Bruno Latour describes matters of concern as a way to recognise diversity and heterogeneity rather than hegemony. He notes that:
The discussion [of freeing human actors from only social explanations and to recognise natural objects to be more than just ‘facts’] begins to shift for good when introduces not matters of face, but what I now call matters of concern. While highly uncertain and loudly disputed, these real, objective, atypical and, above all, interesting agencies are taken not exactly as object but rather as gatherings. (Latour, Reassembling the Social, p. 113.)
Cristiano Storni is a designer who uses matters of concern as a way to rethink the role of design. He argues:
Deriving much from ANT, these scholars acknowledge the need to move: (i) from rational and consensual decision making to agonistic public spaces; (ii) from designing objects to designing things; (iii) from projects to infrastructuring and (iv) from use-before-use to design-after-design. (p. 168.) [Storni, Cristiano. “Notes on ANT for Designers: Ontological, Methodological and Epistemological Turn in Collaborative Design.” CoDesign 11.3–4 (2015): 166–178]
This is part of a broader movement that wants to shift the role of design as expert/hero/savant toward a facilitator. Someone who can listen and make visible to those the design is for what matters to and for them. In the quote above it is then about how to design a space that isn’t about consensus and accord but can accommodate disagreement and difference.
In relation to our class this is a principle that I am wanting to apply to learning and teaching. So it is no longer a case of a clear (rational and consensus) arc and structure where we know exactly where we are going and why but one that becomes agonistic (struggle or contest). So two concerns come from this. How to make this visible (what are the elements and terms of the struggle?), and what to do with them so that we still learn something? (With learning understood as a qualitative change in our understanding something.)
So we compiled our list of matters of concern:
- Observing both our habits and our agency
- to decentralise our anthropocentrism in media and humanities
- more aware of our relationality between things and how dependent we are to/on objects
- understand the importance of constant doing
- that things are their relations, the density of a thing
- the more you know the more you don’t know
- that we learn to make media that exists for itself
- social media, meshes, porousness of it all, what is ‘alive’
- exploring different avenues is useful (not all narratives)
- level of control we have over things is inaccurate
- learnt how to see things from other perspectives (things, non anthropocentric)
- realised how concerned we are with ourselves as a species
- go beyond initial assumptions
- evaluate and reflect in constructive ways
- see things true to their form
- more important to recognise what things do rather than what they mean
- redirecting agency and understanding what agency is
- questioning what constitutes being
- deeper understanding of other objects understanding of us
