Department of Design

The Mediterranean is a place of longing for the consumer society and at the same time a witness to political upheavals, cultural and economic networks and military conquests of the past millennia. If you stand at the harbour in Pula, a small town in Istria in the north of Croatia, and squint into the sun, you will see traces of all this. The ferry taking travellers to Venice may be waiting at the jetty, while yachts bob alongside fishing boats in the water. A few metres inland are the impressive ruins of a Roman amphitheatre, the legacy of a hegemonic power that continues to have an impact for the present.

The real drama of this present, however, takes place further out, in Valsaline bay, a place once known for its biodiversity and intact ecosystem. Here you regularly meet people on dives who are exploring the underwater world for the “Interfacing the Ocean” research project, recording its damage and looking for solutions with newly designed prototypes. The project, led by Karmen Franinovic and Roman Kirschner from the Interaction Design subject area, focuses on three regions that are exposed to human influences on a different degree: the small town of Calvi, located on the northern coast of Corsica, Venice and Pula, all connected by the Mediterranean Sea.

Attuning, caring and consciously designing
In the Valsaline bay, the laying of an overflow pipe a few years ago stirred up and distributed so much sediment that the habitat of the local species has been massively affected. However, Valsaline is just one of countless places where indicators of humanity’s escalating material consumption that has brought living conditions on Earth to the brink of collapse are becoming increasingly evident. “Interfacing the Ocean” aims to counter this with a self-reflective practice of caring, observing and consciously designing in exchange with the underwater world. Diving, as a core element of this project, is categorised by Kirschner as follows: “When diving, you move in the water as if you belong there, but you are also cut off from it by the technical apparatus. Noise is generated, both acoustically and seismically, which influences the organisms in the environment. As humans, we shape this space with our breaths and movements. We should ask ourselves what it means to encounter other living beings as cyborgs.”

Exploring metabolic connectedness
Life originated in the oceans and today we still only understand a fraction of the complexity of this space. The project approaches its subject from the perspective of different local and disciplinary experiences and knowledges, social and cultural practices. Franinovic grew up in the Mediterranean: “The sea is like an elixir that carries and heals me.” Her father was one of Croatia’s first diving instructors and later co-founded a non-profit diving club. Kirschner, who previously knew the sea primarily as a recreational destination, also came to diving through him. Franinovic’s and Kirschner’s fascination for the underwater world led to a growing professional interest, new design courses at ZHdK and a successful application for funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation. The project team also includes the two designers Anthea Oestreicher and Rasa Weber, who are currently writing a PhD, and the artist Antoine Bertin, who documents, explores and interprets the world through the medium of sound. From the perspective of interaction design, much centres on the relationship to technology. Franinovic refers to the experimental building “Biosphere 2”, in which a completely self-contained ecosystem was simulated in the early 1990s. When a scientist took a single sweet potato out of the ground after being in the building for twenty-four hours, the measuring devices immediately registered changes in the composition of the air. “This direct connection between microcosm and macrocosm, cause and effect, leads to the question of how we can come to feel, think and act in a planetary way. And how the ‘metabolic connectedness’ between different living beings can be explored creatively and scientifically from an embodied perspective.”

Tension between the knowledge cultures
Experts from various disciplines and institutions are involved in the joint search for answers: marine biology (Jordan Lab, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, University of Konstanz), anthropology (BLUE: More-than-Human Ethnographies of Oceans in Crisis, Aarhus University), cultural studies (University of Arts Linz) and curatorial practice (TBA 21-Academy, Ocean Space, Venice). The academic-institutional knowledge meets other forms of local knowledge, and the project team works closely with the communities in which it is created. Kirschner explains: “We don’t mediate between the public, design and science. We are united by interests and questions. We want to set a clear agenda. This creates a field of tension between the knowledge cultures and we endeavor to respect the different perspectives and conditions, human and more-than-human.”

In favour of togetherness and coexistence
A project choreography provides the framework: in the first year, the team developed methods to attune with the sea and its inhabitants through a research practice of “collective ethnography” including joint diving, sonic and visual documenting, sketching, writing, reading and discussing. This methodology will continue throughout the entire duration of the project and parts will be shared with the public at certain points via the website and publications. In the current second year, interventions and prototyping is taking centre stage; a process that mainly takes the form of workshops and small exhibitions. In the third year, the focus will shift to the involvement of local communities, such as the divers in Pula, whose knowledge and questions the project sees as just as relevant as its own. A major exhibition in Venice, a symposium in Zurich and a publication will conclude the project in the fourth year. The researchers of “Interfacing the Ocean” are hoping for new impulses for the theory and practice of design in the aquatic space, with a view to a balanced coexistence of humans and more-than-human species. And they are already thinking about a follow-up project – because the world’s oceans remain largely unexplored.