The happy accident: Post-anthropocentric understandings of serendipity in making processes

Abstract

This position paper establishes a way towards a post-anthropocentric understanding of serendipity, or the happy accident, in making processes across art, craft and design. Throwing into question hylomorphic attempts to understand the application of the maker’s know-how, which devalues the enabling capabilities of the ‘happy accident’, this position paper sets a course towards a post-anthropocentric model of making. Exploring the ineffability of materials and other events or circumstances that lie outside of purposeful affordances diffracts the focus from purposeful human agency. Instead, re-understanding the maker’s process and knowledge as a transcendent intra-action between flows of material and cognition opens up space for a more subtle and comprehensive investigation into the complexity of human and non-human intra-action, which shapes the maker and the made in a reciprocal process.