Poetic Knowledge Building and Transdisciplinarity: the role of the artefact

Paper in proceeding, 2013

I discuss a type of poetic knowledge building, which assigns to artefacts the role of carriers and generators of concepts and the power to act as discursive statements. In this paper I discuss what the role of artefacts can be in a context of transdisciplinary theory-development. I focus on artefacts resulting from poetic knowledge building where the ‘making’ (material creation) and ‘speculating’ (inventive) aspects of theory and practice are emphasized. The transdisciplinary quality of such artefacts is situated on two levels: as drivers of transdisciplinary processes (instigating discussions among different disciplinary and non-disciplinary actors) and generators of speculative theory (involving a specific theory-practice relationship). I will reflect on how we should understand the relation between transdisciplinarity, poetics, sense-making and speculative theory development.