RICHARD FADOK

My first book project considers the politics of design in “biomimicry” to grasp how value is generated in the green economy. While American ideologies of invention have long discounted imitation as a cultural practice, design consultants from the late 1990s onward have championed the imitation of biological design principles; biomimicry, they promise, can both create new goods and address ecological crisis through “sustainable innovation.” Based on nearly a decade of fieldwork, Lifelike analyzes how architects and other design practitioners have refashioned the meaning of design through the folk biology of these consultants. Tacking back-and-forth between workshops, studios, exhibitions, and competitions, I outline a paradox: The production of artifacts that resemble nature, like termite-inspired buildings, depends on the public erasure of designers’ labor – a kind of design without designers. In this form of magical thinking, “good design” materializes directly from life itself. I term this regime of moral value commodity animism. By tracing the origin of these beliefs and revealing how imitations are actually constructed in everyday situations through human and nonhuman agency, this project offers an ethnographic critique of romantic notions of sustainability in the United States and an anthropological theory of green capitalism.

I am currently working on an article about the concept of commodity animism, in which I reread Marxist theories of fetishism through posthumanist theories of animacy. I have written an essay on the discourse of imitation in design for Platypus and a chapter on the cybernetic origins of biomimicry in the edited volume Nature Remade (University of Chicago Press). I have also shared portions of this project at the 2018 meeting of the American Anthropological Association, the 2015 and 2019 meetings of the Society for the Social Studies of Science, the MIT Design and Computation Forum, the ASU Biodesign Institute, and the Honeywell Women in Engineering Network.