Du Zhang 张都
Designer, Artist and Lecturer at Muthesius Kunsthochschule
“As an artist and design researcher I explore how humans and machines co-sense and co-create realities. Rooted in phenomenology, technofeminism, and XR practice, my work investigates embodiment, perception, and the porous boundaries between digital and physical space. Through my practices I am developing sensing methods that convey embodied knowledge —inviting beings to experience how the body, technology, and environment think and feel together, in the attempt to reclaim agency through poetic, sensory forms of design research and world-making.”
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Valentin Zhou Brück
PhD Candidate, Researcher and Materials Designer, IMD Institute for Materials design and Advanced Material Studies, and Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach am Main
“In my PhD research, I am reflecting on the emerging field of materials design from a posthumanist perspective. As ecological and technological systems become increasingly entangled, it is necessary to reconceptualize matter as an active, relational participant in processes of making and knowing. In my research, I am considering materials design as a posthuman practice that challenges anthropocentric assumptions and foregrounds the agency of non-human forces. Materials are active, designable, and connected more-than-human collaborators in the process of designing for, and with, humans and non-humans alike. By developing a post-anthropocentric methodology, I am reconsidering materials design as a more critical, responsive, and ecologically attuned mode of practice for approaching the challenges of the Anthropocene, and for creating new ways of thinking and speculating beyond anthropocentric restrictions.”
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Mathilde Gouin
PhD Candidate, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa
“How can we develop more-than-human design tools and practices that can be effectively adopted at the community scale? My research explores the creation of new design frameworks that engage with the more-than-human world in practice. Working alongside local communities living in ecosystems at risk, I combine qualitative research and multidisciplinary approaches (such as co-design, more-than-human data visualisation, filmed ethnography, research-through-design, and sensory mapping) to address specific ecological challenges while fostering multispecies imaginaries for sustainable futures.”
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Lauren Thu
PhD Candidate in the Everyday Design Studio at Simon Fraser University
“A posthuman or new materialist understanding of the ways that we exist with others is one that is vibrational, uncategorizable, and radically different from the assumptions we operate under in a current Western context. To live differently in this sense requires us to become otherwise; to fundamentally change our beliefs and subsequently, our actions. Doing so with humility, respect and perseverance is chiefly important and is something I strive for in my own design practice.”
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Katerina Inglezaki
PhD Researcher in Digital Media at Técnico Lisboa
“How can we design for the hybrid timescapes of nonhuman beings and act as speakers for the living? From imperial sea maps to today’s data-driven visualizations, map-making has long served dominant power structures, reinforcing assumptions of human exceptionalism over the natural world. My research contributes to counter-cartographies that resist static, hierarchical worldviews by emphasizing the fluidity and relationality of ecological processes. I see drawing as a methodological tool for capturing the temporal and dynamic dimensions of multispecies interactions across scales. Through storytelling-based spatial analysis, I translate field observations into visual representations that reveal these relational dynamics. This interdisciplinary work, developed in collaboration with social and natural scientists, fosters new ways of understanding and designing with more-than-human worlds.”
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Alisa Goikhman
Designer, PhD Candidate at TU Berlin
“I work at exposing the entanglements of human and non-human agencies in food systems and making them a priority in the department for Education in Sustainable Nutrition and Food Sciences at TU Berlin, where I am pursuing my PhD. I am fascinated by how Things (in the Asssemblage Theory sense), like recipes, utensils, and algorithms, mediate practices we often consider exclusively human. Through making and doing with sometimes reluctant collaborators, I explore ways to introduce relational perspectives and situated knowledge production into Sustainable nutrition studies, nudging them beyond consumer choice models. I am dedicated to developing tools and frameworks that help action research in the social sciences engage with posthuman design approaches, attentive to complexity and more-than-human relations.”
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Anca Serbanescu
Senior Research Fellow at the University of Salford, UK
“My research explores human–AI co-creativity in design, focusing on how tools and methods can support inclusive knowledge acquisition. I approach posthumanism as a critical framework for decentering human agency and fostering relational design ethics. Engaged with the solarpunk movement, I advocate for design practices that dismantle systemic barriers and foreground ecological interdependence. Posthumanist design, for me, is a commitment to multispecies care, distributed agency, and speculative futures that challenge the dominance of human exceptionalism. Through this lens, I aim to develop responsive, situated design methodologies that reflect the complexity of our entangled world.”
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Kevin Bellò
Art curator, educator and researcher. Founding member of Sympoietic Society. Researcher and educator at The Gramounce.
“Grieving is a pervasive condition of earthly coexistence: to be alive is also to encounter loss. Yet, in the context of ecological collapse and large-scale extractivist agriculture, this loss manifests on overwhelming and uneven scales. To me, the posthumanist lens allows a more profound participation in ‘environmental grief’ and ‘multispecies mourning’, tapping into its socio-political potential. I am developing this research as part of two communities of practitioners. My collective Sympoietic Society aims to revise the contemporary dominant framework of mourning, particularly in relationship to the more-than-human world, through speculative fabulation and community gatherings. As a teacher and researcher with The Gramounce, my practice in writing, developing courses and shaping workshops around the entanglement of food politics and shifting landscapes.”
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Janna Lumiruusu
Designer and web developer
“I approach posthumanism as a boundary object: a space to be, explore and notice. My work explores how systems of design shape access, often excluding through assumptions of neutrality, certainty and legibility. I’m drawn to recursive structures, digital activity and barriers to participation. Within this network, I’m seeking permeable spaces for undoing, for serendipity, and for responsive encounters that move, shift and flow.”
