Fifteenth #5: On more-than-human design
Decentering humans to design for a multi-species world
How human-centred thinking produces technologies that exploit and extract; how a more-than-human approach to design is more in tune with ecology and our entangled existence
🔓 I first published this essay on 15 April 2024. Since then, I have continued to develop my thinking on human decentred design. So one year on, I am removing the paywall so you can read my original essay in full
📚 You can buy any book mentioned in this newsletter from my store on Bookshop.org
Decentering the human in design
What is wrong with human-centred design? The method underpins professional and academic practice and shapes how contemporary software and services are made. A human-centred designer starts by analysing the needs of the people for whom they are designing. Usability, accessibility and efficiency are the basis for assessing how well a system or interface works. In recent decades, supplementary techniques have diverged from the human-centred design process to become specialist skills in their own right, ranging from user experience research and information architecture to service and content design. Each contributes to the delivery of the modern interactive digital product.
Human-centred design is not above critique. The scale of our technological landscape has expanded to such a scale, that is not uncommon for billions of people to be connected by their use of a single platform. Technology encroaches into more avenues of our lives than ever before, meaning a designer must also contend with being part social scientist, ethnographer, lawyer, ethicist, ecologist — or a combination of each! The current rush to AI-powered automation has cruelly exposed the harms that automated and predictive computerisation at scale can cause, especially when automated decision-making can have such life-changing outcomes.
Large-scale cloud platforms are both extractive and exploitative — from the acceleration in the consumption of mineral and material resources needed to manufacture our phones, to an exponential growth in the scale of data centres needed to warehouse our data. The turbo-charged profit motives driving this need for exponential growth are mirrored in supply chains that ensure labour exploitation falls most heavily on the shoulders of low-wage workers who keep the most extreme forms of hate, violent and pornographic content off our screens, perform gig work, or, in a globally distributed and permanently online workforce, compete for digital piece-work for ever-shrinking payment.
Advocating for an uncritical continuance of human-centred design means upholding a performance of design that treats the world, its material and labourers as underused resources that have yet to achieve optimal utilisation. Human-centred design positions humans as the pinnacle of intelligence while also justifying activities that subjugate and exploit other entities — living and non-living. Human-centred design is a product of histories that classified organisms into hierarchies that gave humans moral permission to dominate space — turning lands into territories, and minerals into commodities. These constructed hierarchies can and have been applied towards humans — producing scientific and academic justification for rendering some people less-than-human, justifying their enslavement and theft of land.
Daring to aim at human-centred design and its ideals is a dissenting position. The future our planet deserves cannot be achieved under the auspices of an extractive system that ignores the assemblage of living and non-living beings existing around us.
Interlude: Wacissa
“Wacissa” was a temporary installation screened at Times Square in 2021. The artist, Allison Janae Hamilton, intended for the work to plunge the busy shoppers, tourists and residents of New York into the still waters of Northern Florida. The haunting relationship with water, the resulting subjugation and extraction was, and still is, mediated by its traversal. Stolen Black bodies across oceans. Slave-produced commodities shipped through canals, across seas. The fault lines being drawn in our race to AI automation continue to flow through similar channels as data centres and generative AI extract, not only from the earth but from its groundwater, reservoirs and rivers. Water runs through it.
More-than-human design
Before disposing of human-centred design, we should be satisfied that we know where we, the humans, are positioned before attempting to formulate new iterations for doing design.
Our expansive and extractive labours lead to resource and climate injustice. We live in a multi-species world, and the results of our industrial and technological expansion have caused the permanent destruction of many species — a point so poignantly demonstrated by a tribunal performed as part of the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes in 2021, where climate crimes causing the extinction of plants and animals were brought before the assembled court — an intervention showing how art foreshadows life — with climate litigation cases a reality today.
We continue to increase our understanding of how simple organisms use embodied intelligence to relate to each other and react to the world. We continue to uncover the complex ways in which plants and fungi exchange communicative signals across mycorrhizal networks. Reframing our definition of intelligence, whether observationally or through zoological research, means that we can recognise other forms of intelligence that have previously been overlooked (and in doing so, disrupt rigid binary conceptions of higher vs. lower intelligence animals).
Arriving at a more-than-human viewpoint means that we consider ourselves, not as singular intelligent beings at the top of a pyramid hierarchy, but rather people living alongside animals, plants, and other non-living entities, cognisant that our actions and reactions reverberate within a complex and entangled world — an existence where we do not have the automatic right to help ourselves to minerals or resource. Moving from a human-centred to a more-than-human ecological viewpoint redraws our relationship with the natural world. In doing so, inevitably, this will lead to us overturning the approach we use to do our work and how we take up space.
