This past academic year, however, was a mind-opening learning exercise in exploring the boundaries of the western knowledge system (WKS) and its scientific method, in counterpoint to the research pursued by Eline and Zita on their master’s thesis projects. Ymmärrys ry was the official partner for Zita’s thesis.
Unlike any other discipline, design teaches its students how to weave together multiple strands of knowledge systems and data flows in diverse media formats ( Kolko, 2010 calls design synthesis a peculiarly embodied skill of a well-trained industrial designer)
January 14th, 2023
Eline’s artistic research through practice was the focus of her Arts thesis which looked at our world through the prism of moss. I was introduced to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing, inadvertently and indirectly, but introduced to it I was. Moss, it seemed was poetry in lack of motion but rituals of stillness in an ever accelerating world emerged from the artist’s practice. I spent a year thinking about the ways moss represented a microcosm of the universe.
Zita returned to the themes of her bachelor’s thesis to explore them again more deeply and more systemically, motivated by the question of design’s role in bringing indigenous knowledges into play for disaster preparedness frameworks and strategies in her home island of Java. She was born a mere 80 kilometres away from Mount Merapi, an active volcano known to keep erupting as Si Mbah, the ancestor, cleans house or grumbles loudly belching smoke.
As these two creative research-based practice and practice-based research projects come to a close with the end of the academic year, I find myself entangled within the skein of the weaving of the knowledges I co-generated with the young women as I worked with each of them to facilitate their own process towards completion.
I could sense that I too had undergone my own process of research and understanding from the hours spent facilitating these two similar but not quite the same works of discovery – each had approached a different knowledge system, from a different creative perspective. We represented numerous cultures and continents, not only within our team but also in the knowledge systems and knowledges being explored and understood.
A whole new world of understanding was born once we applied the 5 minds as a lens for coding interviews of the Merapi people who have lived and thrived on the slopes of a live volcano for tens of thousands of years. Asia, Australia, North America, and Europe are just one of the categories of the multiple facets of the prism for understanding Indigenous ways of knowing (Kimmerer’s work) and ways of thinking (Yunkaporta’s book). These were interwoven with reflections on skilled embroidery – an embodied practice with its own ancient legacy of knowledge. This knowledge is embedded in skilled practice – its held in muscle memory and in the interface the artisan creates with the natural living world in order to understand it better (Smith, 2022).
Where this knowledge weaving exercise gets interesting is that now we are able to map on the understandings from the two different indigenous knowledge systems and visual ethnography from a third locale against and amongst each other rather than how it was during the thesis development process when each creative researcher had to stick to their own selected theoretical texts. We can now synthesize what we were constrained from doing before – comparing and contrasting different ways of knowing and different ways of thinking regardless of disciplinary boundaries or requirements for the academy. It is this work we are bringing into fruition in the form of practical action – dreaming-mind – more confident now that analysis has confirmed the viability and feasibility of using Yunkaporta’s 5 minds as thinking tools, in addition to their desirability.
This resulted in a framework that integrates gleanings from Kimmerer’s Indigenous heritage from North America, her scientific background in plantlife, with Yunkaporta’s portal into Aboriginal ways of knowing; his book led me to his dissertation which opened the door to Martin Nakata’s theory of the Cultural Interface between indigenous knowledge systems and the western scientific mode. I will introduce the blended creative knowledges framework in the next post.