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Thomas Pausz
Associate Professor, MA Design & New Environments, Iceland University of the Arts, PhD Candidate, Faculty of Humanities at the University of Iceland
“How can we relate to the slow movements of plants? Which tools might help us decipher the inscriptions on sea shells? From experimental cinema to bioacoustics, our desire to be affected by and connect with more-than-human worlds—those beyond our perceptual reach—drives us to invent and refine technological prostheses, populating an alternative history of interspecies media. The hypothesis driving my research and experimental practice is that sharing the sensorium of non-human life is not a secondary or niche application of technology; rather, it is one of its primary engine, with each technical epoch allowing for new forms of co-existing and co-creating. The task is to keep on listening to the enigma of non-human life, to orient our tools, and to scaffold them with more-than-human ethics.“
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Carol Breen
“My work centers around technology, embodiment, and post-human centered design. My research and process often probe technological co-existence, creating works that reflect the blurred boundaries between the corporeal and the virtual and sometimes mythical. I am particularly drawn to diffractive methodologies, imagining design not as a tool to solve, but as a lens to reveal, question, and entangle.”
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Abdullah Tarık Çelik
“My posthumanist design approach relies on searching for novel definitions of design since its belongings extend beyond space and time. I see this beyond human capacity and agency thus, I position my research around this entangled nature where relational agencies cause the unstability of forms. Currently, I focused on the algorithmic agency in the socio-technical level and I see design as a way of revealing more of this agential gap.”
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Carolina de Lara
PhD student at Kyoto Institute of Technology
“My research departs from an inquiry into the growth of bacterial cellulose, and how this growth can become a wearable artefact. This simple inquiry touches upon the basal materialities of textiles and artefacts embodied by the human and contextualised in the everyday, however, at the core of its design concept is the fact that these artefacts are created alive. Designing and (bio)fabricating with properties of livingness questions the very essence of such an anthropocentric discipline as fashion, as well as opening up for a plethora of possibilities in future design. From this perspective, posthumanist thinking allows for different species to establish dialogue, albeit non-verbal ones, by designing through acts of living, and living through acts of designing.”
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Angelos Arnis
Strategic Designer
personal website
Member of Joint Frontiers
“We need a radical reimagining of design that aligns with post-humanist narratives by decentering human needs and acknowledging our interconnection with the planet. By tracing the full lifecycle of design interventions, posthumanism becomes a form of multispecies care. It is pushing practitioners to develop new methods of consultation, representation, and accountability that include the agency and well-being of future generations, more-than-human species, and the planet in every design decision.”
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Burak Taşdizen
PhD
“While acknowledging that ‘non-human’ can also refer to ‘things’, the posthuman banner, in my work, corresponds to the prioritized inclusion of sentient beings other than humans within design, whether they be users or co-designers. This core tenet of my posthumanist approach informs my critical stance towards techno-utopian approaches such as transhumanism and its human-enhancement project, which I regard as perpetuating the Humanist notion of ‘Man’ as a privileged entity, often at the expense of others, human or otherwise. For me, posthumanism mandates a critical rethinking of the positions of all that live within a relational and interdependent framework. It is within this framework that design can become a caring practice that de-centers the human to better accommodate other beings. My current work engages with the animal question in design, with the objective of expanding the methodological repertoire of design scholarship toward this critical posthumanist direction.”
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Miriam Johnston
M.A. Conceptual Textile Designer
“Thinking about posthumanism does not come without thinking about collaborations. How can we as humans build a relationship with nature and our surroundings that is no longer harmful but instead is fundamentally based on our interconnectedness? In my work I explore the living aesthetics of bacterial dyes and structural colour produced by bacteria. How can we be involved in the process of material growth? How will these materials evolve? How can we holistically co-create with the diverse micro and macro ecologies around us?”
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Felix Carros
PhD, Postdoctoral Socio-Informatics Researcher at+
the University of Siegen, Founder of a forest NGO
“My work focuses on creating digital solutions for humans by applying participatory design and ethnographic methods. While I co-develop with human actors, many of our tools support those managing ecosystems – such as forest owners. This challenges me to look beyond a purely human-centered perspective. Nature is not a resource but the source of our life, and we are part of its complex, interdependent systems. Designing meaningful, lasting technologies requires understanding these systems and their non-human actors. Ecosystems are far more difficult to grasp than human systems, yet ignoring them can lead to unintended harm. Technology should help us live in balance with nature – otherwise, we risk damaging ecosystems and, ultimately, ourselves.“
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Josh Gellers
Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of North Florida, Research Fellow of the Earth System Governance Project, and Expert with the Global AI Ethics Institute.
“I am fascinated and inspired by the posthuman turn in design for its implied ethical imperatives regarding how humans interact and co-exist with the more-than-human world, and its emphasis on strategies intended to literally build a society in which this becomes possible. I think the nexus of design and posthumanism is a rich landscape where those of us in the social sciences and humanities can explore how our ideas and values can find concrete instantiation in the real world.“
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Giga Tsikarishvili გიგა წიქარიშვილი
Artist and Designer. Co-founder of the artistic research platform wit[h]nessing. Lecturer at VA[A]DS: School of Visual Art, Architecture and Design
“My primary interest lies in identifying and analysing pivot points – moments and experiences where significant shifts in human subjectivity become possible. My research and practice focus on how speculative approaches in design and art can contribute to these processes of becoming, acting as catalysts for more fluid perspectives – forms that remain open to lingering affects of more-than-human assemblages and enable navigation within posthuman conditions.“
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Eva Monestier
“Amidst contemporary instability and climate crisis, post-anthropocentrism should be seen as the necessary paradigm shift for the unfolding of our collective futures. Noticing and sensing our relationality with the more-than-human world becomes essential to foster alternative ways of being and enable multispecies futures. My research lies at the intersection of design futures, more-than-human design and posthuman feminist philosophies and seeks to investigate how designers can unlearn embedded dualisms that normatively separate nature from culture and propose alternative narratives of multispecies thriving by embracing a post-anthropocentric creative mindset. Seen as a deep leverage point for change, such a new mindset can ignite a transformative ‘process of becoming post-anthropocentric’, inspiring different worldviews of coexistence and interdependence essential to envision more-than-human futures.“
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Giovanni Inglese
Product Design PhD Student, Department of Planning, Design and Technology of Architecture, Sapienza University of Rome
“The concept of the Capitalocene examines how capitalist logics permeate both the physical environment and digital realms, driving widespread ecological and social crises. It challenges human exceptionalism, acknowledging that capitalism reshapes all forms of existence, both organic and inorganic. In response, design practices informed by more-than-human perspectives and diverse cultural understandings of nature are emerging, seeking alternatives beyond capital-driven systems. My research explores how emerging plant ontologies – rooted in expanding knowledge of the plant world – can inform design in fostering more equitable and inclusive futures. Specifically, I investigate the role of technology in mediating human-nature interactions and enabling new techno-vegetal symbiotic relationships.“
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Katka Katerina Cerna
Assistant senior lecturer/Assistant professor at Digital Service Innovation, Halmstad University
“We are in the middle of a crisis – the world is literally burning and the well-being of humans and more is drastically decreasing. We need to find novel ways of how to think about how we relate to the world and develop novel ways on how to build our capacity to do that. I see the Design+posthumanism network as a great space to work towards this transformation.”
