Yuxi: Hi, Marie Louise. To set the stage, I’d love to ask who are you, where are you currently in the expansive field of design + posthumanism, and where are you headed in your work and exploration?
Marie Louise: Hi Yuxi! Thank you so much for inviting me to this micro interview. My baby is currently napping, so let’s see how long I have to answer this first question about who I am 🙂 These days I’m mostly a mother on parental leave. Having a baby puts things in perspective yet also makes every speculation and question very concrete… what’s the future going to look like when my child grows up… why does he not want to eat… can we travel there with all that air pollution… how do I raise my son as a feminist… what’s that lump in my breast… does it soon stop raining so we can go out and watch the trees?! Although my research is on women’s health and feminist posthumanism and I often use my own lived experience to inspire my design practice, I have made a clear decision to not do any work while on parental leave (does this interview count?). I would not use my own pregnancy and postpartum experience as my research subject. I really needed a break from academia, and honestly care work takes up all my time and energy and I do enjoy being absorbed in the oxytocin-release of skin-to-skin cuddles, microorganism exchanges of bodily fluids and seeing that first new movement my son just learnt. Imagine seeing the world anew through the eyes of another little human, whose DNA will forever be part of my own body (see “microchimerism”). An opportunity to reframe everything you thought you already knew. Right now, we are (re)discovering the texture and taste of all living and non-living surfaces! But yes of course, as a researcher it is difficult not to let one’s personal life and big life transitions, such as growing, birthing and feeding another human life, influence where I am headed next, and of course as a feminist researcher this is very valuable knowledge. I am incredibly interested in the relations between reproductive justice and climate crisis, how environmental changes and hazards influence the most intimate of our human bodies, and how we, humans, impact ecologies through care practices that are designed to only sustain our own health, our own survival. Design is key to how these relations have been formed and continue to form. I explored these questions in the project Biomenstrual together with my good friend and colleague Nadia Campo Woytuk, where we reimagined human menstrual care as an environmentally-nourishing practice. We redesigned menstrual hygiene products to be biodegradable so that they would bring the nutrients from menstrual blood back into depleted soil. The project traces and makes visible ignored relations between plastic pollution, healthcare, vaginas and local moss ecologies. Who knew a healthy vaginal flora and sphagnum moss (a moss species that has historically been used to absorb menstrual blood) has the exact same pH value (pH 3,5-4,5)? Moving from menses to mosses have taught me so many lessons, which I hope to bring into my future design research. For now, while I am still waiting to get back in my menstrual cycle and back to academic work, I have been enjoying lots of sphagnum moss on hikes with my baby strapped to my body. My friends’ dog did however start bleeding just recently, so congratulations from me ❣️
Yuxi: I’ve explored the Biomenstrual project blog, and it has expanded in diverse and exciting directions from moss to soil and machine learning. Could you share more about the challenges or discoveries you encountered while developing the project? How did you approach these challenges in the design process, and were there any specific techniques or practices that helped you connect with these non-human participants meaningfully?
Marie Louise: Biomenstrual was an incredibly fun and explorative project. While Nadia and I officially started working on it in 2021, our conversations and design explorations started earlier in our collaborative fabulating collage-work with Karey Helms presented in our paper “Scaling Bodily Fluids for Utopian Fabulations” (Helms et. al, 2021).
We all three worked with intimate health and human body-centric technologies, but we developed a troubling unease with the implicit anthropocentrism of these practices. Learning about the plastic pollution and endocrine disruptions of menstrual hygiene products — polluting both Earth and human bodies — was quite depressing. At the same time we were also tired of talking about “menstrual taboos” and negative narratives around menstrual blood as disgusting. We wanted to bring more joy to the topic of menstrual health, and following the relations and thread of many intersecting and sometimes contradicting non-human participants, really brought so much inspiration and new exciting directions to the project, but also challenges of course! The project did not start with one “problem”, but a mix of many both theoretical, designerly and everyday interests and concerns. One of these was the discovery that Sphagnum Moss has been used as a menstrual blood absorbing material since perhaps the beginning of times? Although there is little documentation of early practices (perhaps because of taboos and many scientists not menstruating themselves), it’s known that people, including the Indigenous Samí population, has used Sphagnum Moss to absorb bodily fluids, including blood from wounds and menstrual blood, as well as using it as a baby diaper! Sphagnum moss also became more widely used during First World War, when there was a shortage of cotton, and actually Johnson & Johnson tried marketing and selling a product “Sfag-na-kins” (a moss menstrual pad), which they also patented (along with a campaign with the lead acting “Moss Girl”). These were interesting stories that we wanted to not only read about but try to live out, perform or explore materially. What does these historical and not-very-well archived stories look like in present and future times? We used speculative but also material and more-than-human approaches, going from quite conceptual and wild fabulations to working very materially with a microscopic precision and getting our hands dirty, gathering moss in ponds and fabricating biodesign-inspired menstrual pads in our kitchens. We also tested out the actual absorbtion-quality in a lab with a material scientist. So we all the time really moved between and through various disciplines and approaches, leading to new interesting directions, opening up new