1st Edition
More-Than-Human Design in Practice
This book provides an overview of the diverse multidisciplinary field of more-than-human design, offering a philosophical grounding of more-than-human design in posthumanism while putting practical design examples and methods to the forefront.
There is an urgent need to radically re-imagine design, as its current processes are contributing to global warming, pollution, deforestation, ocean acidification, ozone layer depletion, loss of biodiversity, and species extinction. Given this need, ‘more-than-human design’ has emerged as a perspective that widens our thinking beyond solely human-oriented considerations and needs, such as animals, plants, and microbes. The book explores the relationship between sustainability and design, touching on topics such as AI, systems thinking, futures studies, and pedagogy, and discusses a range of case study projects that are grounded in more-than-human thinking, demonstrating how this can be incorporated into practice.
This easily accessible and theoretically grounded book will provide design researchers and educators an excellent introduction to more-than-human thinking. It will also be of interest to students and scholars studying design more broadly, sustainability, environmental studies and service design, as well as to practicing designers interested in sustainability.
Prologue: A perspective on posthumanism from outside design
Cecilia Åsberg
Part 1: Focus Areas
1. Design by/for/with/about/without Animals: Tactics for Animal Liberation
Michelle Westerlaken and Erik Sandelin
2. Being with Plants through Collective Fabulation, Critical Companionship and Cohabitation
Katka Cerna, Anton Poikolainen Rosén, Yuxi Chen, Oscar Tomico and Dawn Sanders
3. Biomenstrual: Designing with the More-than-Human Body
Nadia Campo Woytuk and Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard
4. Trying out Shit: Experimental Approaches for Relating with Microbes
Danielle Willde and Tau Lenskjold
5. Designing with Bodies of Water in the Hydrocene
Thomas Laurien, Anna Schröder, Inna Zrajaeva and Chris Matt
6. Weathering with storms and grounds as a more-than-human design practice: encountering winds, soils, and rocks
Gloria Lauterbach and Delphine Rumo
7. Designing with Planetary Artificial Intelligence
Marcos Chilet, Martin Tironi, Iohanna Nicenboim and Joseph Lindley.
8. Creative AI as More-than-Human – Design Practices, Aesthetics and Cultural Imaginaries
Petra Jääskeläinen
Part 2: Methods and Pedagogy
9. Multispecies Ethnography in Design Research and Practice
Heid Biggsi, Anton Poikolainen Rosén, Emilija Veselova, Katka Cerna and David Sánchez Ruano
10. Four Questions for Systemic More-Than-Human Design in Practice
Anton Poikolainen Rosén, Yuxi Chen, Suzanna Törnroth, İdil Gaziulusoy and Tatu Marttila.
11. Staying with Complexity through Multispecies Companionship at the I.N.S.E.C.T. Summercamp 2023
Svenja Keune, Colleen Ludwig, Katka Černá, Anneke ter Schure and Julia Tabet.
12. How can we design with a multi-species mindset towards regenerative practices?
Julia Lohmann
13. Temporalities of Care in More-than-Human Design
Gizem Oktay, Minha Lee, Bahar Barati and Ron Wakkary
14. Envisioning Multispecies Futures in Multispecies Environments: Methods, Outcomes and Learnings From A Future Scenario Workshop
Lotte Nystrup Lund and Shams Hazim
15. Peering through Time: Harnessing Anticipation in More-than-Human Design
Camilo Sanchez, Anton Poikolainen Rosén, Antti Salovaara, Felix Epp and Tim Moesgen
16. Teaching for More-than-human Values and Perspectives in Technology Design
Elisabet M. Nilsson, Anne-Marie Hansen, Daisy Yoo, Tilde Bekker and Eva Eriksson
17. Stepping out of the Classroom and Into the Worlds of Other Species
Daniel Metcalfe
Epilogue: Towards Creaturely Ways of Designing
Ann Light
Biography
Anton Poikolainen Rosén is a postdoctoral researcher in Human-Computer Interaction at the Department of Design, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland, studying design for sustainable futures and the more-than-human world. His research themes include critical, circular and multisensory approaches to farming and waste management.
Antti Salovaara is a Senior University Lecturer at the Department of Design, Aalto University, Finland. His research develops methods for HCI researchers to anticipate possible futures, particularly with a goal that futuring in HCI would not only consider technology-based factors.
Andrea Botero is an Associate Professor at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture of Aalto University. Her research and practice aim to understand how collectives (broadly speaking) come to understand the design spaces available to them, what counts as design, what other practices for world making are there, and which ones we need to call into being.
Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard is a designer and researcher exploring feminist design of technologies for human and environmental health. She is curious about how the materiality of human bodies relate with ecologies, and uses research-through-design, participation of communities and speculative storytelling to design for social and environmental justice. She has a PhD in Interaction Design from Aarhus University in Denmark and has been a postdoc at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and the Oslo School of Architecture and Design in Norway, where she researched somatic approaches in design and more-than-human design.
