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.

Chapters Introduction, 6, 7, 10 and 15 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Anton Poikolainen Rosén is a postdoctoral researcher in Human-Computer Interaction at the Department of Design, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland, and the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, Sweden, 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.