ABSTRACT

Taking advantage of Deleuze’s image of the wasp and orchid, this chapter considers how ANT and design can productively become-with one another, rather than merely bolster each other’s practices. The chapter draws on the case of an interdisciplinary project, involving designers and STS practitioners, to discuss how a workshop for exploring the use of smart energy monitors involved retroscriptive and procompositional practices. With these notions, the chapter confronts the conundrum of how to unite the legacy of ANT, as an ostensibly descriptive and agnostic commitment towards the collectives it traces, with the prospective attitude of designing as that of adding to and modifying the collectives it renders. This, I argue, involves a shift towards engaging the speculative compossibility of a collective where the question of what an issue, concern or care is capable of elaborating on the question of what it is composed of.