Thinking about the more than human in making and research process.

The aim of this workshop is to explore the role of making and embodied thinking in processes of engaging with research data, findings and ideas. As researchers, we are inseperable from the world (Harraway, 2016), in which humans and things “slip-slide into each other” (Bennet, 2010, p.4). Thus, the more-than-human material world, and the materiality of our human bodies, is always part of the research processes. Ingold (2013) describes processes of ‘making to think’ or ‘designerly making’ (69), in which human cognition is never fully or entirely in control. Instead, the maker’s imagination must hurry to keep up with the materials, in a process forever poised between “catching dreams and coaxing materials” (73). This workshop will explore processes of making and thinking, by employing intra action with simple materials, including paper, scissors, lego and playdoh, in order to explore research data. The workshop will begin with the presentation of two research projects. In the first a closed Facebook Group and a new build residential apartment block are the sites of the research. I present explorations of home learning activities which were enacted across the sites with a focus on more-than-human flows between the digital and physical spaces and places. I will share images from the Facebook Group and some models I have made with the digital data. In the second, young children played and explored during a series of ‘forest schools’ session as a nursery. In particular, I focus on the children’s rolling down a small hill in the nursery grounds, thinking about how these actions came to feel so significant and place-shaping within the research. I will share in particular video data from a series of different episodes of hill rolling, and offer as a provocation ideas about the role of bodily experience, place, materiality of the hill and intra action in making sense of these episodes. In the second part of the workshop, participants will be invited to explore the emergent ideas we have presented, by making to think. Choosing from paper, lego or playdoh, participants will work the materials with their bodies, at the same time as discussing the ideas presented, whilst still images and video data are played on loop throughout the making session. To conclude the session we ask the participants to give us feedback on the experience of exploring data but not having been there for the original fieldwork. Drawing on Haraway’s (2016) concept of speculative fabulation (Haraway, 2016) we end the session by reflecting with our material creations through storytelling. To explore how these different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives might come into dialogue and enable us to think in new ways about research, making and design processes as never a soley human endeavour.