Abstract
This research explores how Inclusive design can be expanded to recognise nonhuman stakeholders by engaging perspectives from the More-than-Human turn. Using Research-through-Design, the study combines literature, semi-structured interviews, and case studies to identify barriers to designers’ responsible engagement with nonhuman entities. The findings reveal that while designers are open to widening inclusion, current practices remain centred on human empathy, usability, and evidence, leaving nonhuman concerns unaccounted for. Instead of expanding the repertoire of prescriptive tools, what is needed is the cultivation of attentiveness and care that enables designers to engage meaningfully with nonhuman agencies. This research offers two contributions: (1) a sensitising concept: More-than-Human Inclusion, which reframes inclusion as relational accountability that extends inclusion to nonhuman stakeholders while remaining accountable to historically excluded human voices, and (2) a speculative provotype composed of audio-narrated nonhuman stories that materialises the concept and proposes how such sensibilities might be cultivated in practice.
Keywords
More-than-Human Inclusion, Inclusive Design, Attentiveness, Care, Research-through-Design, Speculative Artefact, Provotype, Multispecies Design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2198
Citation
Siesquén Deza, J.L. (2026) Towards More-than-Human Inclusion: Designing Artefacts that Cultivate Attentiveness for Engaging with More-than-Human Worlds, 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.2026.2198
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Towards More-than-Human Inclusion: Designing Artefacts that Cultivate Attentiveness for Engaging with More-than-Human Worlds
This research explores how Inclusive design can be expanded to recognise nonhuman stakeholders by engaging perspectives from the More-than-Human turn. Using Research-through-Design, the study combines literature, semi-structured interviews, and case studies to identify barriers to designers’ responsible engagement with nonhuman entities. The findings reveal that while designers are open to widening inclusion, current practices remain centred on human empathy, usability, and evidence, leaving nonhuman concerns unaccounted for. Instead of expanding the repertoire of prescriptive tools, what is needed is the cultivation of attentiveness and care that enables designers to engage meaningfully with nonhuman agencies. This research offers two contributions: (1) a sensitising concept: More-than-Human Inclusion, which reframes inclusion as relational accountability that extends inclusion to nonhuman stakeholders while remaining accountable to historically excluded human voices, and (2) a speculative provotype composed of audio-narrated nonhuman stories that materialises the concept and proposes how such sensibilities might be cultivated in practice.