Playing in the Grass
When is the last time you experienced awe and wonder at 8 am? When I decided to run a workshop using natural materials, I expected the actual workshop to be informative. What I didn’t expect was that the process of gathering rather than creating could be transformative to my practice.
I wake up excited to facilitate the first in-person workshop since the before times, but with a surge of anxiety, realising I have no idea how long it will take to gather natural materials. I know how long the laser cutter takes, how long I need to trim and fold, and the inevitability of a printer malfunction if I’m doing it the night before. This knowledge is routine and ritual, built through training as a designer.
But for this workshop, we want to incorporate natural materials. We want to see how exploring climate change and action might feel different when thinking through and with wooden textures, earthy smells and fragile leaves. I am excited and feel a bit like a child as I prepare my scissors and Tupperware containers and head out for my scavenger hunt.
I used to play outside for hours. Armed with my magnifying glass, I would lose myself in the grassy worlds of bugs below, becoming topography to the grasshoppers that would land on me. When they would stay still, I could study them and feel them studying me back from the one eye facing my direction. How was I being seen? What were they looking at with the other eye that was out of view to me? I was small, and it was easy to lose sight of myself by following the trails of ants and checking in on the growth of sprouts that popped up all over the ground after summer rains. As a child, it was less of a backyard and more of a relational field of immanence that I didn’t need Deleuze to enjoy or to sense my belonging in. I was part of something more than my family or my year level, and in turn, the world I was part of was co-constituting me.
Instead of play clothes, I am in a nice shirt and what we now call “hard” pants, suitable for in-person encounters in professional settings. I try to protect these work clothes from the work of collecting grasses and branches, and think about the work these clothes let me do; the appropriateness of this uniform for catching a train to the city and presenting and facilitating. But as I continue my way down the back alley by the parking lot near my house, I start to feel less like a part of nature and more like something that stands out. Not because of my attire, but because of my way of being in the world and this parking lot.
This isn’t a botanical garden, meant for lingering gazes and close examinations of the sort I am engaged in –it’s just that these seed pods are incredible. Lost in a little universe of organically aligned indentations, I can see how the pod has grown around the seeds, and the intra-action of growth and protection and emergence into the world, all made visible in this casing. I wonder about its name and marvel at its similarity to the pods from the bottle bush tree 13,000 km away from where I grew up. The connection to home makes me smile as I continue, crouched by the curb in the parking lot, carefully selecting seeds to put into my bag.
I only take a few leaves or flowers from each plant, and I mostly use dried pods and seeds on the ground as I find it more than enough. In fact, I find too much. I have almost filled the bag with various trimmings, pods, rocks, and twigs in my enchanted state. Collecting, cutting, smelling, scavenging and benefiting from nature’s ability to co-exist in these urban spaces, I wonder about my own design identity. I wonder about the designer in all of this.
Margret Somerville writes about an article by Hultman and Lenz Taguchi, (2010). This article is considered an important text for the way it applies and entangles post-human theory in a real-world learning event as it details the “coming into play” (2020: 230) between a girl and sand. Somerville interweaves theories from Karen Barad and Guiles Deleuze into the article to take the reader through a relational materialist approach to agency as a “quality that emerges in-between different bodies involved in mutual engagements and relations”. She makes me wonder about the coming into Design that takes place between the screen, the adobe programs, the printer and laser cutter and myself.
Sommerville elaborates, describing how:
“In this sense, “the girl and the sand simultaneously “pose questions” to each other in the process of trying to make themselves intelligible to each other as different kinds of matter involved in an active and ongoing relation” (p. 530).
What I am doing no longer feels intelligible as a design practice; sitting at a computer, making decisions and imposing my creative will to make things. I feel entirely at the mercy of nature, realising my credibility as a designer and success of this workshop are inextricably linked to the generosity of my environment. That is what scared me this morning, setting out outrageously early in case I couldn’t find anything suitable.
My bag, which has so many times carried envelopes with laser cut figures, printed cards, designerly templates, is now filled with composite layers of stones and seeds, long tendrils of the appropriately named “grass tree,” flowers and leaves. Carried by the enthusiasm of collecting and finding, my previous concern with organisation and making things tidy seem laughable. I am grateful and indebted in a very different way to the usual sense of care and sometimes obligation that I feel when the topic of protecting the environment arises.
On the way to the workshop, some of the awe and wonder that filled my body and animated my scavenging dissipates, giving way to concerns this won’t be appropriate for a Design Week event. If I hadn’t designed something, would my credibility be lost? Might my ability to facilitate be diminished? I feel the dissonance between my body on the train and my childhood self, hiding under the rose bushes where even the mosquitos feeding off my ankles and parents calling for supper could not tear me away. I wonder about our ability to be so easily removed from nature now as adults, and start wondering about the destabilising effects of putting leaves and gasses, rocks and seeds on the pristine tables in the conference room at the Art Centre.
As people come in and smile or start exclaiming and excitedly touching our garden of material co-facilitators, these doubts subside. I wonder what questions these materials will pose back to us. What might they let us imagine, feel, or re-discover as we come into play together? How might we grow beyond our identities as workers, as survivors of a pandemic and Melbourne lockdowns, as victims of bushfires and as occupants of changing, always already unprecedented times? As I watch strangers sit down together, smiling and starting to play with branches and examine seeds before the workshop has even started, I forget about being a designer and lean into the feeling of possibility and the curiosity of a child playing in the grass.
This post is an updated version of a post written in 2021 for the Design Week workshop I ran as part of WonderLab with Dr. Ilya Fridman and advice from the always generous Professor Lisa Grocott
The amazingly thoughtful and articulate Sam Rye has also written about using regenerative design methods, such as this terrific article, and some of his reflections have seeded and nurtured my own thinking around these topics.
In this article I refer to the work of:
- Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. The logic of sense. Trans. M. Lester. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Hultman, Karin, and Hillevi Lenz Taguchi. 2010. “Challenging anthropocentric analysis of visual data: A relational materialist methodological approach to educational research.” International journal of qualitative studies in education 23.5 : 525–542.
- Somerville, Margaret. 2020. Posthuman Theory and Practice in Early Years Learning. 103–127. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67286-1_6
