Conference Agenda

This proposal opens with the term maraña, a Spanish word that resists translation and serves as a conceptual provocateur. Instead of seeking clarity—often presumed as the goal of design—maraña encourages participants to inhabit discomfort, density, and entanglement. Marked by the “ñ,” it signifies complexity as a condition of life, not a problem to solve. Etymologically, maraña relates to material conditions of entanglement: thickets, tangled threads, or intricate situations that cannot be separated without loss (Malkiel, 1948). It names material situations of coexistence where separation is never neutral and never without loss. 

Drawing on the contrast between Prometheus and Epimetheus—anticipation versus understanding after the fact— this proposal rejects fully anticipated futures. Instead, it positions design as a practice of learning to live enmarañados, cohabiting complexity through praxis, staying with unresolved conditions rather than resolving them. It aligns with Haraway’s call to “stay with the trouble” (2016), using imagination not to escape, but to refuse fixed realities. 

In this Epimethean view, prototyping becomes a research method of learning-after: iterative redesigning with what already exists (in line with panel 1.5 Restaging Doing and Undoing Post-Anthropocentric Design). Prototypes are seen as incomplete, open to revision, allowing uncertainty and unforeseen relations to persist (Hermansen & Tironi, 2024). This method facilitates staying-with marañas, slowing certainty and fostering situated engagement with resistance to closure. 

This entails an ethical shift away from binary logic toward inhabiting interstices, co-operations, and tensions. The Aymara concept of ch’ixi—heterogeneous elements coexisting without fusion—becomes central: a condition where “something is and is not at the same time” (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2015). Designing thus becomes a process of learning to read, touch, and hold knots—accepting tension as an epistemic and coexistence mode (Sánchez-Aldana, 2025). 

Textile-thinking matters here as a material mode of perceiving and composing entanglement (Barad, 2003; Sánchez-Aldana, 2025). Maraña shifts from a word to a practice, emphasizing entanglement as inherent in everyday practices, infrastructures, bodies, and technologies —especially within the Capitalocene, where separation without loss is unfeasible. 

Participants are invited to collect real marañas—not metaphors or drawings. The session will produce photographic maraña specimens that record entanglements as they exist. These images are not mere documentation but prototypes that can be handled, compared, re-tagged, and reclassified. This photo-prototyping aims to let relations and frictions emerge through cycles of arrangement, testing, and revision. By sharing and handling images and textile marañas, the focus shifts to proximity, contact, and material engagement over abstraction and disembodied reflection.