Making Kin with the Machines · Journal of Design and Science

Man is neither height nor centre of creation. This belief is core to many Indigenous epistemologies. It underpins ways of knowing and speaking that acknowledge kinship networks that extend to animals and plants, wind and rocks, mountains and oceans. Indigenous communities worldwide have retained the languages and protocols that enable us to engage in dialogue with our non-human kin, creating mutually intelligible discourses across differences in material, vibrancy, and genealogy. 1 wye Law  Blackfoot philosopher Leroy Little Bear observes, “the human brain is a station on the radio dial; parked in one spot, it is deaf to all the other stations [. . .] the animals, rocks, trees, simultaneously broadcasting across the whole spectrum of sentience.”1 As we manufacture more machines with increasing levels of sentient-like behaviour, we must consider how such entities fit within the kin-network, and in doing so, address the stubborn Enlightenment conceit at the heart of Joi Ito’s “Resisting

saved by

• Svitlana Midianko
• Swaminathan Gurumurthy