Seeing like a Stoat

I’ve been seeing, hearing, and… sensing… a lot of things of late pointing in a similar direction, so worth a quick post and a useful pun.

I started with a shat with Matt Pritchard, who amongst other things is Co-Lead of the Nature-Centric Catalyst hosted by the University of Reading, and is doing really interesting work around how considering ourselves to be part of nature impacts us individually and collectively.

He was describing some new projects he was starting, and riffing off James C Scott’s Seeing like a State, I offered that he could called something ‘Seeing like a Stoat’.

Then I was listening to a recent episode of Tobias Revell and Radha Mistry‘s excellent Future-ish podcast on the walk to the station this morning. amongst other things, they talked about a design studio called Inxects who have developed a (speculative) vest that translates environmental stress signals into physical sensations to let the wearer feel a given impact on nature.

And this ties to an unexpectedly popular post I put on LinkedIn yesterday of the video of the frogs spawning at night in our pond. I had set up a wildlife camera that was a Christmas present from my brother in the back garden, and I hadn’t quite realised the night vision was quite as impressive as it turned out.

Anyway, ‘Seeing like a Stoat’ is my new shorthand for being able work with the world around us, using technologies that extend all of our senses.

Further reading – this is tangentially related to the ‘information is light, not liquid‘ line of thinking perhaps, but if you really want a good read on this try Ed Yong’s An Immense World, which I found really thought provoking in terms of how else we might take inspiration about using and augmenting our own senses.