morning computer pluriverse

Leonora Carrington, whom people are complaining about, again.

Ancient sculptures were scented.

…visiting ancient sacred sites would have been a rich olfactory experience. Sculptures in ancient Greece were covered with perfume just as bodies were. The practice was known as kosmesis, a “super-adornment” that also involved applying textiles and jewelry. Among the nearly 3,000 stone inscriptions found on Delos are those that record the ingredients necessary for kosmesis for the statues of Hera and Artemis. The list included sponges, oil, soda carbonate, linen, wax, and rose perfume.

Super-adornment!

Kerstin Brätsch.

This idea that there can be at any one given time multiple intersecting, beautiful in some cases, conflicting worlds in which design occupies, operates, and works is a really powerful concept that is driving where design is heading.

This links to a podcast episode that I haven’t listened to yet, but I like the term pluriverse. There’s a transcript lower down the page, which is great for me as I read faster than people talk.

Pluriversal design, the concept of a world of many worlds as design practice, is not a new idea but one that has drastically increased in influence. First, here’s Renata Marques Leitão explaining how the pluriversal design paradigm can restart discussions of change:

I think that we have to start to identify what I name theories of change, how change happens. What are our assumptions about how change happens and what’s the final result? What do we want to produce? What is the pathway towards change? And then our partners, they also have their theories of change. They also have their pathways. And you can’t really imagine that your pathway, just because you are a very educated person, is better than their pathway. So it’s a lot about recognizing our assumptions, especially assumptions about how change happens.

The idea that we all live in intersecting worlds is worth picking apart a bit: it’s either blindingly obvious or it’s a useful filter to look at life through, and I’m not sure which yet.

Sometimes it’s very difficult to separate what is real help and what is simply oppression. 

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

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