I'm interested in how our idea of our subjectivity and role in the world, or 'self-model', is shaped by designed things around us. How driving a car makes me feel like a king of the road, how trying on clothing make me see myself as an artwork; how holding money casts me as a boss, a plant pot as a protector; how chatting with a bot makes me feel more or less human. In other words, how any technology is also a self-technology➪.

If so, how could technologies support – rather than hinder – a transition to a relational self-model➪, one where we view ourselves as the product of a context as much as the coproducers of it. A modernist self-model that separates the subject from other bodies has served to justify regimes of extraction and exploitation. How instead to produce the relations that produce the relational self?

How does design contribute to the production of a separable self-model, and could it instead invite a relational one?

• sq1 How to understand self-models? (background)
• sq2 How to analyse the effect of technology? (lens)
• sq3 How does design invite the separable self? (problem)
• sq4 What are material conditions of the relational self? (openings)
• sq5 How can design invite a relational self-model? (proposal)

To find out, I want to engage in an artistic research project: using making and sensing, both to find patterns in existing designed objects, and explore ways of using aesthetics and materiality to invite a relational self-models.

If I think of myself as wise I'll avoid situations where I might come across as naive. I might come to believe it's true and I'll effectively start performing the role of a wise person. That is, until the eventual fall, a situation where I can't avoid saying something foolish or making a slip, thus losing my role and reputation, and needing to face my self-image. This research project starts from the suspicion that something similar is happening with the dominant self-model in modernity.

How many crises today make sense from a particular idea of what the human is: essentially separate from the world, its context? Ecology: a matter of managing nature for use. Politics: a matter of collecting people's rational perspectives. Economy: a matter of giving individuals free choice. Our worldview structures what seems possible and plausible (Campagna). And to make certain ideals possible, it required certain worldviews.

Critical posthumanism argues many forms of oppression and exploitation have been justified based on a certain humanist understanding of what it means to be a human. While claiming universal human qualities like rationality, this humanist perspective only grants them to one side of divides like human v. "stupid" animal; white v. "barbaric" black; man v. "emotional" woman. This not only dehumanises the 'other' but also represses those lesser valued qualities in oneself.

Meanwhile, the world is encroaching on our agency. From the limits of our planet, to the microbes in our gut, down to the quantum actions of subatomic particles (Barad). I resonate with authors that expose separability as a myth – 'we have never been modern' (Latour), 'we're all cyborgs' (Haraway). But when clean-cut separations don't hold up, how to avoid the reflex to retreat further into isolation cocoons? I know these inherited modernist desires for control, overview, solitude all to well, every time I feel stressed or threatened. But these only offer temporary relief and isolate me from the world and the others in it, who will never be fully controlled nor grasped. I want to get out of these instincts and embrace relational interpretations of safety as trust, and freedom as relating.

So, a need for a different subjectivity (also: Wynter)

ontology	essentialist	relational
desire	seperation	strings
subjectivity	modernist	posthumanist
safety	control	trust
honesty	independent	situated
ethics	neutrality	desire

To find out, I want to engage in an artistic research project: using creative ways of knowing to find patterns in historical designed objects, and to explore ways of using aesthetics and materiality to invite a relational self-conception. I don't know yet what would be a good context➪ for this research, one where I can meet academic peers and contribute. But first I'll explain a bit more about the topic➪ and methods➪.

With the term 'self-technology' I want to develop a lens to analyse the way that any technology may affect our self-conception. Not just how we relate to the world, but also reflexively to our selves. Here I can imagine building on theories of agential cutting in new materialism (Barad), mediation theory in postphenomenology (Verbeek), or ontological design in design theory (Willis).

Technological mediation¹ of the world-relation.

Self-technology's metamediation² of the self-relation.

I think this reflexive effect happens both in explicit and implicit ways. There are many historical examples of explicit self-technologies: from mandalas, temple architecture and spiritual rituals, to figurines, self-portraits and psycho-analytical diagrams. Each is a technique of framing and working on the self.

When new technologies are introduced they often start acting as accidental self-technologies: they come to influence how we relate to what it means to be human. Structurally, the steam engine became a model for the working human, the computer for the thinking human, the corporation for the human planning their livelihood. Would generative AI become a model of the relational creative human? But also in everyday technology: what kind of subject is made through conventional design aims of clarity and control?

I'm interested in exploring the different dimensions and ways of how self-technologies mediate our self-relation. The materiality of subjectivity. Could there be a practice of explicit subject-design? Of including the self-forming aspects of a technology in the design brief? Or would that exaggerate the power of design in such ontological matter? Still, if this mediation is happening anyways, what to do?

¹ often the main focus of analysis in technology studies like postphenomenology, see Verbeek (2005).
² concept developed in my MSc thesis on posthumanist design.

While I work most comfortably through artistic media, I miss academia, a community of people being passionate about studying shared questions. I see the artistic works as primary research to be analysed and contextualised through theoretical lenses, with the aim to contribute with new concepts and frameworks. In the quest for a place to do this research, I have two main questions:

1. What would be a fitting academic field and discipline to situate this research within? One that shares my questions and houses concepts and frameworks that may help me analyse self-technologies. For example:

• critical posthumanism and new materialism in the humanities, where I could build upon theories of posthumanist subjectivity (Braidotti 2013) and agential realism (Barad 2007) with an account of the material conditions affecting subject formation on an individual level.
• postphenomenology in philosophy of technology, where I could focus on the mediation (Verbeek 2005) of the reflexive self-relation, in line with my philosophy thesis on 'metamediation'.
• posthumanist design in design research, complementing the emerging recognition of how the design process itself is always already a more-than-human endeavour (Wakkary 2021), with how designed things affect how users relate to themselves in their surroundings.
• ontological design (Willis 2005) in design studies, extending the ontological shaping of the world to how things may shape ontologies themselves: the way people understand the world.
• ?

