Abstract
Grounded in post-anthropocentric and post-humanist perspectives, this track explores more-than-human data practices that challenge dominant data paradigms and cultivate alternative modes of engagement with the world, from the microbial to the planetary. Rather than treating non-human life as objects of measurement and classification, as data subjects, the contributions in this track ask what it would mean to recognize organisms, systems, and processes as data co-producers, whose perceptual worlds, temporal rhythms, and relational entanglements actively participate in what counts as knowledge. This reorientation carries profound consequences for the designer. Co-producing data with more-than-human others is a political, epistemic, and ontological commitment that goes beyond inclusivity: it unsettles human authority, disrupts extractive infrastructures, and demands new forms of response-ability in how knowledge is gathered, represented, and put to use. If data has long spoken for the world, this track asks: how might it begin to listen?
Keywords
more-than-human design; multispecies worlds; data practices; data as relation
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.118
Citation
Giaccardi, E., Lenzi, S., Speed, C., Tsaknaki, V., and Zhou, J. (2026) More-than-human data practices, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.118
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
More-than-human data practices
Grounded in post-anthropocentric and post-humanist perspectives, this track explores more-than-human data practices that challenge dominant data paradigms and cultivate alternative modes of engagement with the world, from the microbial to the planetary. Rather than treating non-human life as objects of measurement and classification, as data subjects, the contributions in this track ask what it would mean to recognize organisms, systems, and processes as data co-producers, whose perceptual worlds, temporal rhythms, and relational entanglements actively participate in what counts as knowledge. This reorientation carries profound consequences for the designer. Co-producing data with more-than-human others is a political, epistemic, and ontological commitment that goes beyond inclusivity: it unsettles human authority, disrupts extractive infrastructures, and demands new forms of response-ability in how knowledge is gathered, represented, and put to use. If data has long spoken for the world, this track asks: how might it begin to listen?