questions. One challenge was then of course how to present all the knowledge and materials we developed, and reflecting on whether we should “finish” the project with “one final object or artifact” or leave it more open-ended and instead presenting the whole collection or assemblage of things and practices we explored. We decided to keep it more open, honoring and respecting the emerging and evolving state of the project. An open exhibition, combined with a “spell book” with recipes and additional workshops where people were invited to make their own menstrual pads, served this purpose. Another challenge was the ethics of gathering Sphagnum Moss, how much to take and how, considering that this species has a purpose in its ecology, including its key role in carbon storage. Last challenge is on how to respect and honor Indigenous practices with mosses, which is something existing more-than-human design approaches did not really help us with. Reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Gathering Moss” was eye and heart opening, and it helped us bring poetic and mindful attention to mosses in our work by understanding not what they are but what they do. So how did we connect with mosses, particularly sphagnum moss, meaningfully? Hands-on gathering it, trying to understand how and where it grows, what are its fascinating facets. We tried to dry it and soak it wet again bringing it back to life. Creating new habitats for it to grow, helping it reproduce and its spores to spread. Understanding it’s pH value by dyeing it with red cabbage juice. Telling stories about it. Fabulating with it. Making collages with it. Looking at its microscopic single-cell rootless texture through a microscope. Cleaning it, making it dirty again. Taking thousand pictures of it and teaching a machine learning algorithm how it looks. Touching its soft fluffiness with our hands, putting our noses far down in it and smelling it. Slowing down with it… these and many more practices were ways, for us, to more meaningfully connect with or learn from the mosses in ways that met them in their ecological existence and not just as a material for us designers to exploit or use.
There is so much more to learn from mosses. These creatures are often overlooked, but they are so small and simple, and can endure the most harsh environments by just being still… sorry for this long answer, but it’s hard for me to stop when I get started about this project. It’s such an eclectic mix of so much joy and curious explorations and wild relations.
Yuxi: There are so much here to unpack, and I truly appreciate the time and care you’ve put into sharing the challenges and methods you and Nadia navigated. As we wrap up, I’d love to hear your perspective on the role of machine learning within posthuman design. How do you envision machine learning and AI contributing to or transforming the field, particularly in fostering deeper connections with more-than-human worlds? Are there specific challenges or potentials you see on the horizon?
Marie Louise: That is a lovely question, and something that brings us to a new place in this conversation… Sometimes a discussion comes up in more-than-human design about the role of AI and machine learning in comparison to other non-human and living beings we are designing for and with, such as plants or bacteria. Obviously AI, also, is truly connected with the more-than-human worlds, although my first thought would be in ways that are incredibly harmful (here I am of course thinking about the horrific amount of electric power involved in running machine learning and the material resources for its infrastructure). So if you would for instance be using machine learning and AI to foster a deeper connection with more-than-human worlds, then it would be important to consider that ML and AI are already very intimately connected with the more-than-human worlds, but in very non-innocent and harmful ways. Any design attempt to foster a caring connection to more-than-human worlds, using ML, would be ignorant of, and even contributing to, ecological impacts, if this is not part of the work. That said, the way out is not necessarily to not use machine learning and AI, but to do so reflexively, not just as a tool. There are many great examples of this, such as Iohanna Nicenboim’s work on situated climate-aware conversational agents, and I love the artwork “Drone in Search for a Four-Leaf Clover” by Sputniko!. I have myself explored machine learning in relation to more-than-human design for several years, starting with the workshop series “More-than-human Design and AI: In Conversation with Agents”, where we interviewed voice assistants, such as Siri, Alexa and Google Home, about their material, social and political values and infrastructures. Here we included the AI-powered assistants in research on themselves. In another experiment, I trained a machine learning algorithm on an image dataset of historical gynaecology tools, to produce a generative AI video. The result was absolutely horrifying, pointing both to the horrors of the gynaecology equipment and the AI aesthetics and its underlying image data sets. And lastly, with the moss classifier image recognition tool, that I mentioned earlier that we created in the Biomenstrual project; here the goal was not to create a smooth tool to find and connect with mosses; instead, the process of teaching the algorithm about various moss species was a process of actually also teaching ourselves about the moss species; eventually making the tool obsolete. I guess these examples point to some kind of critical creative practice with AI and machine learning that is not afraid of the technical practice of getting one’s hands dirty and being implicated in the use of AI, but that does not use AI as a neutral tool. Rather when using machine learning within posthuman design, it is necessary to do so with a curious care for AI’s ecological impact on more-than-human worlds and with a feminist justice-oriented lens that disobey the dominant logics of AI and how it harms especially already marginalised groups.
Yuxi: Thank you for sharing your insights about AI and ML. Your thoughts beautifully highlight the complexities and responsibilities involved in integrating these technologies within posthuman design. This certainly leaves an open thread for future discussions. Now, please accept the needle and continue the thread onwards!
Marie Louise: Thank you for your motivating words :). Looking forward to follow the thread onwards, and connect with you again!