope, designed and resolved through the refined iterative skills of prototyping, contradict the certainties of ‘design solutions’ and instead allow entry to ‘mysteries and doubts.’
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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