Aconcagua Fablab: Learning to Become with the World through Design and Digital Fabrication Technologies

We reflect about the role of creative and innovative design/fabrication technologies in processes of learning to become with the world and understanding our place as humanity within nature. In particular, we present part of the work of Aconcagua Fablab, a mobile design and digital fabrication laboratory. We situate it in relation to the Fablab movement, highlighting its focus in generating processes of ecological understanding, immersion and literacy, working in association with BioGeoArt, an action-research project inquiring about humanity-nature relationships in Chile. Unfolding this discussion, we present two workshops developed by Aconcagua Fablab with children and young people, focused in designing / fabricating artefacts and occasions for the exploration of more-than-human languages in territorial expressions and immersion in sensitive landscapes – one of them focused on biomimesis and filotaxis; the other one on soundscapes. In doing so, we discuss digital fabrication technologies from a convivial conceptualization, in relation to a more-than-human geographical understanding of nature, and concepts such as relational agency, intra-action, more-than-human languages and representation, and situated knowledge, arguing for the role that these technologies and arts in general can play, when used within creative and collaborative learning processes, in awakening ‘the curiosity about life on earth that we will need to limit the destruction we call Anthropocene and protect the Holocene entanglements that we need to survive’.