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Aslı Eylem Kolbaş
Academic, Architect, and Artist, PhD researcher at Reworlding Network
“In my PhD project, I aim to trace how youth communities react to and discuss changes in their neighborhoods and community spaces triggered by climate change or urban development. Within this context, Posthumanism offers a lens to rethink relationality and agency beyond human-centered frameworks. It enables me to consider the role of more-than-human actors while using hybrid and playful participatory tools to fabricate critical fiction, with the help of mapping, storytelling and co-designing.”
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Marietta Radomska
PhD, Docent, Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities at Linköping University, Founding Director of The Eco- and Bioart Lab
“The Eco- and Bioart Lab (EBL) connects artists, artistic researchers, and other practitioners, as well as doctoral students whose practice and research focus on art and the environment in their broadest understanding. EBL opens up a transdisciplinary space, where artistic practice and artistic research converge with philosophy, cultural theory, performance studies, art studies, visual culture, queer death studies, environmental humanities, and posthumanities in synergy and as equally legitimate voices. In this way, EBL addresses critical questions concerned with life/death, nature/culture, art/science, ecology, environment, vulnerability, materiality, and the body in a more-than-human sense.“
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David Sánchez Ruano
PhD, Research Professor at EAAD, Tec de Monterrey
“There is an urgent need to co-habitate along with our non-human relatives. Understanding their way of life, and ultimately their language will make us resilient in a constantly changing planet. The gentle and emphatic way of designing with and for them can expand our symbiotic consciousness opening new capacities to become a bio-civilization.“
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Sainath Krishnamurthy
“Design+Posthumanism, to me, represents an exciting paradigm shift. It’s about evolving design beyond the anthropocentric lens, considering emotional, environmental, and more-than-human perspectives. In my work, I explore how AI and haptics create new forms of emotional communication, allowing us to move beyond verbal expression and into tactile, multisensory exchanges. This approach, grounded in posthumanist thinking, pushes the boundaries of how we relate to technology, our environment, and each other.”
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Nur Horsanalı
Designer and tutor at KABK, Part of Sympoietic Society
“As a designer and educator, I explore how our material culture contributes to the disconnection between us and the landscapes we inhabit, and how we can envision a post-anthropocentric design practice. My current work is grounded in collective practice with the Sympoietic Society, a pan-European group addressing environmental losses and grief through site-sensitive interventions and storytelling. I am deeply curious about expanding our understanding of relationality within a more-than-human world and am eager to learn and grow in collaboration with others.”
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Francesco Burlando
Postdoctoral Researcher in Design at the University of Genoa
“Design, understood as the ability to shape one’s environment, plays a crucial role in modifying human relations with the world and stands as the discipline that can guide the anti-anthropocentric transition. Designers must take into account the overall ecological balance and, rather than focusing solely on human interests, place the needs of non-human agency as the primary goal, at the cost of moving radically away from referring to human needs. Indeed, if users don’t find analogies with previous experiences, the deliberate distance from the reality they are accustomed to allows immersion in a new and unfamiliar cognitive experience that can break the monolithic system of anthropocentrism and stimulate a debate on how the relationship between human and non-human should evolve.”
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Irina V. Wang 王以寧
Systems transition designer & researcher
“Rather than becoming better stewards, I believe the human species will only usher forth a future both survivable and desirable by allowing ourselves to be better stewarded by fellow entities on an entangled planet; there is a role for design research and system-nudging prototypes to enable and operationalize the ongoing dance of co-agency.”
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Prateek Shankar प्रतीक शंकर ப்ரதீக் சங்கர்
Strategic Designer at Dark Matter Laboratories, steward of Jungle Publics, and founding member of the Planetary Civics Inquiry.
