An evolving program of world-making
This page presents the evolving program of Ontoepistemic Design. It sketches the concept, its central proposition, and how it develops across my artistic practice, research, curating, education, and leadership.
Ontoepistemic Design articulates an inquiry and practice that runs across several fields. This page is a work in progress where I develop the concept and bring together strands of work that have evolved over many years. The program continues to develop, and the page is therefore intentionally provisional.
The Program
Within the broader program, my research investigates how material-semiotic arrangements participate in the practice, enactment, and configuration of knowing.
The program in Ontoepistemic Design brings together my long-standing inquiries into experience, learning and knowing and how these are mediated by design and more-than-human relations. I am interested in how we as human beings relate to and act with the rest of the world: how does the world become knowable to us and how do we shape the world in such processes of sense-making, learning and knowing?
Across my research in educational institutions, museums, universities, and learning organizations, the same question guides my work:
How do material-semiotic arrangements participate in the practice, enactment and configuration of knowing?
Ontoepistemic Design provides the conceptual language through which I develop this inquiry.
Ontoepistemic Design is an umbrella program across art, research, curating, education, and leadership. These are multiple, situated, and socio-materially distributed practices of knowing through which worlds are made and remade.
Designing or redesigning a learning environment, inventing a course, establishing a research center, creating an installation, or staging a performative walk are different ways of creating and shaping material-semiotic arrangements. The program develops through artistic practice, empirical research, pedagogical design, curatorial practice, and institutional experimentation. It is grounded in STS+Art and develops in conversation with Learning Sciences, Design Research, Ethnography, and Artistic Research.
Ontoepistemic Design investigates how materiality, technologies, media, institutions and design participate in the emergence of knowing. It examines how epistemic practices are configured through arrangements of people, objects, infrastructures, representations, environments and more-than-human actors.
Ontoepistemic Design is positioned in a relational, processual, poststructuralist, postphenomenological, new materialist and posthumanist intellectual tradition. This means that experience, learning and knowing are viewed as situated; embedded in material-semiotic arrangements.
Experience, learning and knowing are distributed, relationally enacted, negotiated, mediated and processual phenomena.
The programme contributes this approach to the Learning Sciences. Rather than understanding learning primarily as an internal cognitive process – located in the brain – Ontoepistemic Design investigates learning as something that unfolds – with the world. Ontoepistemic Design asks how education, research and design might cultivate new ways of learning with and for the planet.
Thinking Through Things
Ontoepistemic Design begins from the proposition that humans never know alone.
Knowing unfolds through relations with objects, materials, media, technologies, infrastructures and environments.
Garments, books, classrooms, AI systems, exhibitions, laboratories, Petri dishes, microscopes, learning platforms, hammers and computers are not simply tools for representing knowledge. They actively participate in shaping what becomes perceptible, thinkable and knowable.
The programme therefore investigates how epistemic practices are distributed across material-semiotic arrangements rather than located exclusively within individual minds.
More-than-human Epistemics
Ontoepistemic Design understands humans as participants within larger ecologies of knowing.
Inspired by Michel Serres’ mediation ontology, John Law and Anne Marie Mol’s accounts of multiplicity, Bruno Latour’s curatorial experimentation, Donna Haraway’s cyborg tentacularities, Lucy Suchman’s situated plans for action, Michael Shanks’ process-relational archaeology, Silvia Gherardi’s practice-based organization studies, Andrew Pickering’s revitalised posthumanist cybernetics, Jane Bennett’s vibrant matter, Karen Barad’s agential realism, and Gregory Bateson’s ecological thinking, the programme approaches learning systems as distributed systems extending across humans, other organisms, technologies, materials and environments.
This opens questions about more-than-human epistemics.
How do plants, fungi, dogs, octopuses and forests participate in practices of knowing?
How do human and more-than-human forms of sense-making become entangled?
How might education cultivate the capacity to learn with, rather than merely about, the planet?
When I think about learning systems, I think of the world itself as a learning system.
What is Ontoepistemic Design?
Ontoepistemic Design investigates how material-semiotic arrangements, media and environments participate in the practice, enactment and configuration of knowing.
The programme begins from the proposition that knowing emerges through relations among people, media, technologies, materials, bodies, spaces and practices.
Design matters epistemically.
Every design intervention is also an epistemic intervention.
Whenever we design
- a classroom
- an exhibition
- an organisation
- a laboratory
- a curriculum
- a museum
- a software system
we simultaneously redesign the conditions through which experience, learning and knowing become possible.
Design therefore can be seen as a way of doing epistemology.
Central Proposition: Knowing is enacted through material-semiotic arrangements.
Environments, media, technologies, institutions, practices and material forms actively participate in configuring what can be perceived, experienced, learned and known.
Definition
- Ontoepistemic Design is world-making through multiple, situated and socio-materially distributed practices of knowing.
- Ontoepistemic Design is the creation and shaping of the material-semiotic arrangements through which practices of knowing make and remake worlds.
- Ontoepistemic Design sees knowing as a situated, enacted, and more-than-human practice.
Ontoepistemic Design is STS+Art.
Themes of Inquiry
The programme investigates multiple forms of epistemic arrangement.
Epistemic Environments
- Learning Environments
- Research Environments
- Institutional Infrastructures
- Knowledge Ecologies
Epistemic Media
- The role of tools, technologies, materials, objects, images, media and artefacts in practices of knowing
Creative Epistemic Practices
- Art, design, and curatorial practice as forms of world-making and as ways of generating, investigating, and communicating knowledge.
