The Archive of Tensions

2025 – 2026

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This work emerged from a one-day workshop at the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) Conference titled “Paradoxes, Tensions and Challenges in Decentering the Human.” We invited designers and researchers to reflect on the contradictions that surface when attempting to design beyond the human.

 

The workshop focused on collective reflection. Participants shared their projects and identified tensions that emerged in their work — between care and control, innovation and sustainability, anthropocentrism and empathy. These tensions were written down, clustered, and physically connected, forming a web of unresolved relations.

From this process, we developed the Archive of Tensions: a growing collection of recurring challenges in more-than-human design. We distilled ten tensions and organized them into three categories:

 

World – Conflicting needs and values
Design – Tensions in more-than-human research practice
Theory – Conceptual ambiguities in more-than-human thinking

The archive is not meant to resolve contradictions, but to stay with them productively. Naming tensions makes visible the blind spots that accompany attempts to decenter the human. At the same time, archiving them is itself a paradox — a human gesture of structuring what resists structure.

 

The Archive of Tensions remains open and continues to grow through conversation and practice.

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Co-Organizers: 

Rosan Chow, Anton Poikolainen Rosén, Daisy Yoo, Eva Eriksson, Marc Hassenzahl
 

Corresponding Publication:

J. Dörrenbächer, R. Chow, D. Yoo, E. Eriksson: »An Archive of Tensions: A Growing Collection of Challenges in More-Than-Human Design« Interactions, (forthcoming).

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Pictures:

Image: Judith Dörrenbächer
Grafic: Daisy Yoo

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