Abstract
How should humans live with animals and other forms of life? Could responses to this question improve the health and wellbeing of the biosphere? This paper argues that design researchers ought to engage nonhuman lifeforms as collaborators: informants and co-designers, or clients and users. Inspired by recent design challenges involving birds, bats and trees, this paper positions emancipatory multispecies cohabitation as a goal that can alleviate ongoing biodiversity losses and human-wildlife conflicts, in cities and beyond. It opens an interdisciplinary conversation by translating emerging scholarship in ethics, politics, and aesthetics to a narrative about desirable more-than-human cultures. This discussion has significant implications and can help to inform regulation, instrumentation, and pedagogies of future design.
Keywords
more-than-human design, multispecies cohabitation, urban rewilding, sustainable futures
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.402
Citation
Roudavski, S. (2020) Multispecies Cohabitation and Future Design, in Boess, S., Cheung, M. and Cain, R. (eds.), Synergy - DRS International Conference 2020, 11-14 August, Held online. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.402
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Multispecies Cohabitation and Future Design
How should humans live with animals and other forms of life? Could responses to this question improve the health and wellbeing of the biosphere? This paper argues that design researchers ought to engage nonhuman lifeforms as collaborators: informants and co-designers, or clients and users. Inspired by recent design challenges involving birds, bats and trees, this paper positions emancipatory multispecies cohabitation as a goal that can alleviate ongoing biodiversity losses and human-wildlife conflicts, in cities and beyond. It opens an interdisciplinary conversation by translating emerging scholarship in ethics, politics, and aesthetics to a narrative about desirable more-than-human cultures. This discussion has significant implications and can help to inform regulation, instrumentation, and pedagogies of future design.