Place and Plants
Focus on living systems across scales, rather than on individuals or organisms.
Focus on functional/consequential relationships and processes rather than normative/metaphysical entities and structures.
Accept the continuity and gradual accrual/distribution of all characteristics, including individuality, agency, intelligence, etc.
This positioning is important because to redress the injustice and damage to all of life, humans need to understand who can contribute what to design.
In particular, consider plants as distributed, connected, embodied systems of relationships and processes.
As such, they are members of meaning-making systems along with others (cf. Biosemiotics) and 4E Cognition.
Consider that plants (with various others) construct internal models, or worldviews, or reference frames. Understanding, defining, protecting, or affecting these frames is one of the challenges for more-than-human design (cf. Mark Making, Representation, Communication)
Examples
- root-to-shoot communication to encode object thickness
- plant intelligence
- plant communication
- plant holobionts
Relevant Notes
Backlinks