“I fundamentally believe that the human condition is decidedly more-than-human, and find myself drawn to the tangled threads between systems, ecologies, and futures. My background in architecture, visual design, and cultural studies has led me to think deeply about language and colonial memory, informing my current focus on how we can design with, rather than for, the non-human. At Dark Matter Labs, I explore ways to build planetary governance frameworks and institutional capacities, exploring how the urgent transitions of our time can hold justice, decoloniality, and an expanded posthuman publics at their core.“
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Björn Eriksson
PhD candidate at the University of Technology, Sydney
“My take on Design+Posthumanism is a dethroning of humans towards equitable multi-species relationships through the materials, objects, and environments we use and communicate with. As fashion dresses us into ourselves in relationship to each other as humans, so it may dress us into deeper relationships with all species inhabiting our world.“
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Del Davis & Lisa Säfdal | Rat-ical Justice
Architects and founders of Rat-ical Justice
“Relearning how to coexist with nonhuman others requires us to actively challenge the anthropocentric biases in our perception of worth and value. We readily extend care and compassion to domesticated pets, to animals we find cute, and to a select few nonhumans facing extinction due to human activities; however, those deemed to be pests, vermin, and those who do not benefit humans by providing some kind of service often fall outside the scope of our empathy. Our work explores the question, eloquently articulated by Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren, of ‘how we may love that which causes us to suffer?’“
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Marc Chataigner
PhD candidate at Kyoto University
“‘Agenda et non-agenda’. The more urgent our collective transition-making for the liveability of life-support systems, the broader the scope of our response-ability as designers, and the more complex the question of our legitimate place(s) and role(s) as practitioners. As a design practitioner for public and private organisations, the question of the distribution of agency continues to trouble me: I have wondered how to foster the capacity of customers as users in the design of services, the disposition of users as agents in the design of peer-to-peer platforms, and the ingenuity of agents as more-than-human in circular design projects. Each time, the question required me and the agencies involved to question our positionality in order to make-do. The old question of ‘what to do’ and ‘what not to do’, which political scientists put to leaders in order to promote the prosperity of nations, is ours to bear.“
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Jiho Kim 김지호
PhD Student, Materials Experience Lab, Department of Sustainable Design Engineering at TU Delft
“‘Where must we go with design, we who wander this Anthropocene in search of our better selves?’ Just like my modified quote of the Mad Max film credits, my whole design journey so far has been about wondering how I can step forth as a designer in this daunting time. Starting with socially engaged design and now in biodesign, I endeavour post-humanistic challenges to the Anthropocene, especially reflecting more-than-human values in this network of life.”
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Klara Sjelvgren
Interior Architect and Designer
“Designing from a posthumanist perspective can challenge the design process and encourage a wider range of creative methods in practice beyond the human sphere. By redefining the meaning of man-made environments/design, it can encourage critical thinking and new discussions, influence dualistic views and open up to more fluid perspectives. For example, addressing the issue of inequitable relationships between humans and non-humans by noticing non-human actors entangled with a human site of activity; and exploring new possible forms and functions. Overall, by questioning narratives and creating new contexts, it can be used as a tool to contribute to new insights that can approach sustainable development/design with a different curiosity and care.”
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Bernhard Poscher
Communication Designer & Photographer
“Art and design are tools for critical inquiry and activism, challenging dominant narratives and engaging the public. In posthumanist discourse, they play a crucial role in expanding empathy beyond the human realm, bringing life to the lifeless, and enriching our world with stories. As a designer and photographer, I understand the intersection between design and posthumanism as an opportunity to curate narratives that highlight the often overlooked parts of our interconnected existence. By speculating and imagining the perspectives of the other-than-human, I allow these insights to guide my work, fostering a deeper, more inclusive connection with the world around us.”
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Clee Zhuo Wang 王琢
PhD Student at Hong Kong Polytechnic University; Transdisciplinary Researcher & Open-ended Walker
“With a background in economics and strategy, I now reflect critically on these linear, rational ways of thinking. Through the lens of posthumanism, I study the role of design and human agency in the Anthropocene. Central to my research is the body as a connector of different realities. I use life experiment and walk as embodied methods to engage and transgress multiple social, economic and ecological systems. I scrutinize how embodied practices open up multiplicities of more-than-human, disrupt nature/culture binaries, and suggest a potential for non-linear transformation.”
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Stina Andersson
Design Engineer and Designer MFA
“I’m a spatial designer with a long-standing passion for materials. My focus lies in creating spatial experiences that evoke emotions and shift perspectives. Relationships are fundamental. Our connection to the world around us shapes who we are and how we interact. My work aims to deepen this connection. Through immersive spatial experiences, I explore how we engage with our environment and gain knowledge through all our senses. These experiences, manifested as material explorations and installations, are meant to be felt with our whole bodies. I have explored glass and mirrors to find new perspectives of water. In my latest project, I’ve been working with clay from a local construction site, transforming it into everyday, hand-held objects. A way to connect different scales and put them in to relation to each other and us.”
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Sucharita Srirangam
PhD in Architecture, Associate professor and Hub leader for Urban Resilience for Climate Change at the School of Architecture, Building & Design at Taylor’s University
“Architectural practices are predominantly of human-centric approaches. With the current global warming and climate change crisis, it is time to rethink holistic approaches. Combining posthumanism and architecture will motivate my architectural design students in two ways: to integrate with nature BY design and to deploy digital technology INTO design. Posthumanism, when brought into architecture, I envision that architecture will be holistic by integrating urban ecology and futuristic by deploying digital technology. Posthumanism is a powerful approach for rethinking the human-centric approaches to be holistic in architecture; it allows us to develop designs that integrate people + technology + nature and be responsive to greater purposes of global sustainability.”
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Moniek Driesse
PhD, Founder of The Imaginary Agency, Storytelling lecturer at Willem de Kooning Academy
“My research is tethered to deep aspirations for becoming one of those beings who repair and care. Both to sense and make sense of the world, I follow waters, shapeshifting their way through and across spaces in between things, concepts and places, allowing them to sustain and carry imaginations. As such, I explore troubles and connections – networks across generations, landscapes and lifeworlds – on which human survival, in times of crisis, depends. Through a framing with a point of departure in critical heritage studies, complemented with methodological and theoretical insights from design research, critical geography and ecofeminism, I mobilise creative practices towards fostering the agency of imagination and planetary regimes of care.”
