Following on from the Infrastructure as Ecology post, I am finding the use of language plays an important part of how we perceive things (thinking back to ideas from the Snipiskes stories through personification post). Reading about ecology systems, the fungi ways collect nutrients are often described (and fungi often categorised by) by how they interact with their surroundings and the type of relationship with them. By describing non-human interactions and being this way, I felt that whilst reading them you could relate to them – understanding them in a human-like way. Describing how things interact with each other makes you think more intimately about how human, non-human, space, materials relate to and effect eachother – homing in on how everything can have an effect on something else; human, non-human, space, time all tangled in threads and levels of agency.
I bring (in the image above) the causal patterns as a way of representing how some of the relationships in the fungi world play out. The ‘mutualist’ fungi connects it’s hyphae into the roots of woody plants to form a network of exchanging nutrients that it breaks down and feeds to the tree, and in return received glucose it can’t obtain from the ground. The ‘decomposer’ slowly breaks down all things dead (leaves, wood, animals etc.) which starts a cyclic-domino effect: death>broken down into nutrients>nutrients released back into soil>new life feeds off nutrients>dies>(process starts again). The ‘predator’ spreads spores which infect unsuspecting insects, where it spread’s through the insect’s body and feeds of it while it’s still alive. Eventually killing the insect, it sprouts a fruiting body to spread the spores – the process starts again, each time spread it’s self further (an accumulative process).
How can we describe how designers and interventions relate to surroundings? What is we named or categorised design by how it interacts and what relationships it has established?
Infrastructures of Autonomy 
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