Abstract
Affective relations among humans and more-than-humans are full of shifts, subtleties, and complexities. Yet, design research often treats feelings as stable instruments to utilize for making sustainable climate futures. Through reflection-on-practice, we untangle impressions and gestures in the field during a design research project in the Sonoran Desert titled Gifts for Tempe. Our reflections focus on shifts in our attention and attachments with an ‘invasive’ plant commonly known as Stinknet. The impressions and gestures reveal designer-researchers’ thick tensions in designing for climate futures. By showing how affective relations with more-than-humans change over time, we identify that climate futuring involves learning to gesture from intermediary positions where plural feelings coexist. These accounts of our unfolding relationship with Stinknet in the desert ecosystem show how designers feel their way toward reciprocity with more-than-humans when striving for sustainable climate futures.
Keywords
more-than-human, affect, sustainability, reflective practice
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2623
Citation
Whitcomb, A., and Ortega Pallanez, M. (2026) More than Weeds: Thickening designer-plant relations in the Sonoran Desert, 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.2026.2623
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
More than Weeds: Thickening designer-plant relations in the Sonoran Desert
Affective relations among humans and more-than-humans are full of shifts, subtleties, and complexities. Yet, design research often treats feelings as stable instruments to utilize for making sustainable climate futures. Through reflection-on-practice, we untangle impressions and gestures in the field during a design research project in the Sonoran Desert titled Gifts for Tempe. Our reflections focus on shifts in our attention and attachments with an ‘invasive’ plant commonly known as Stinknet. The impressions and gestures reveal designer-researchers’ thick tensions in designing for climate futures. By showing how affective relations with more-than-humans change over time, we identify that climate futuring involves learning to gesture from intermediary positions where plural feelings coexist. These accounts of our unfolding relationship with Stinknet in the desert ecosystem show how designers feel their way toward reciprocity with more-than-humans when striving for sustainable climate futures.