More-than-human design: rethinking agency and sustainable practices
Transformation is a continuous process. 2020 has brought rapid acceleration of social transformation in a shift towards working from home, working remotely and living in the new normal of a global pandemic. Design thinking has also been going through a conceptual transformation in order to adapt to the new needs of organisations, product developers, researchers and consumers. But is human-centred design still equipped to identify and address the increasingly complex and new challenges we face in the new normal? And how can we design for positive impact beyond humans?
Human-centred design has dominated the product and service design industry, but as designers seek to scale up in social complexity and also consider the ecological and environmental challenges faced by all humans, such as climate change and plastic pollution, there is a need to rethink our methodologies.
More-than-human design is a conceptual articulation that stimulates action by designing for impact beyond humans, because it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas (with).
The more-than-human approach extends the agency of humans beyond their impact on humans to include the conscious need to consider the impacts on non-human actors in the world. We don’t need to design human agency out, but redesign human agency and understandings of agency, to consider our intended and unintended involvement of non-human actors — animals, forests, weather events, waterways, and more.
With this article, I suggest that we need to focus our design on the people who create and consume products and services, and the social systems that enable negative impacts on ecosystems, animals, and waterways. That involves changing our own conception of what is sustainable, who or what has agency, what agency means, and reshaping the actions, systems and processes that have negative impacts while finding ways of transitioning into sustainable practices, such as designing an economy without waste by designing landfills out of existence.
One of the proposed approaches to reconceptualise design thinking is planet-centric design which proposes the need to put the planet at the focus of design. The intention is to shift the attention towards the need for sustainability, circularity and regenerative designs as drivers of economic growth and innovation.
But the challenge with that approach is that it risks leaving out the most crucial cause of environmental degradation: humans. Sidestepping humans as the cause also makes it difficult to find the right solutions. Thinking of more-than-human design is another conceptual approach to stimulate actions towards social and behavioural change in the Anthropocene, to rethink and redesign human relationships with environment.
While the focus of the two approaches is similarly on sustainability, I suggest that thinking of more-than-human design keeps humans in the focus but allows designers to include other actors. Humans are always at the centre of design and our ecological crisis is anthropogenic; it’s caused by humans, so designing with those problems in mind will also lead to solutions that curb the cause. To address environmental problems, we need to change social conceptions, human behaviour and transform the social systems that enable current practices. Not planet-centric, but more-than-human.
What design approach can help us address the environmental challenges that we face on local and global scales? How might we shift the design narrative and ask: what are the more-than-human interactions with a product/service/material?
This article builds on my previous article where I outlined a way of thinking, acting and designing sustainable futures in the Anthropocene. In the article, I outline that we live in the Anthropocene, a term that describes the current era of unprecedented human impact on the planet, to the extent that nuclear radiation, plastic pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel extraction are the most significant factors in influencing global ecosystems, even causing climate change.
What do I mean by ‘more-than-human’ and why does it matter for design thinking?
In products or services where humans engage with ecosystems, plants, animals or environments, we still need to think about humans, but beyond the interactions between humans, to integrate thinking about the interactions between non-humans and humans into our designs. Thinking beyond humans acknowledges that human lived experiences are situated in a multispecies context, that our experiences and relationships are entangled with that of other species, and that we co-inhabit places.
The way we talk about something is shaped by the way we think about it (and vice versa), which in turn affects how we behave towards it, or as Haraway puts it: “it matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts.”
Thinking of design practices as ‘more-than-human’ enables a social science approach to sustainability that includes environmental humanities and multispecies ways of thinking into design thinking. The approach draws on the work of Donna Haraway (ibid) to suggest that we need to think beyond human actors in our global systems and consider the role of non-human actors: their agency, the consequences of our agency on them and how we conceptualise them. That way we can think of plastic litter as having agency on marine animals and that human actions have agency beyond production and consumption.
As designers, consumers and producers of social systems that have an impact on our environments, we need to focus on the consequences of our own actions on ecosystems, animals, plants and waterways. A big part of that is identifying the deeper social causes of a problem. For example, plastic is the result of an economy fuelled — pun intended — by fossil fuels and the intention to produce materials cheaply and that generate cheap supply chains, through lighter and more durable shipping materials that can also provide hygienic and sanitary packaging for food, drinks and medical supplies.
Through a more-than-human approach, we can think of what happens to plastic if it litters an environment, ends up in rivers, waterways and ecosystems. Plastic takes centuries to decompose and can repeatedly harm animals who digest it by suffocating them. Even after their carcass is decomposed, plastic is still there for another animal to suffer the same fate. Turtles ingest plastic bags because they look similar to jellyfish. The polymer molecules of plastic take on toxins from the environment, acting as carcinogenic sponges that they carry to other organisms. Plastics have even been used by birds to build nest and by hermit crabs to seek shelter.
A more-than-human designer would take a system thinking approach to plastic pollution and highlight that the social, economic and political systems that exist play a significant role in creating plastic pollution, and consider solutions that address these social factors by shifting values, narratives and behaviours, which in turn influence design, production and consumption.
Plastic production is the result of social systems that have more than human consequences: while product design usually only includes its use by humans, should product design consider the product’s agency in its afterlife, such as what happens after it is being discarded? That would mean being aware of unintended consequences and then iterating to avoid them.
A more-than-human design approach would take methods and artefacts like a Journey Map and consider the more than human interactions with it, even before and after a product lifecycle. This may even require developing new design artefacts, using or building on new approaches, like those form the Circular Design Guide, but adding to it ‘more than human touchpoints’ that consider when animals and ecosystems interact with a design.
This requires a shift in social values in individuals and organisations to put people and planet before profit. One way to certify and encourage this is through the B-Corporation certification, which encourages fair worker compensation, renewable energy use, reduction of energy consumption and waste generation. Working with and purchasing from B-Corporations is one step towards acknowledging that we live in a more than human world and there are more important purposes than profit.
The B-Corporation certification assessment measures a company’s social and environmental performance, including its waste generation, energy use and supply chains, but also employee benefits and compensation. This establishes an accountable set of criteria that seek to empower businesses to put sustainable practices in place.
Many thanks to Martin Espig for helping me to improve an earlier draft of this article through his critical commentary. If you are interested in talking further about this or would like to learn about how to apply this way of thinking in your organisation, please get in touch with me here.