More-than-Human Epistemics
How humans, other organisms, materials, technologies and environments participate together in knowledge mattering – in the enactment of sense-making, competence and knowing.
Together these themes examine how different configurations shape attention, participation, inquiry and knowledge production across educational settings, research organisations, museums, institutions and public life.
Methods and Modes of Inquiry
Across its different practices, Ontoepistemic Design draws on heterogeneous methods and modes of inquiry:
- Artistic research and research-creation
- Curatorial inquiry
- Design research
- Ethnography
- Pedagogical experimentation
- Studio inquiry
- Reflective practice
These methods move across and connect its artistic, research, curatorial, educational, and leadership practices. They are complementary ways of investigating and intervening in epistemic arrangements.
Research Trajectory
The programme develops across several themes and contexts of inquiry.
Experience, Culture, Museums and Mediation
Museums and heritage sites provide one of the programme’s principal empirical sites of inquiry.
Objects, exhibitions, media, architecture, movement and spatial composition participate in shaping attention, experience and knowing.
This work develops the programme’s understanding of mediation, sociomaterial enactment and epistemic environments. It establishes the conceptual foundations for understanding experience and knowing as distributed accomplishments emerging through material-semiotic arrangements.
The work I do with museums and heritage sites examines how objects, exhibitions and mediating artefacts shape visitors’ experiences and participation. This forms the basis for understanding environments, information and communication technologies, exhibits and learning experiences as more-than-human – distributed enactments of engagement, experience, learning and knowing.
The focus on mediation, multiplicity, and sociomaterial enactments as constitutive of knowing is developed conceptually in my work with museums and natural heritage sites. This foundational understanding for the mechanism of what I now call ontoepistemic design was developed in this work.
Learning Environments
Learning environments extend the inquiry into classrooms, laboratories, field sites, makerspaces and educational technologies.
The programme investigates learning as emerging through sociomaterial relations among people, materials, technologies, practices and environments. Educational design therefore also becomes ontoepistemological design.
Designing learning environments means designing ecologies through which new forms of knowing become possible.
Research Environments, Knowledge Ecologies and Institutional Infrastructures
Research environments constitute another scale of Ontoepistemic Design.
The establishment and leadership of STEM Education Research Center FNUG is an inquiry into Ontoepistemic Design, where the inquiry is scaled up and shifted to a systemic and organisational level. Leadership in this way is seen as a design practice and a mode of inquiry. It is a reflective practice into how to create research culture, research and educational environments. Ontoepistemic Design investigates how institutions, collaborations, funding structures, spaces and shared practices participate in shaping knowledge production.
In large-scale research projects and programs such as USE and NAFA, the scale is to redesign and remodel educational systems through professional development and organizational development. In this strand of inquiry, research environments, institutional infrastructures and collaborative knowledge ecologies are researched as organisationally designed conditions for inquiry.
Artistic and Curatorial Studio Practice
Artistic and curatorial practice is a central strand of Ontoepistemic Design. It intertwines with research, leadership, and education, while also developing on its own artistic terms. My recent work creates environments and stages situations through installation, live action, moving image, poetic writing, garments, projection, and spatial composition. These works explore how multiple realities can coexist and become experientially present.
The works are situated, site-specific, and materially driven. Garments, installations, projections, spatial compositions, texts, and bodily movements create environments in which different realities, bodies, materials, and ways of knowing meet.
The recent artistic and curatorial project Anatomy Galaxy is one example.
Interwoven Practices
I understand my work as unfolding through multiple interconnected practices.
Artistic practice creates environments, images, texts, and live situations in which multiple realities can coexist and become experientially present.
Research develops concepts and empirical knowledge about material-semiotic arrangements and practices of knowing.
Curating composes exhibitions, events, and participatory situations through which bodies, materials, media, and environments are brought into relation.
Education creates environments through which learning, experience, and knowing become possible.
Leadership creates and shapes institutional conditions through which people, ideas, collaborations, and knowledge ecologies can grow.
Design moves across all five practices as the creation and shaping of material-semiotic arrangements.
Together, these practices constitute different expressions of Ontoepistemic Design.
Examples: Ontoepistemic Design
Current Work
Current projects develop Ontoepistemic Design through different sites and forms of practice.
- Epistemic Environments
- Learning Environments
- Research Environments
- Curatorial Studio Inquiry
- Science Communication
- Museums and Heritage
- Knowledge Ecologies
- Artistic Research
- Institutional Infrastructures
- More-than-Human Epistemics
Together these projects continue to develop Ontoepistemic Design as an evolving programme of world-making inquiry.
An Invitation
Ontoepistemic Design is intentionally transdisciplinary.
The programme welcomes collaboration across Learning Sciences, Science and Technology Studies, Design Research, Curating and Museum Studies, Artistic Research, Education, Architecture, Heritage, Environmental Humanities and related fields.
A central question within the research strand of Ontoepistemid Design is:
How do material-semiotic arrangements participate in the practice, enactment and configuration of knowing?
Rather than asking what knowledge is, research in Ontoepistemic Design asks how knowledge continually comes into being through arrangements, practices, media, environments and design—and how reshaping these arrangements participates in making and remaking worlds.
Ontoepistemic Design is world-making through multiple, situated and socio-materially distributed practices of knowing.
As people begin to know differently, they also begin to inhabit the world differently.
