Iain Kerr

Montclair State University, Feliciano Center for Entrepreneurship, Faculty Member

University of Maine, Arts & Humanities, Faculty Member

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I am a designer interested in how we participate in shaping the world. While this might sound pretty straightforward, it is an activity that gets interesting when we realize that every part of the world is actively doing the very same thing. The question for me is: How do we participate in co-shaping a world in which everything is active? In trying to experimentally come to terms with this question I realized that a key part of the answer lay in developing new forms of collective action. This lead to co-founded the research and design collective SPURSE 15 years ago. Much of my work over the ensuing years has been as part of this collective. We have worked at the intersections of art, design, ecology and urbanism collaborating with communities from the high arctic to the inner cities in Bolivia on projects ranging from restaurants, to wetlands to microbiology laboratories.This ongoing work has shaped the current focus of my research: (1) developing new forms of the commons , (2) creating an experimental design pedagogies for Worldmaking and Innovation, (3) unpacking the pragmatic consequences of creative process based philosophies for real-world action (The Innovation Design Framework, and Exaptive Design), and (4) developing a diagrammatic philosophy of action. Working on real-world design problems has led me far beyond my early academic training in Philosophy and Architecture. I have developed skills in a very broad range of activities from clothing design, to systems theory, rapid prototyping, cooking, evolutionary theory, microbiology, ecology and beyond. All of which stems from an interest in the actively utilizing the process that give us tools to co-shape the world around us. This work has been called many contradictory things: art, ecology, philosophy or politics. I take pleasure in this difficulty with categories, as the work follows its internal experimental necessities towards ecological design, or trans-disciplinary design, or diagrammatic philosophy, or fashion design, or experimental cooking or...If you find any of my work of interest or use, please use as you wish -- and if you desire please be in contact. Thank You.

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Papers by Iain Kerr

Designing a Multi-Species Commons (A Lesson Plan) SPURSE

by Iain Kerr and Matthew Friday

An overview of SPURSE project to design a Multi-Species Landscape @ Pitzer College (2013-14). The... more

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Re-received Ideas: A generative dictionary for research on research Part 1

by Gwen Allen and Iain Kerr

Performance Research, 2006

In 1971, French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou spent a month in residency at the Stedelijk Museum i... more

10 THESIS ON EATING AND BEAUTY

by Iain Kerr, spurs spurse, and Matthew Friday

These speculative notes are part of SPURSE'S project EAT YOUR SIDEWALK -- a project to transform ... more These speculative notes are part of SPURSE'S project EAT YOUR SIDEWALK -- a project to transform how we inhabit our urban environments, understand eating and cooking, and utilize foraging as a technique for multi-species commons building. This document was prepared as working notes for a workshop we participated in at the Culinary Institute of America in the spring of 2018. We further utilized this in preparation for talking with Alison Waters, and as part of a public discussion, we had with the great chef Peter Hofmann on “Does Sidewalk-to-Table come after Farm-to-Table?” at William Patterson University. The focus on art, recipes, and restaurants is in part because of these contexts. It is, like much of our writing, a living and speculative document, we would love to hear your thoughts.

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Making is Thinking – How doing transforms our thinking centric paradigm of innovation and education

by Iain Kerr and Jason Frasca

Making is thinking1. This is a much more radical claim than it might seem at first glance. It is ... more Making is thinking1. This is a much more radical claim than
it might seem at first glance. It is not that making is simply
critical to thinking (which is true), for to phrase it in this
manner is to see making and thinking as two separate activities.
The claim Making is Thinking argues for something
more fundamental—that the very act of making is a form of
thinking.

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AFTER ART

About five years ago, I had the privilege of working over a two-year period on a project at Grand... more About five years ago, I had the privilege of working over a two-year period on a project at Grand Arts called DeepTime RapidTime. 1 It was at this time that I first sensed that many of us involved in the arts—both at Grand Arts and elsewhere—were reconceptualizing the status of art. Something was very different. It was not the usual debate about expanding the definitions of art (art into life and so on); it was, ironically, the opposite: artists wishing to limit the expanding definition of art. Artists wishing to be done with art. There was an urgency to step outside of art, not for the sake of shifting art into an alliance with another existing discipline, but for the sake of scrapping the existing realm of the aesthetic. What was being reconsidered was not solely art (as if it could still be thought of as a standalone endeavor) but also the entire project of Western metaphysics and all its neat dualisms: Nature + Culture, Subject + Object, Human + Non-Human, Fact + Value, Art + Science, and so forth. The pressing and unavoidable question that seemed to be on all of our minds was: If these interwoven logics, in which art plays a critical role, are no longer justifiable, then are the procedures that comprise art worth adhering to even as everything else is being critically rethought? Can we really be " after Nature " and " after Culture " but not " after Art " ? Giving art a free pass no longer seemed viable or interesting. To be clear, this was not a continuation of the Post-Modern desire to critique all metaphysics and then ultimately be done with metaphysics. Rather, what I could sense emerging at Grand Arts and elsewhere was an experimental curiosity to begin an adventure to co-evolve a new metaphysics after art.

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