While reading and re-reading a three-part trilogy called Spheres by Peter Sloterdijk ([1998–2004] 2011–2016), I got on with designing . I took eight years on and off, taking longer to read Spheres than it probably took the author to write it. I stayed for a while because it’s a complex trilogy and I continued to read femini st-queer -crip-science fiction too. I journeyed into the literature recommended by Spheres and read that too. I read myself into writing a companion . But I did not plan to.
There’s so much ground covered in the trilogy that many readers will experience an inspiring literary read that helps creative practitioners to laterally think, make and do. Unintended by Sloterdijk , I experienced a renewed interest in feminist technoscience . Spheres was published a decade after Donna Haraway first wrote the “Cyborg Manifesto” in 1983, and Octavia Butler had written the science fiction trilogy, Lilith’s Brood between 1987 and 1989. I read these books before I read Spheres. I didn’t discover feminist technoscience through Spheres, but it sure seems like Sloterdijk was doing just that in the final volume of Spheres. The broader word feminism concerns me in Spheres because it’s not the generative and car ing set of literatures that I know. The main offering of Spheres is to suggest that we live in co-isolated clubs and the trilogy does this by bringing together a range of disciplines . By erratically gathering contexts to create a continental philosophy, Sloterdijk has inadvertently gathered a plurality of feminisms , but it’s no club. The feminist ideas are dislocated and sidelined, but they’re also intriguingly multiple and divergent.
As a designer rather than a philosopher, I share Sloterdijk ’s implicit fear of global failure as an impetus to write about the depressive sphere . Sloterdijk is not a design er but a philosopher and Chair of Media, at ZKM , Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe , Germany . While the trilogy refers spatially to the “depressive sphere”, a reader may be more familiar with the temporal term of the Anthropocene , an epoch named at the International Geological Congress in 2016, where a feminist technoscience reader will know Donna Haraway’s term the “chthulucene ”, which emphasises the biological taxonomy of multispecies (2016). To produce and consume during this geological time is in itself an act of design ing our shared atmosphere.
The trick to reading Spheres is to bring more to it so as to implicate design into what being-in the depressive sphere might mean (I, 468). Digital “atmosphere designers ” (III, 65), of which I am one, work on problems like designing tech nical systems in the “depressive sphere” (I, 468). Sloterdijk figures atmosphere designers as architect s, graphic design ers and engineers but more broadly to how all humans can be considered as such through their product consumption. I contribute to this term by including sentient machines as atmosphere design ers too (in Chapters 3 and 6). I also entangle the three prevalent metaphors of Spheres which are bubbles , globes and foams . Bubbles signify intimate human relations between beings and things. Globes relate to maps and global systems like economic markets . Foam(s) are the co-isolated social arrangements like being-in an apartment block . Foam(s) is the trope most practical for considering what is defined socially as atmosphere design .
While I find atmosphere design er and depressive sphere generative terms, it became clear to me that my way of thinking about this agential situation had been fragmented and interrupted by Sloterdijk ’s narrative voice. Reading and re-reading about dislocated female bodies in pain and stress requires a reparative approach. How women’s bodies are used to explain the abstract and intangible aspects of the social environmental sphere and how they continue to pervade in design philosophy and practice needs further enquiry. Without such, the reader may continue to spiral down into Spheres without ever really knowing why, while those in the know, i.e. whose disability, impairment s and elliptical viewpoints support their understanding of gender , may have strategies to deal with texts that are written for an abled-bodied reader. I take courage from authors who write about bodies from experience. I gain strength from writers like Sarah Lochlann Jain (2013), Jackie Orr (2006) and Celia Roberts (2007). I will not explicitly work with these texts, but I will highlight them upfront for differently abled readers. 1 And, my body will crop up in the text because bodies are one particular boundary for registering the depressive sphere .
Feminists do work at the centre of ideas, but I intend to bring the peripheral ideas of Spheres to the surface b...