A Sympoietic Ocean. Design research with/in the marine holobiont

In the face of profound human impact on planetary systems, the global ocean, as the main source of life, is fundamentally transforming its interactions, flows, and ecologies. These critical changes raise questions of other-than-human cohabitation beyond the terrestrial. In response to these radical ecological changes, a growing branch of the design discipline is currently struggling to free itself from a production-oriented paradigm of industrial modernity and reorganizes its methods toward forms of interspecies collaboration with/in environments of anthropogenic change. In this paper, I argue for activating the evolutionary theory of Symbiogenesis (Margulis, Kozo-Polyansky, Meresch-kowsky) and its relevance for a holistic view of the ocean as a starting point for challenging and reinventing our disciplinary protocols. The article follows Haraway’s notion of sympoïesis, adopting it for the design discipline. The evolutionary model of Symbiogenesis offers a new perspective on the role of design as a facilitator for collaborative forms of making and shared survival. The coral reef, as a prototypical space for symbiotic system relationships, serves as an experimental contact zone for designing these interspecies encounters. Design research in underwater environments, could help us to align the design discipline with a new conceptual framework that I propose to call Sympoïetic Design.