Abstract
An emerging dimension of multispecies design is the effort to attune to new sensory entanglements with the more-than-human world that foreground the alternative temporalities of multispecies life. Adding to such approaches, in this paper we want to emphasise that there is an incommensurability between the timeframes of organisms and those of human ways of thinking about time and of capitalist production. Indeed, multispecies design involves trying to work with alternative timeframes that necessarily disrupt dominant rhythms of design and production. Exploring a set of encounters with fungal time, we consider how such experiments have the capacity to plunge us into the rhythms of another organism and into the temporal ecologies of multispecies life. Rather than cultivating a romanticised sense of connection to nature, we argue, often more important is the way such encounters highlight the limits of such a sensibility: in moments of frustrated waiting, disappointment, or unexpected happenings.
Keywords
fungal time, incommensurability, multispecies design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1709
Citation
Williams, N., and Parker, A. (2026) Incommensurable durations: Fungal time and the limits of attunement in multispecies design, 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.2026.1709
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Included in
Incommensurable durations: Fungal time and the limits of attunement in multispecies design
An emerging dimension of multispecies design is the effort to attune to new sensory entanglements with the more-than-human world that foreground the alternative temporalities of multispecies life. Adding to such approaches, in this paper we want to emphasise that there is an incommensurability between the timeframes of organisms and those of human ways of thinking about time and of capitalist production. Indeed, multispecies design involves trying to work with alternative timeframes that necessarily disrupt dominant rhythms of design and production. Exploring a set of encounters with fungal time, we consider how such experiments have the capacity to plunge us into the rhythms of another organism and into the temporal ecologies of multispecies life. Rather than cultivating a romanticised sense of connection to nature, we argue, often more important is the way such encounters highlight the limits of such a sensibility: in moments of frustrated waiting, disappointment, or unexpected happenings.