The Paradox of Designing for Nonhumans
10 | 2023 – 10 | 2024
This work emerged from a Master’s level project on more-than-human design that I initiated and taught together with Madlen Kneile. The project invited students to explore how technology might advocate for nonhuman interests in times of ecological crisis. Rather than positioning animals, plants, or ecosystems as passive resources, the brief encouraged students to design for them as entities with their own stakes and forms of agency.
Seven technology concepts were developed within the project. Building on this material, we later conducted a qualitative analysis of all seven artefacts. Instead of evaluating them as solutions, the analysis approached the concepts as sites of tension. Read together, they reveal three relational orientations: (1) enabling interspecies relations, (2) enabling intraspecies relations, and (3) enabling no relations.
Across the concepts, seven paradoxes became visible — including tensions such as preserving interdependent beings by separating them or conserving “the wild” by taming it. These paradoxes point to two deeper challenges in more-than-human design: overcoming an anthropocentric perspective and practicing relational thinking.
The insights from this analysis resulted in a peer-reviewed paper that contributes to ongoing HCI discussions on sustainability and more-than-human design.
More broadly, this research demonstrates how design education can serve as a site for theoretical reflection, where speculative artefacts reveal structural paradoxes of more-than-human design.
Technology concepts:
Parsa Moazami Goodarzi, Joanna Seweryn, Andrew Christopher Marsh, Jan Stępniewski-Janowski, Edwin Ofosuhene Boadu, Francesca D’Errico, Alessandra Asero.
Corresponding Publication:
J. Dörrenbächer, M. Kneile, M. Hassenzahl, M. Laschke: »Navigating the Paradox. The Challenges of Designing Technology for Nonhumans«. Proceedings of the Nordic Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (NordiCHI‘24), ACM 2024.