In geological terms, we find ourselves in a period known as the Anthropocene or the Age of Man; a term that attempts to speak to the effects that centuries of human activity have caused on this planet. The technological advances we enjoy in computation and communication are a blip within this epoch. It is clear that despite this period being so short-lived, the continuing ecological and environmental effects are unsustainable. Yes, the business of technology pushes us towards the design of centralised architectures, housing bigger stores of data with greater energy demands fuelling the faster processing of data — but the planet cannot uphold these demands at the scale of growth that these corporate extractive economies demand.1
“In order to think through a cartography of Black ecologies, it is necessary to remember that the relationship between Black subjectivity and the more-than-human remains contested. It is fraught with histories of colonial violence, with increasingly harsh climates, and with the haunting of dispossessed lands, lives, and lifeways” — Locating Blackness In Intimate Ecologies
We stand at a critical juncture. On one hand, we know that dismantling existing human-centric approaches is necessary for avoiding further irreparable planetary damage and human exploitation. However in doing so, we must survey the practice we are poised to depart. We seek to leave behind a practice that is patriarchal — in labour, in the fixity of data binaries; we leave behind a practice that can only thrive on extractive business models — in the resources taken from Earth to be remade into our devices, in the data extracted from the people from whose eyes the fortunes of the biggest tech companies are made; we leave behind a practice that is derivative of anti-blackness — in embodying affordances and normative standards defined by white supremacy which in its ubiquity are interpreted as culturally neutral.
Whichever route we take towards a more-than-human design, the structurally oppressive and exclusionary ideas of the past must not be recast into its foundations.
Who gets to imagine the future?
THERE ARE BLACK PEOPLE IN THE FUTURE. The message from Alisha B. Wormsley’s multi-site, multi-continent intervention rings loudly — both as a call to action and a reminder.
Imagining better futures must not replicate the structural oppression, epistemic erasure, or ecological vandalism that our current human-centred approaches have facilitated.
In Ways of Being, James Bridle argues “Our machines should be non-binary, decentralized and unknowing” (pg. 208). If we let this idea mentally percolate, it mandates the dismantling of rigid, binary data architectures, and not only that, I would also add that the processes and structures we construct around making-doing should be a reflection of this. Design as an industry has settled into a formulaic way of working. All the better to produce, reproduce and sell at scale. A decentralised, non-binary approach would rely, not on deference to a fixed process or single representative authority — be it a person, method or institution — but on a sense-making, adaptive approach to creating knowledge.
“Epistemic justice is about overcoming the tradition of silence. It is about the coming to voice of all those whose voices cannot be spoken in the grammar of Western epistemology.” — Aesthetic and Epistemic Restitution for the Joy of Life, from Errant Journal #5, pg. 55
“[It is] difficult in the Western intellectual context to see the full extent of what relationships might be between humans and non-humans, or even between non-humans. We have to look at other traditions to widen our conceptual boundaries.” — “Good Technology is Messy” by Jason Edward Lewis from The Good Robot: Why Technology Needs Feminism
A more-than-human approach to design builds on the work of those who seek to challenge Western universalism — such as Daniela K. Rosner who in Critical Fabulations argues for the work of alliance over individualism.
A more-than-human approach to design echoes the entangled and interconnected relations existing in the world and deliberately resists reduction to template and commodification.
“So-called design thinking routinely treats animals, plants, and the organic and inorganic environment as endlessly replenishable resources, devoid of agency and value beyond utilitarian ends. In so doing, it fails to understand the earth itself as a vulnerable, incredible, precious meshwork of nonhuman and human beings.” — “An Attempt to Imagine Design Otherwise” from Design Struggles: Intersecting Histories, Pedagogies, and Perspectives (pg. 18)
A more-than-human approach to design is reparative — seeking reconciliation with knowledge traditions that have been historically and forcefully made invisible; is sensitive to the politics of citation and knowledge-making; is concerned with decentering the primacy of text on which the Western academy pins its value.
“When we cite European thinkers who discuss the ‘more-than-human’ but do not discuss their Indigenous contemporaries who are writing on the exact same topics, we perpetuate the white supremacy of the academy.” — An Indigenous Feminist's Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism, pg. 18
Our relationship with the more-than-human world contradicts the space we occupy and our precarity within it. The natural world is not bound by linear borders. Animal life is not confined to kingdoms. So we create and imagine new designs that reflect these interspecies relations: avoiding unidirectional extraction — of knowledge, of material resource, of space. The business models and methods of measuring success are destabilised at the very mention of such ideas.