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Ulrika Roslund Svensson | Skapismen
crafts/sloyd/frugal design and rural development
“I´m searching for tools and practices that strengthen human feelings and responsibility for other beings, through ecology, crafts, folkart and frugal design. My work hovers around questions of local and planetary coexistence, at the moment through the project Beekeeping Sculptures in Folk Art, the movement of alternative beekeeping and rewilding of the honeybee. How can a log hive design work as a tool for sharing vulnerability between human and bee?”
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Olga Lackner
Industrial Designer and Master student at Chalmers University of Technology
“Design should aim to facilitate responsible interaction with the environment and between humans and non-humans. Modern technologies can be seen as tool to this end but need to be implemented in a conscious and conscientious manner. As an industrial designer I aim to explore the holistic and more inclusive potentials for (co-)design that are created when viewing (non-)human-machine interaction as another entangled relation.”
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Lotte Nystrup Lund
Owner of futurista.dk., and PhD Student at The Royal Danish Academy
“In my research I explore how people engaged in urban development unfold ideas of biodiversity and Nature. To be more precise, I study how biodiversity is integrated in urban practice. I study human practices within a wide range of actions; from urban policies, plans, and architecture being realized through formal systems, to citizens performing art as activism, filing lawsuits, or singing, talking, painting, and shouting at demonstrations. All these diverse urban practices are expressing ideas and dreams about not only biodiversity, but also about future ways of living and relating to other living beings.“
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Sebastian Gatz
Architect and PhD student at Konstfack/HDK-Valand
“In order to avoid a (total) collapse of the planet – and this desire seems to be informed more out of human angst than out of compassion for the planet – we have to step away from a form of thinking, where ‘others’ are at the ‘bottom’ of the food chain and humans are at the ‘top’. All living and nonliving entities share the space we call ‘universe’ and are interconnected with each other in a non-hierarchical way. Accepting and encouraging the agency of non-humans in this universe points toward a more holistic form of ‘sustainable’ thinking which includes respectfulness and gratitude toward (basically) everything. This form of thinking is relatively new to western (academic) minds but very old compared to non-western or non-normative ontologies.”
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Anton Poikolainen Rosén
Postdoctoral researcher of Sustainable Interaction Design at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm university
“We cannot separate human needs from those of other organisms in our environment. Many organisms, including humans, benefit from considering design spaces as holistic and relational. This is the starting point for all my posthuman research in Human-Computer-Interaction in application areas such as gardening, farming, and forestry.”
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Athanasios Vagias Αθανάσιος Βάγιας
Architect MSc at Liljewall arkitekter
“Architecture practice is not a medium for demonstration of power or exploitation of nature. Architecture should be the bridge between humans and non-humans, born from the surroundings and serving as a democratic shelter. Design strategies that derive from the posthumanist perspective are often considered as unnecessary costs while, at the same time, sustainability is the main marketing agenda of the current building industry. My ambition is to introduce posthumanist strategies in the daily architecture practice, in form of multispecies based design. I believe cities could be much livelier, colorful, and truly sustainable, if symbiosis is in the center of architecture. Ecology and economy could merge into one notion, providing a possibility of future evolution for all beings.”
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Anna Marie Schröder
PhD student at K3 at MAU
“My work concentrates on the human entanglements in oceanic ecosystems, with a focus on the Baltic Sea. In the intersection of the Ocean Literacy Framework, posthumanism, and interaction design, I am curious about existing cultural practices that could inform a posthuman methodology for design-based research, which affirms the deep interdependencies in more-than-human entanglements along the coast and reactivate a relationship of resonance with the ocean. Bringing the posthumanist theory into practical design and design-based research can be an answer to the distance that anthropocentric thinking, human-centered design, and the technological advances of the last decades brought between humans and our natural environment. Affirming the deep interdependencies in more-than-human entanglements can reactivate the human resonating relationship with all living entities around us.”
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Yuta Ikeya 池谷宥太
Designer and Engineer, PhD Candidate at TU/e, Eindhoven University of Technology
“As a designer with an engineering background, I feel the responsibility to properly introduce technology in our life so that we do not exploit other life forms as we have so long. To achieve an earth where humans are more respectful of others, I aim to contribute to the posthuman design movement through my design practices focusing on the entanglements of humans, nature, and technology.”
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Petra Jääskeläinen
Doctoral Candidate/Researcher in Creative-AI at KTH
“Posthumanist perspectives can help us to question, critique and re-define the boundaries that we have constructed between the human and non-human with the humanist line of thought. I think these matters are becoming increasingly relevant, as both environmentalism and AI are challenging those norms and societal perceptions. In my practice, I have focused on themes around both environmental and technological post-humanism. For example, I have explored feminist care ethics as a lens of unpacking slow violence that is part of constructing Creative-AI technologies and producing imaginaries to uncover, analyse, and critique the norms and perceptions regarding Creative-AI and sustainability. Essentially, I am interested in how we can create futures in which humans, animals, and AI can co-exist in more equalitarian, sustainable and ethical ways, and what is the role of art/creative practices and technologies in this transformation.”
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Lígia Oliveira
PhD, interdisciplinary research at independent practice
“All work humans do is essentially relational: it is about the relationships we establish with other people, and how we relate to other beings, to the elements, places and landscapes around us. Acknowledging this and understanding the profound interdependence in how these processes occur, and their impact, opens new possibilities of kinship: ones in which we recover the innate connection to what is meaningful and true, in ourselves and in others. Remembering that deep knowing, of how good it feels to be intimate with nature is key in restoring the bond we have with life on Earth. Creative disciplines such as design, art and architecture provide the new ways of doing we desperately need, reuniting culture with nature through nurture and care, with an expanded perspective on timeline and beings; both in their objective and in the symbolic ways leading to societal change.”
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Sven Quadflieg
PhD, Professor at HSHL
“In addition to the urgent discussion of fundamental ethical issues, a posthuman understanding of design in the context of the reality of planetary boundaries is of enormous importance: understanding the complexity of the multiverse with a multitude of actors can help establish a new and just design practice, paving the way for a long-term desirable future.”
