The Happy Accident: Post-anthropocentric Understandings of Serendipity in Making Processes

This position paper establishes a way towards a post-anthropocentric understanding of serendipity, or the happy accident, in making processes.

Throwing into question hylomorphic attempts to understand the application of the Maker’s know-how, which humiliate the ‘happy accident’, this position paper sets a course towards a post-anthropocentric model of making.

Adopting an analytical stance to include the ineffability of materials (Ingold, 2013) and other events or circumstances that lie outside of purposeful affordances (Gibson, 1986), diffracts the focus of analysis away from purposeful human agency.

Re-understanding the Maker’s process and knowledge as a transcendent intra-action between flows of material and cognition then opens the space for a more subtle and complete investigation into the complex fluid flows between human and non-human which go to make the maker and the made.