2. What would be relevant academic fields to bring in to challenge and inspire the artistic methods? A field that may complement theoretical gaps in the main field, or provide empirical studies to support the analysis. Some ideas:

• neuro-archeology, to understand the role of artifacts like cosmograms and self-depictions in the development of subjectivities, like Lambros Malafouris on the influence of beads on self-awareness (2008).
• decolonial studies to help recognise non-Western modes of subjectivity, such as Sylvia Wynter's genres of human and Rolando Vazquez (2020) decolonial aesthetics.
• philosophical anthropology, for a view of different models and practices of subjectivication, for instance Foucault's technologies of the self (1978).
• technological psychoanalysis, to support the analysis of subject formation, for instance Isabel Millar's psychoanalysis of AI (2021) or confrontation with the Lacanian Thing.
• contemporary marxisms, on how economic and political systems condition subject formation, structuring agency and desires beyond individual artifacts.
• cultural studies, for ways that aesthetics and subjectivies intersect, for instances through subcultures or phenomena like the dandy.

I work best through a combination of theoretical and practice-based research. Moving from philosophy to an artistic design MA, I felt liberated in the embodied and material ways of knowing that I could apply: e.g. mimicking what I was critical of, materialising speculations, or experimenting in performance. Especially when researching how things affect self-models, these methods of working with materiality and subjectivity as a site for research seem helpful.¹

Here are some ways I picture engaging with the subquestions:

sq1 How to understand self-models?

• diagramming of self-models, both to understand and compare them. Some are already visual (think Freud's iceberg), others can be drawn out. Can include metaphorical ones like the state's separation of legislative, executive, juridical branches.

sq3 How does design invite the separate self-model?

• mappings to gather and analyse instances of historical and current self-technologies from design & cultural studies, including;
  • design principles
  • objects across design disciplines
  • metaphors based on objects
  See gijs.garden where I collected care tools: things related to plantcare, mapped on how they affect how much control and engagement takes place.
• auto-ethnographic design research (Schouwenberg & Kaethler 2021). Starting from my own experience (and supported by feminist theory) to find entries of when the things around me make me feel more separate from the world. When looking deep enough, even navel-gazing can never end with the self, but will arrive at its contexts and conditions.
  See Objective Portrait where I explored the posibility for AI bias to work as a positioning tool by making self-portraits, or How to win trust in stormy weather? where I experimented with honest trust tactics through my fear of posing.

sq4 What are material conditions of the relational self?

• site portraits of relational contexts like raves, dinners, jams. What material conditions invite relational ways of being? Documented in photo, video, sound, site-writing.
• set design modeling relational contexts based on site visits, trying to craft the decor that sets the stage for the relational self. Documented in 3D, photo and/or video, like in Objective Portrait and How to win trust in stormy weather?.

sq5 How can design invite a relational self-model?

• visual speculation of future worlds where aspects from the relational contexts in the realm of technological design, like in the Post-Growth Compass critically explores possible futures for a think tank on human-technology-nature relations.
• object (re)design merging material and aesthetic qualities from relational contexts with those of existing objects. To craft objects to live with like in ¥€$ supernormal or as props like in Always Trust Me.

Throughout:

• essays as ways of finding patterns between different registers of references, and to think ways out of conceptual tensions. In the visual essay Between Fox Traps and Hero Bait for instance, I explored what design discourse could learn from the ambigutity of emerging types of memes. And Plantcare & Power Tools.
• workshops as ways of learning together. In teaching I try out methods of critique through complicity in Hypocrits, and self-portraiture as a positioning tool in Ego Design.
• performative talks and videos, both as a way to structure findings in a narrative and to play with ideas through the aestethics and roles of how I present. See for instance How to win trust in stormy weather?

¹ I see these forms of artistic research as a practical implication of a relational epistemology; they allow to work with situated, aesthetic, and embodied ways of knowing. This has overlap with methods in practice-based research, auto-ethnographic design research (Schouwenberg & Kaethler 2021), research-through-design, and the emergence of artistic PhDs.

I am an artistic researcher and educator based in Rotterdam, NL. I combine a background in philosophy and design to study how aesthetics and materiality affect ideas of the self in different contexts. My work includes videos, visuals, essays, websites, focusing on themes like the design of trust, artistic positioning, or care relations.

In my practice I deal with inherited modernism, and I use the self as a site of research: how do I embody my conditions, how do I respond when I change those? Born in the post-industrial city of Eindhoven – self-proclaimed 'Brainport' and 'Design Capital' of the Benelux – I feel like I grew up with modernism and tech-optimism running through my veins. As a smart and male kid, I've come to know the desire for control, for independence, for overview all too well – every time I feel overwhelmed, stressed or threatened. I read my practice as a way of dealing with these inherited modernist desires in a relational world.

I work within artistic and academic contexts. I hold an MSc Philosophy of Science, Technology and Society from University Twente, and an MA Contextual Design from Design Academy Eindhoven. I've presented work at Dutch Design Week, Noorderlicht, Economia Festival, Sandberg Institute; collaborated with parties like Stichting Toekomstbeeld der Technologie, Today Art Foundation; published essays in Robida Magazine, Designo, C Magazine, and academically I worked on papers for the DIS, CHI, and HTR conferences.

I currently teach at the MA Critical Inquiry Lab of Design Academy Eindhoven, and co-run Extra Practice, a shared artist space in Rotterdam.

Here you can find my CV and website.

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