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Delal Şeker
Designer MFA
“Designing for/with non-human stakeholders, to create stories that will make the material mesh we are interlocked in visible, is a touchstone for my artistic practice. In this creative process I find the possibilities of speculative realism and the conceptual tools it offers, with the broad perspective of post-humanism, inspiring. I also believe in the power of speculative texts and designs to make the material networks and forces shaped by political preferences and economic manipulations more readable. In this way, I aim to expand the meaning of agency and new actors with a strategy of alienation by breaking the mundaneness of the everyday. Thus, we can not only defend the idea that living and non-living material forms have a story, but we can build new dreams without looking at the world through dualities.”
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Nadia Campo Woytuk
Designer, artist & PhD student in Interaction Design at KTH
“My work focuses on critical and intersectional feminist design of technologies for menstrual health and intimate care. Previously I have led and contributed to projects involving new media art, textiles, software art, and postcolonial computing. In my current work I am interested in drawing from feminist posthumanities and ecofeminism in order to design technologies for understanding and noticing the menstrual cycle and the social, environmental and more-than-human ecologies it entangles.”
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Berilsu Tarcan
Practice-based research fellow at the Department of Design at NTNU
“The issues brought by the Anthropocene suggest that design as a field should shift from a human-centric practice and include other-than-humans. I believe that design should become a decolonized and more-than-human practice. Posthumanism and new materialism are relevant ways of thinking that can enable this. However, these concepts are not new, as there are already nonbinary ways of looking at the world in indigenous ways of knowing. This is why I am doing a PhD on how design can become a more-than-human practice through craft-design relationships. I specifically look at felting, a traditional craft technique which allows me to have a hands-on experience with wool material and use indigenous knowledge with more-than-human approaches.”
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Stina Wessman
Senior lecturer at Konstfack
“I work as Senior Guest Lecturer at Konstfack in Gestalt and Design for Sustainable Development. With design I examine relationships we form and have with nature and resources. I’ve spent 10 years in the field of interdisciplinary Design Research at Interactive Institute and RISE where we have been formgiving tangible future scenarios. With a Research through Design approach, I’ve been involved in many different projects that challenge our attitudes and views on energy, resources and nature. I have always worked in consortium with various actors and perspectives and in my own practice I explore eco system interventions that connects humans and non-humans in specific contexts.”
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Johanna Mehl
PhD candidate and research associate at TU Dresden
“Critical posthumanism allows for a problematization of the trajectory of the human subject increasingly destabilized by advanced technological mediation, the contesting of human exceptionalism among species, and disclosed social power relations. Yet this figure is frozen, sharply contoured, and stiff, reified by products, systems, and services on the everyday-things basis, by infrastructures, processes, tools, education, media, within unconscious habitual gestures, within homes, neighborhoods, cities, and interactions among people. While it may not be possible to truly step out of the human perspective when designing, it could be possible to disrupt anthropocentrism and decenter a specific image of a human consolidated by political, cultural, social, and technological hegemonies.“
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Christoph Matt
Designer and founder of Studio Matt
“The Studio Matt is inspired by adventures, explorations, and translations in the great outdoors and its vast ecosystems. Keeping a wary eye on the blue planet while working with the human and non-human around the world. Constantly facing emerging issues with rock-solid rucksack principles, more-than-human focus, progressive design practices and by embracing a positive failure culture.”
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Inna Zrajaeva & John Kazior
Founders of Feral Malmö
“Feral Malmö is a small collective of designers recognizing and responding to the more-than-human community in Malmö, Sweden. Interviews, research, and collaborative workshops are tools we use to write the story of the city’s feral systems from a multispecies perspective. By keeping our designs open and collaborative, we aim to become more feral and to give people a more-than-human map for social-ecological living in the city.“
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Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard
PhD, Postdoctoral researcher at AHO – The Oslo School of Architecture and Design
“With a background in interaction design, I have explored speculative and feminist approaches to designing intimate digital technologies for human beings. My interest in the intersection between posthumanism and design practice is in the more-than-human concerns of human menstrual and sexual health. This intersection leads me to wonder how design can nurture an appreciation of and care for the micro- and macro relations of reproductive cycles and fertility in human, bacteria, plants and soil, and how such a thickening of our relations can contribute to healthier lives.“
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Matthew Dalziel
Architect, and PhD by Practice Fellow at AHO – the Oslo School of Architecture and Design
“The Posthumanities are a critical port of call for the cultivation of architectural imagination. If nothing else, PH reveals to architects that the notion of sustainability in architecture is transhumanist in nature – a humanist project reaching out toward autonomous perfection through technological wizardry. In PH the concerns for our entanglement with technology are joined by a critique of ‘man’ and a critique of ‘species’, challenging the colonialist substrate of architectural concepts such as ‘place making’. PH invites architects to occupy an expanded imaginative landscape of concern, where the age-old questions of how we build and who we build for are necessarily reconceptualised.“
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Yuxi Chen 谌 禹西
Designer MFA
“In my practice, posthumanism brings a new perspective to living with, designing with, and working with the external world. Design holds the ability to take care of the relations between humans and non-humans. For me, the idea is to re-imagine, re-see, and re-connect with other-than-human stakeholders – and it is about constructing a speculative future.”