“If the Anthropocene proclaims a sudden concern with the exposures of environmental harm to white liberal communities, it does so in the wake of histories in which these harms have been knowingly exported to black and brown communities under the rubric of civilization, progress, modernization, and capitalism.” — A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, (preface), pg. xiii
So we return, curious about what forms of inspiration can guide us — looking towards feminist design theories as well as Black Feminist ecologies and Indigenous knowledge traditions.
The ravenous expansion driven by Technology’s founder class, not satisfied with engorging themselves on Earth’s resources, are already setting their sights on the unclaimed territories of the Moon and beyond. Reparative steps must be taken before we can imagine new technological possibilities. We are, in the words of Ama Josephine Budge, “Aestheticizing futures in which Black ecologies are no longer contested ground.”
Explore further
On Substack
The discourse surrounding technological expansion into Outer Space is not just a science fiction fantasy. In this episode of The Anti-Dystopians podcast, Dr. Alina Utrata and her guest discuss the origins of these ideologies and how critical technological researchers can be much better equipped at contending with such ruinous ideas.
Listen
Transcripts are available for Chelsea Mikael Frazier: Learning environmentalism through the lens of Black feminism and BECOMING WATER: Black Memory in Slavery’s Afterlives.
Watch
There are many things wrong in the design industry. While I have dwelled on more expansive topics in this article, Mike Monteiro delivers a wake-up call to show how you — an Individual Contributor — have more agency and power than you ever imagined for effecting change.
In March I attended the Extractivism/Activism symposium. One paper that resonated with me was “From Mars to Venus: Activism of the Future” from research led by Ignacio Acosta (Royal College of Arts, London). The dual aspect view powerfully communicates the interconnection of our planetary concerns: in Kiruna — Sweden’s northernmost town inhabited by the Sámi people, and Chile’s Atacama Desert — one of the most arid places in the world; we see how our hunger for more — technology, data, speed — is already reshaping landscapes that are poles apart.
Magazines
MOLD Issue 04: Designing for the Senses (Print edition, 2022, £17)
The Slow Grind: Practising Hope and Imagination (Print edition, 2023, £30)
Resources
Critical Studies of the Cloud is a project from the Environmental Media Lab at the University of Calgary which uses art and artistic interventions to interrogate our understanding of The Cloud — as an artefact, infrastructure, metaphor, and cultural imagination.
Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene is an interactive resource that accompanies the book of the same name by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou
Read
Feminist HCI: taking stock and outlining an agenda for design by Shaowen Bardzell (from CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 2010, pages 1301–1310)
An Indigenous Feminist's Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism by Zoë Todd (from Academic Freedom and the Contemporary Academy, vol. 29, no. 1, 2016)
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None by Kathryn Yusoff (University of Minnesota Press, 2018, 115 pages; available from the ICA bookshop in London)
Black Feminist Ecological Thought: A Manifesto by Chelsea Mikael Frazier (from Atmos, 2020)
Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design by Daniela K. Rosner (MIT Press, 2020)
More-than-human design: rethinking agency and sustainable practices by Thomas Wright (Medium, 2020)
Pollinator Pathmaker Generates New Possibilities for More-Than-Human Art and Design by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (This is Mold, 2021)
The future as a public good: decolonising the future through anticipatory participatory action research by Robin Bourgeouis, Geci Karuri-Sebina and Kwamou Eva Feukeu (from Foresight, 2022)
The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet by Leah Thomas (Souvenir Press, 2022, 256 pages)
To achieve racial justice we must rebuild the world – and save the planet by Aaron White and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (openDemocracy, 2022)
From Mars to Venus: Activism of the Future by Ignacio Acosta (2023)
Locating Blackness In Intimate Ecologies by Ama Josephine Budge (from C&10, 2023)
More than Extraction: Rethinking Data's Colonial Political Economy by Catriona Gray (from International Political Sociology, vol. 17, issue 2, 2023)
More-Than-Human: Design After Human-Centricity by Ollie Cotsaftis (Medium, 2023)
On sensual futuring by Ouassima Laabich (from Ding, issue 5, 2023)
The Good Robot: Why Technology Needs Feminism edited by Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, 212 pages), in particular [1]: “Good Technology is Messy” by Jason Edward Lewis, pages 21-27. [2]: “Good Technology is Biophilic” by N. Katherine Hayles, pages 28-35.
Arguing when in human history the Anthropocene age started is a dispute that continues to rage in scientific and academic circles today. Of particular interest to me is the erasure or flattening effect that occurs when we consider define a starting point from the perspective of a universal (hu)man.