Abstract
Design is evolving from primarily human-centred approaches towards planetary concerns that re-centre more-than-human agency – a perspective that correlates with pressing ecological challenges emerging from global anthropogenic impacts. Against this backdrop, design education that equips graduates with the competencies to engage present and future complex socioecological challenges continue to develop. The authors discuss interconnected drivers that are shaping the wider field and advancing designers' roles before presenting a pedagogical model that supports design students to engage in academic-industry-community collaboration and forms of making to materialise complex systems and evolving epistemologies in accessible and tangible ways. The authors offer insights into how future educators and graduates might design with myriad forms of intelligence – human, artificial and ecological – to navigate poly-crisis issues such as the energy transition and nature restoration. These graduate attributes are positioned as an agile material practice, capable of advancing design for regenerative and just climate futures.
Keywords
more-than-human; systems; ecologies; intelligences
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2062
Citation
McAra, M., Prosser, Z., and Ross, K. (2026) Materialising Ecologies of Intelligence: learning to design with and within more-than-human systems, 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.2026.2062
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Materialising Ecologies of Intelligence: learning to design with and within more-than-human systems
Design is evolving from primarily human-centred approaches towards planetary concerns that re-centre more-than-human agency – a perspective that correlates with pressing ecological challenges emerging from global anthropogenic impacts. Against this backdrop, design education that equips graduates with the competencies to engage present and future complex socioecological challenges continue to develop. The authors discuss interconnected drivers that are shaping the wider field and advancing designers' roles before presenting a pedagogical model that supports design students to engage in academic-industry-community collaboration and forms of making to materialise complex systems and evolving epistemologies in accessible and tangible ways. The authors offer insights into how future educators and graduates might design with myriad forms of intelligence – human, artificial and ecological – to navigate poly-crisis issues such as the energy transition and nature restoration. These graduate attributes are positioned as an agile material practice, capable of advancing design for regenerative and just climate futures.