Mariana Simões

Caring Archive of Landscape Colors: How to design a digital platform of making materials with the world

Material design is a human-centered practice in which extraction processes are not approached transparently. Materials are often regarded as abstract entities whose origins, damaging extraction processes or fabrication methods are secondary to their economic potential. The present research is concerned with supporting designers and researchers in establishing more caring connections between natural landscapes and material objects through color pigments. Informed by post-humanist perspectives of feminist care, this pictorial (co-authored by Mariana Simões, Fernanda Soares da Costa, Valentina Nisi, Mariana Pestana, Frederico Duarte) aims to illustrate how to build on alternative and other-than-human approaches to cataloging and sensing landscapes, deconstructing current anthropocentric paradigms. Through foraging nature and practice-based design explorations of colored biomaterials, the authors describe the process that inspired the design of the storytelling platform “A Caring Archive of Landscape Colors”. This work contributes to the design of Interactive Systems by providing a blueprint of a potential artifact that can lead designers to more informed, engaged and sustainable ways of relating with the world, at a bioregional scale.