Collaboration : Holobiont Skin

Holobiont Skin: a dialogue with the living

Text by Catherine D'Amours
Photo of the installation by Jean-Michael Seminaro

In his last text, Adieu Design, Alain Findeli wrote: «I would like to thank the spirit of design, the spirit of the times and a wonderful school of life, which continues to nourish me, because it has convinced me that it contains, more vividly than elsewhere, resources that the Anthropocene will greatly need». We are at a time of social and climatic upheaval when, as practitioners of design, we need to ask ourselves how we envision the future of design. Despite its ability to facilitate our understanding and exploration of the world, its production continues to leave its mark. However, seen in a different light, we believe that design has the potential to provide a number of solutions to contemporary issues.

Is it possible to study various design methodologies to convert the ecological footprint into responsible action? The Holobiont Skin project was developed in response to these questions concerning our practice. We drew on the two areas of design that concern us - clothing design and graphic design and visual experiences - and embarked on an interdisciplinary exploration to define the contours of a project that would shift our approaches.

Since the beginnings of atelier b, Anne-Marie and Catherine have cultivated an increasingly responsible and sustainable practice. For example, their research project into textile circularity, in which they transform production offcuts and moulded objects, shows their interest in waste-free production, aligned with nature's processes. They have also undertaken research into natural dyeing, experimenting with local plants to reduce the environmental footprint of their textile production. For my part, I'm conducting research in the field of social design and responsible practices, trying to combine reconnection to the living world with new technologies, research that I've been trying to integrate into my teaching since becoming a professor-researcher at UQAM's École de design. Anne-Marie, Catherine and I have known each other for over 10 years and have worked together on a number of different projects in the past, most notably at atelier b. Our paths have evolved a great deal since those early collaborations, and we felt that it would be very unifying to approach design with these new parentheses that have been added around our current practices.

Exactly 7 and 9 years ago, we welcomed our children Romeo, Laurier and Jeanne into our lives. Becoming a mother involves many upheavals, including a long transformation of our identity and our perception of the world. The arrival of a child is often synonymous with anxiety about a world out of balance. In particular, an anxiety that is shaped by an environment that is changing and undergoing a profound ecological crisis. Many of us are familiar with eco-anxiety. This state brings together a multitude of sub-concepts related to ecological distress, such as solastalgia. Solastalgia is a concept that was problematised by Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher. He defines this feeling as the inconsolable sadness we feel when faced with an environment that has undergone irreparable change. It's a state that echoes our inner waves ever since our children set foot on the soil of this endangered territory. Solastalgia can plunge us into a deep lethargy, but it also has the power to become an invaluable driving force for lasting behavioural change. So we asked ourselves: How can interdisciplinary collaboration and the exploration of solastalgia enrich the practice of design and lead to practices that go beyond the traditional framework?

Exploring solastalgia through various creative projects has led me to work on personal video recordings of daily walks, using machine learning to create mutant landscapes that aesthetically mirror this feeling of unfathomable nostalgia. This first phase of research and creation first came to life during a residency at Hexagram (a network for research and creation in the arts, culture and technology) in the Cœur des sciences at UQAM. During this first phase of research, I realised that creating around these concepts allowed me to transform myself and reconsider my place in the living world. It then became clear to me that we are not separate from the living world, but that we are part of it, in the same way as all the other living things that inhabit the Earth. That's when I came up with the idea of creating a garment that represents this deep connection with the living world. Holobiont is a concept that has been defined by Lynn Margulis, an American microbiologist, as an organism composed of a host and multiple associated symbiotic organisms, forming a cooperative functional unit. In other words, an organism would be composed not only of its own body, but also of all the symbiotic micro-organisms living within it. It was in resonance with these ideas that Holobiont Skin began to germinate somewhere between the head and the heart.

The project was carried out using a research-creation approach adopting a co-creation posture. Co-creation refers to a process in which several parties, be they designers, users, experts or other participants, actively collaborate to develop solutions in response to specific challenges. Through workshops and meetings, we have exchanged certain skills and techniques. Traditional sewing skills met technological explorations and were intertwined in the first prototypes. Each stage was discussed and each time we came away from these moments of exchange with new missions to accomplish. A reflexive design process then began. Reflexive design has been studied by a number of design researchers, notably Donald Schön, who writes that "thinking in action involves the ability to recognise patterns in situations as they unfold, to develop an intuition about the important aspects of the situation and to act accordingly". This exchange with the situation has enabled us to design an artefact that illustrates our ability to effectively solve a specific problem while mutually enriching our respective expertise. By exploring new frontiers of knowledge, we built a bridge between our two disciplines, and succeeded in transposing the holobionte concept into our methodological approach.

This path led us to a more holistic and symbiotic understanding of our subject of study and enabled us to answer our initial question: How can interdisciplinary collaboration and the exploration of solastalgia enrich design practice and lead to practices that go beyond the traditional framework? Through co-creation at the intersection of textile design and graphic design, we went beyond the usual framework of our practices. The Holobionte Skin prototype is a poetic representation of the coexistence of skills and entities. The hybridisation of traditional techniques and machine learning in the creation of patterns printed on cotton and silk textiles illustrates the possibility of harmonious cohabitation within the fabric of the living world.

These first iterations of the project lead us to believe that, in the context of the environmental crisis, it will not be possible to stop technology. It is possible, however, to learn to use them responsibly, to hijack them, to question them. The first prototype of the Holobionte Skin installation bears conceptual witness to these encounters and to this necessary reciprocity.

On a more personal level, my practice as a graphic designer is slowly being transformed through contact with the expertise of other practitioners, such as Anne-Marie and Catherine. I now know that an interdisciplinary design practice fosters exchange about social, environmental and political issues that have the potential to open up a dialogue with others. Co-creation in design becomes a language that opens the way to solutions we wouldn't have thought of otherwise. Design thus becomes a mediator, refining our understanding of the world and creating spaces where new and enriching ideas can take shape.

In the end, the exploration of solastalgia was the trigger for a shared awareness. It was in fact the pebble that created a few perceptible ripples in the river, enabling us to join forces and think things through together. We can't let this environmental crisis hold us back until the end. What if the solution lay in collective action, in reinventing our social systems and co-creating new methods?

1.  Findeli, A. (2022). Adieu design?. Collection Actes : Alessandro Zinna.
2. Albrecht, G. (2019). Earth emotions : new words for a new world. Ithaca, Cornell University Press.
3. Margulis, L. (1993). Symbiosis in cell evolution : microbial communities in the Archean and Proterozoic eons (2nd ed). Freeman.
4.  Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner : how professionals think in action ([Pbk. ed.]). Basic Books.