More-Than-Human-Centered Design (9/15)
Overview
Today, the class took one step further from Human-Centered Design. Decentering the human, students learned how to embrace non-human actors in design. New concepts such as environment-centered design, posthuman design, and naturecultures were introduced. After the lecture, students engaged with mapping & empathizing with non-human actors.
More-Than-Human-Centered Design
Our course How People Work, started with the emphasis on understanding the human. We focused on how we can better understand people and take human factors into design. However, today, we raised the question of whether Human-Centered Design is enough. The class thought about non-human agents which coexist with human ones. Animals and the natural environments are also an important part we must consider as we co-habitate the planet.
“What if we deny that human beings are exceptional? What if we stop speaking and listening only to ourselves?”
“The call to re-imagine humanity’s place in a more-than-human world, and to recuperate or create right relations in a wide range of more-than-human worlds, now rings insistently in many ears.”
-Ann Galloway
Environment-Centered Design
From Human-Centered Design, we expanded our perspective to Environment-Centered Design, in which we think about the other creatures in our surroundings.
There are two challenges of transcending the human-centeredness focus. First, it is difficult to engage with more-than-human worlds from a human perspective. Second, we face challenges of dealing with multiple ontologies, whether we see ourselves as separate from nature, or see reality as objective and external or subjective and relational. It is important to acknowledge the challenges and try looking beyond anthropocentrism.
Students were exposed to examples of more-than-human actors integrated and given particular agency, such as a river in New Zealand that has the same legal status as a human being and a robot that is now a partner in a law firm. From these examples, students learned that there are new forms of expertise, questions, opportunities, and solutions that are needed in order to take nonhumans into consideration. The takeaway was that new types of stakeholders and agencies exist in the world and it becomes important to “design with” them as opposed to “for them” as a more traditional design approach often assumes.
Posthuman Design
What is posthuman?
‘Posthumanism’ without a hyphen originated in science fiction in the 1970s. It is defined as “the idea that humanity can be transformed, transcended, or eliminated either by technological advances or the evolutionary process; artistic, scientific, or philosophical practice which reflects this belief.”
-Laura Forlano
The postman blurs the boundaries which are strongly present in western thinking since the Enlightenment. With the perspective of theposthuman, the class was introduced to different concepts often related to this perspective and understanding on the non-human: multispecies, the Anthropocene, the more than human, the transhumance, or simply decentering of the human.
Naturecultures & socio-technical-ecological systems
To highlight useful related concepts that adopt a relational approach (as opposed to a binary perspective), Naturecultures was introduced. It contains the idea that nature and culture are mutually constituted and strongly intertwined — hence, impossible to separate as entities.
In addition, the concepto of socio-technical-ecological systems was presented, as a way to highlight how neither the natural realm or the technological (the artificial) can be excluded from our consideration and understanding of systems. It was presented as an expansion and more holistic understanding beyond socio-technical (STS) or socio-ecological systems (SES) alone.
Finally, we reflected upon a few implications for design, one of which emerged as the need to design for cohabitation and entanglements, and to produce insights that do not exclude non-human actors or stakeholders.
So What Could We Do?
The lecture wrapped up with the question of what we could do. The main suggestions were:
- We need to let go of universals that maintain the human as central (individual human minds as a centre of creativity) — re-integrate all actors/actants.
- We should learn from plural and different field (other fields of knowledge, other systems of knowledge — ie. Indigenous).
- We need to allow space for speculation (consider different ways of living)- expand our imagination through stretching and sometimes diminishing the human.
Engaging with, mapping & empathising with non-human actors
Finally, as a way to explore and grapple with these concepts and the type of paradigm change that considering the more-than-human means to design, students were proposed an activity to map out and empathise with non-human actors. In groups, they went around the School to identify and analyse some sort of designed interaction that could be analysed with a particular focus on the “invisible or voiceless” more-than-human actors/actants. Students thoroughly observed the non-human actors, put themselves in their shoes, and came up with creative ideas on how to portray them as personas or through speculative narratives. The results were stunning, funny and highly creative; and helped to show how developing empathy is a process that takes effort and time -it takes exercise.
