Dasein Design: Eco-anxiety, Platform Performativity, and Making Cures

Abstract

Bodies exist in medias res. Platform performativity — cybernetic imperatives to perform or else — operates across the three ecologies of self, society, and environment through diverse sociotechnical systems, producing transmediated performances that extend yet challenge logocentric power forms of Platonic and disciplinary platforms (eg, the rules and roles of schools and theatres, classical and modern spacetimes). The content of platform performativity is eco-anxiety, trickle-down angst triggered by climate change, legitimation crises, and pandemic viruses cascading through bodies young and old, human and animal. Hence, experience design. Collaborative making cures combine direct communication of information and indirect evocation of transformational experiences among different stakeholder groups, including partners and designers. The form of platform performativity is Gestell or positionality of subjects and objects, while its poesis or making is dasein design, eccentric attunement beyond modern critique and human expression. Making cures cure perfumatively, as shamans cure with incense, beyond therapy. Wrangling site-specificity (da, there) and being thrown (ek-static sein), dasein design’s detouring of positionality resonates with applied research in environmental theatre (Schechner), performance design (Harslov), event-space (Hannah), and notably, design for dasein (Wendt). Overlaying design thinking with a general theory of performance, StudioLab’s dasein design unfolds through participatory action research and design projects that match media designers with community partners working in education, healthcare, and environmental and human rights. Co-designing with Health Access Connect in Uganda and its network of rural clinics, design teams negotiate messianic narratives, data storytelling, and KPIs (key performance indicators) while tapping a geology of morals whose restorations of behaviour run deep. At stake are transvaluations of efficacy, efficiency, effectiveness—and experience writ large. Between calls to adventure and action, responses vary. Conversion of performative eco-anxiety solicits perfumative lifedeath, making paranoia metanoia. Making doesn’t always take — this (what?) may be rare — even as it gives.