Equine Eyes: Imagining Otherwise - A Speculative Feminist Design Approach to Interspecies Kinship

Equine Eyes (2024) is an ontological tool, or, to emphasise its playfulness, an ontological toy, for imagining with. It explores how Designing and making can promote new forms of kinship, and new types of knowledge. By better understanding the horse, we can reimagine it, and our relationship to it. As a piece of Academic Carpentry, it applies Design Rhetoric to craft an experience for helping audiences become more attentive to other species, specifically horses; but in so doing, they learn to become with other species – and the world – in new ways.

By applying philosophies from Object Orientated Ontology to the making process, to build experiences which nudge towards the flatness it strives for, the project tries to craft philosophy. The project as a whole employs Feminist methods to question the ways in which we discipline and situate knowledge; what ways we construct our knowledge(s) of other species and the world. The annotated portfolio platforms situated, subjective, positioned and crafted knowledge through Research through Design as a way to trouble discipline, the way we know the world, and our relationship with other species.

The project is Designed to explore different ways of thinking, doing and being with the world. It applies tactics from Feminist Design to build a playful, immersive, ontological experiment which promotes post-humanist discourses of thinking, and rethinking other species. The device uses the ambiguous spaces opened by play to experiment with different ways of thinking, knowing and being with horses, and the wider world. The work resists positivist rational ways of knowing other species, and champions plurality, positionality, provisionality, complexity, resistance, liberation, social justice, wellbeing, equality, entanglement, and inclusion to craft a Speculative Design that is open and greedy at the edges.