Gersande Schellinx: Social Shelves

This project is a world-building experiment. Using non-human perspectives it attempts to redefine what material thinking—broadly understood as the encounter of practice and theory in artistic and design fields—can mean to anyone in and outside of those fields. We, social shelves will talk to you, the reader, directly. Together we will investigate the following question: How can a better understanding of socialised objects create opportunities to affect the social design of tomorrow?

As part of the original case study for this theoretical investigation, material experiments take place in parallel to the writing process. One month after the other, between 2022 and 2023 five social shelves have been prototyped, built, and trialed across different locations in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, the Netherlands.