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Mathilda Dahlqvist
Designer MFA
“Stemming from the human-centered worldview that is at the root of intoxicated waterways, desolated forests, and altered landscapes, I want to sharpen our vision for what is beyond our sight and shed light on places in the shadows. By exploring design and posthumanism as a combined discourse, I aim to rethink these no longer viable ways of living, thinking, and behaving. Thus, I’m approaching social, environmental, and economical issues with critical and reflective making, enriched by theories and concepts within posthumanism. In these studies, I’m proposing the methodology of multispecies interplay, which is a set of experiments that explores the two discourses mentioned. How can design shed light on shadow places and rethink its relationships between human and non-human residents?“
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Gabriel Giacometti
Designer MFA
“Through studying the process of decomposition I have learned that building, creating, and killing are not only human behaviours, but are natural and necessary processes for new life to arise. Yet, to avoid harmful practices, this must be done with care and in collaboration with the ecosystem. I envision a change in mindset where we could experience living with non-humans to get to know them. To understand what is to live with them? Study their behaviour to understand their needs. To understand their role and relevance to our shared ecosystems. Maybe if we better understand the non-human we will be more aware when, and if it is necessary, to alter an ecosystem, and how to do so for the benefit of the natural cycles.“
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Eva Durall
D.A., Designer and postdoctoral researcher at Aalto Media Lab
“My design works explore sociotechnological assemblages in learning and education using participatory and speculative design approaches. Through my research, I’m interested in envisioning more-than-human futures that support diversity and inclusion of various actors in learning environments.”
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Jana Pejoska
PhD student at Aalto Media Lab, lecturer at UWAS, Aalto University, and researcher at Cicero Learning, Helsinki University
“How we experience and relate through digital products and services is depending on how they are designed. As users of technology we see a world through them, a viewpoint that is shaping our behavior too. I am curious to unpack these spaces in between the human and technological non-human actors, to understand the relations that we form with and through them. My work has been mainly around topics of communication, collaboration and meaning-making with emerging communication and mixed reality technologies. As a design researcher in digital culture, I investigate the human experiences mediated by technology with postphenomenological goggles, with posthuman ideals while using Research Through Design methods and design prototypes to reform experiences.”
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Karey Helms
PhD, associate professor of design at Umeå Institute of Design, and postdoctoral researcher at Stockholm University
“My research explores the more-than-human implications of technological assemblages that proactively operate on the behalf of humans by designing within intimate settings of care. Such situations are often difficult to quantify and where an unintended consequence of technology can be revealing, shameful, or devastating for a diversity of bodily beings and meanings. This includes designing within queer scales of human bodily fluids, such as urinary infrastructures and breastmilk entanglements. Within autobiographic and speculative design methods, I draw upon feminist new materialisms and queer theories to implicate myself and unsettle bodily boundaries for a more careful design of technology.”
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Mariana Alves Silva, Katarina Bonnevier &
Thérèse Kristiansson
“Mycket has embarked on a three year artistic research project called Trollperception in the Heartlands. In Trollperception in the Heartlands, we turn to folktales and legends to reconnect to that time when people in our regions lived closer to, and were more subordinated to nature. We invite others to delve into trolls, spirits, and animism together with us, joining the pack, and craft together, while simultaneously mediating and sharing these artworks through filmed animations – investigating what new and unforeseen knowledge can be derived from the process itself. The aim is to explore troll perception through artistic research, and to create and share viable ways of designing and living for the future. Returning people to a dialogue with Earth and its fellow creatures.”
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Agnes Backegårdh
Founder of Where Is My Pony Design And Communication
“”Business as usual” is a dead end, and humanity needs to reform its relationship with the planet. A profound change requires both intellectual and emotional approaches and I believe that PH theories form a transformative foundation for sustainable design and innovation.”
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Anette Væring
Designer, Collective & Connecting Design Practice, Copenhagen
“The aim of my practice is to shift our orientation in design towards more respectful ethics. What could design research and practice become as a more social and sustainable practice, that liberate collective dreams and powers for us as human beings as part of nature? I do mostly research-based communication and design related to nature. With designer Petra Lilja I arrange alternative walks in different landscapes – that attempt to explore the magic and common ground of human and nature.”
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Tamara Lašič Jurković
Designer MFA, Ljubljana, Slovenia
“When seeking ways to deal with the environmental crisis, I found it difficult to come up with viable solutions within the existing societal narratives. However, when I started looking from a posthumanist perspective, it was like rewiring my perception of how things are/could be. I think of it as a regenerative process of overcoming old patterns and unlearning ways of being by acknowledging the complexity of the web of life, appreciating the interconnectedness and exploring its entanglement. How exciting is it to wonder what can happen when after centuries of trying to stand out and separate ourselves from this mysterious mesh, we dive back into it, merge with it and start working with it instead of against it?”
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Linnea Våglund, Leo Fidjeland & Filips Stanislavskis
Nonhuman Nonsense – Design and Art Studio
“Nonhuman Nonsense is a research-driven design and art studio creating near-future fabulations and experiments somewhere between utopia and dystopia. We seek the contradictory and the paradoxical to tell stories that open the public imaginary to futures that currently seem impossible. Working in the embryonic stages of system transformation, in the realm of social dreaming and world-making processes, we aim to redirect focus to the underlying ethical and political issues, to challenge the power structures that enable and aggravate the current destruction of the (non)human world – allowing other entities to exist.”
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Satu Samira Hamed
Impact Designer at Helsinki Design Company
“We’re facing major complex global challenges that require new perspectives and methods of addressing development and change. Service and business design have traditionally been focused on users and customers. However, the world is not changed solely by designing more products and services. The world is changed by behaviour that supports positive change. In order to design desirable futures, we need to involve those who design traditionally has left out, the non-human stakeholders. I believe that the posthumanist perspective offers ways to design in a more sustainable way, not only for today’s world but to the new world.”
