Tei Carpenter’s piece in PLAT 5.0, On Bighorn Sheep, Salmon Cannons, and Plastic Rock analyzed three exhibits in which the boundary between human and non-human collapses. In 10.5, she introduces a fourth example and a recent project, Pollinator Rest Stop, that complicates typical narratives about sustainability and decenters the human subject.

Alongside bighorn sheep relocating to national parks via helicopter, salmon flying through cannons to their spawning grounds, and plastic rock materializing on beaches, this image of a hermit crab living in a soap bottle cap complicates the relationship between human and nonhuman species. Rather than a binary between nature and culture or a technological augmentation as seen with the sheep and salmon, the relationship of the hermit crab to its new home suggests an increasingly intertwined mutuality that works with human impact (though perhaps unintentionally) to produce a form of coexistence.

Perhaps a designer can learn from a hermit crab. As Jane Bennett has described in regards to decentering the human subject, “The ethical task at hand here is to cultivate the ability to discern nonhuman vitality, to become perceptually open to it.” Working with this idea in mind, my studio has been designing “little infrastructures” that suggest an approach to sustainability that both mitigate human impact while also admitting to it through material reuse and a co-production with nature. Pollinator Rest Stop, for example, takes the ubiquitous concrete barrier and proposes to intervene in its design to produce a pollinator garden along a flyway in Toronto. By reassessing the barrier’s sidedness, the design is a collaboration between the needs of local safety infrastructure and the possibilities for designing with and for multiple species to create a hybrid “little infrastructure.”

And the Hermit Crab