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Svenja Keune
“The separation of humans and nature that is so evident in our built environment is part of how we understand ourselves – as separate from nature. Therefore we need to rethink these boundaries and invite nature into the built environment and offer positive and empowering perspectives of designing and living with her. Posthumanist perspectives may help with the social learning processes and a reorientation of how we understand ourselves – as a part of nature.“
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Martin Malthe Borch
M.Sc.Eng Biotechnology, M.IxD, Coordinator of BioFabLab and external lecturer at Roskilde University
“How do we shift from designing inert or “dead” matter for human experience to evolving systems of living matter and agency for multispecies experiences? And how can ecosystem design practices and principles be supported by existing biological and ecological models and knowledge?“
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Elin Sundström
Artist
“The arts: making something out of something else; what a promise of change that is. Posthumanism and the environmental humanities; such yummy ingredients to use. Looking at posthumanism through claywork and vice versa, I will keep exploring some posthumanist ways of relating to place, matter and multi-species relationships, with a special concern for water. What does being in deep relationship mean, what does it look like and who will we become?“
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Petra Lilja
PhD student at KTH+Konstfack
“The paradigm of human exceptionality has set in motion a machinery of global effects of which design, by adding to mass-production and consumption, can be argued to be one principal cog. Informed by critical posthumanist concepts, my work aims to disrupt human-centeredness and open up for reconfigurations of design practices to better engage with troubled presents where a myriad of other species is overlooked and becoming extinct. My research project also explores multispecies-inclusive narratives and strategies for engaging and empowering scales of actors and knowledges otherwise unaddressed.“
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Henrik Lübker
PhD, CEO Design Denmark
“As CEO of a union of designers I strive to advance society’s understanding of how design is an integral part of reconfiguring how we understand the relationship between subject and other, but also to advance posthumanistic and speculative strands of design thinking within the design community.“
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Li Jönsson
PhD, Senior lecturer at K3
“In regards to recent discussions around environmental issues and ecological changes, it is argued that we need to take account of ozone holes, coral reefs, garbage heaps, and all the rest. This requires us to become posthuman-designers; to question not just arrangements between humans, but to open up to an entirely different universe – a multiverse – of actors. I believe posthumanism and design can help us here, to practice and imagine how to create mutually beneficial relationships and more ecological entanglements between and among this sprawling multiverse.“
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Fanny Lindh
Part of design studio Doma, applied research designer at RISE Interactive
“By engaging in and with the nonhuman, I believe that we can unveil the stories where human and nonhuman are not that inherently different from each other, and place us human as something not separated from the world around us, but part of it. The human perspective is not the only one, but rather one amongst the many perspectives that creates the story about the world that we live in. Not only are we changing the world but it is also changing us, it is about time that we take responsibility in the why’s, how’s and what’s we change.“
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Cecilia Åsberg
Founding Director and Director of the Posthumanities Hub and LiU
“The Posthumanities Hub is a postconventional research group and a platform for postdisciplinary humanities, art and science, and more-than-human humanities. We work across the arts and sciences, with philosophy informed by advanced cultural critique and some seriously humorous feminist creativity. In our research, we specialize in the more-than-human condition and re-inventive feminist theory-practices and methodologies for how we can learn to live better together on a damaged planet. Conceptually, we explore, re-think, design and put to use posthuman, a-human, inhuman, nonhuman, and trans-, queer or anti-imperialist and feminist theory-practices for academic or societal uses. We target specific cases and relevant phenomena in our projects – all with the clear aim to meet up with pressing societal challenges.“
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Anna Maria Orrù
PhD student at Umeå PhD, Research Curator, Lecturer at Chalmers
“We are on a voyage of poethical proportion – poetic, political and ethical – to appeal for a posthuman and postnature approach to critical spatial practice. By taking inspiration from our companion species helps to re-align relational activity between humans and non-humans. Such transformations to the making and relating to space are fundamental to understanding a significant otherness that goes beyond anthropocentric mindsets for a reorientation of coexistances so that new interactions can emerge. In this endeavour, Biomimicry offers a way forward and provides an overflowing cradle of knowledge taken from 3.8 billion years of nature’s research and development.“
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Aditya Pawar
“To think about participation in a more-than-human world requires us to reconsider the primacy of human agency. The move suggested here is from participation to acknowledging livingness or relational becoming as the modality of connecting bodies, matter and worldly arrangements. I understand this as expanding the sensibility of the political to build durable associations between human and non-humans.”
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Martín Ávila
PhD, Professor at Konstfack
“Design devises, which implies creating divisions, arranging partitions, material and sensible, including some and excluding others. Thus, a form of togetherness is inscribed in, by and through things that tend to maintain us in our relating to (some) others. The norm of the devising through design has been human; done by humans and for humans. There is a need for an ethical commitment to create designs that acknowledge other beings, and to create a culture that devises disruptions of anthropocentric spatialities and temporalities. Responding ecologically, in working to increase life-affirming response-abilities.“
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Åsa Ståhl
PhD, Senior lecturer at LNU
“Design has contributed to good life for many, but also excluded many actors, spaces and temporalities – and left problematic marks for generations to come. Posthumanism can generatively help practitioners, educators and researchers to transform the basis for their inquiries, choices and answers, partly by a shift in who is even understood as an actor.”
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Kristina Lindström
PhD, Senior lecturer at MAU
“Given that design and the way it has been practiced have participated in creating urgent environmental concerns, I believe there is a need to rethink and rework the foundations of design. Posthumanism can offer an alternative imaginary for design, that invites designers to work with interdependencies between and across more-than-human actors.”
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Erik Sandelin
PhD student at KTH+Konstfack
“The world is not a smorgasbord for humans to indulge in. Exploitation of non-human animals permeates our everyday lives. I believe some posthumanist concepts may be productive for (re)imagining what being human could be like, beyond human supremacy. In the tension between affirmative posthumanism and critical animal studies imaginative alternatives can be prototyped.”
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Thomas Laurien
PhD, Senior lecturer at HDK-Valand
“We urgently need to increase the PH value in our minds. Instead of being part of the problem I believe that a designer, by taking a stand for other-than-human stakeholders, can play an important role in the crucial survival project of decolonizing and re-enchanting the world.”