More than Human Design

How should we go about designing for flourishing and justice that do not exclude non-human lives?

Needs and Aims

• Advance multispecies thriving and justice beyond mitigation baselines.
• Deliver measurable, real‑world ecological and social improvements.
• Build, share, and maintain open knowledge and methods.
• Innovate responsibly in materials, tools, and design practice.
• Develop skills across teams, partners, and communities.
• Transfer stewardship to appropriate community custodians and networks.
• Scale effective solutions while safeguarding local contexts.

Limitations and Disconnections

Existing works provides evidence and inspiration, but also reveals common pitfalls and gaps.

Approaches in Conservation Biology

• Prioritise mitigation for listed species and regulatory compliance; sideline broader legal and ethical duties.
• Optimise for short grant cycles and monitored metrics; under-resource long-term stewardship.
• Limit methods to established protocols and protected sites; discourage adaptive practice.
• Focus on populations and habitats; overlook individual welfare and animal-centred design.
• Adopt new technology late; avoid experimental tools and fabrication.
• Centralise expert authority despite thin species-level or behavioural evidence; underuse community and Indigenous knowledge.

Approaches in Design and Engineering

• Develop a technique, then search for a problem.
• Chase exhibitions, grants, or competitions; retrofit ecological aims.
• Compress work into short, fixed time frames; sacrifice monitoring and iteration.
• Optimise for novelty and aesthetics; neglect ecological function and maintainability.
• Prototype off-site; ignore site constraints and stakeholder use.
• Under-document design decisions; weaken accountability and reproducibility.

Approaches in Business and Development

• Set human-centric goals (risk, cost, compliance); neglect multispecies flourishing and justice.
• Optimise for short-term returns; under-invest in persistent stewardship.
• Rely on standard processes and controlled sites; restrict experimentation.
• Stop at pilots; under-explore pathways to scaled implementation across projects.
• Prefer proven, low-risk solutions; avoid bespoke or experimental designs.
• Engage mainly financial and regulatory stakeholders; exclude community and ecological voices.

Approaches in Environmental Humanities

• Privilege theory and critique; deliver limited practical implementation and measurable ecological outcomes.
• Work mostly within humanities and arts; exclude scientists, designers, and engineers.
• Address select academic audiences; offer limited, sustained community collaboration.
• Look to past and present; neglect methods for future-oriented design and evaluation.
• Exhibit scepticism toward technology and engineering; favour speculative or discursive methods.
• Provide few actionable guidelines; leave insights hard to operationalise.
• Abstain from generating new evidence or engaging with empirical data.

Principles and Approaches

A definitive list is hard to compile, but the following is hard to reduce.

• Prepare by systematically questioning your own biases, in thinking or behaviour.
• Identify target taxa by vulnerability, habitat loss, and conservation priorities; prefer umbrella or ambassador taxa.
• Build taxa expertise with ecologists, local residents, and Indigenous custodians; review evidence to spot opportunities for innovation.
• Map stakeholder needs through literature, meetings, observations, and exploratory methods such as brainstorming, games, or site walks; agree scope, timeline, and expectations.
• Select sites using existing evidence; consider infrastructure, access, ecological criteria, and community constraints.
• Review standards and policy to find gaps; embed Indigenous land care and multispecies ethics.
• Assess tools, including AI-assisted design, parametric models, biodegradable materials, and digital fabrication; evaluate for flexibility, efficiency, and accountability.
• Establish baselines from existing datasets and bespoke methods at spatial scales and time frames relevant to design.
• Interpret data with visualisation, statistics, or machine learning to guide design choices and trade-offs.
• Define problems and measurable indicators; predefine success thresholds and compile data on existing designs.
• Create comparative methods with counterfactuals or controls to test alternatives and reduce bias.
• Seek innovations that improve function, maintainability, inclusion, and equity; prioritise low-risk, testable advances.
• Implement as adaptive trials with clear protocols, roles, permits, safety plans, and documentation.
• Monitor outcomes against baselines using robust methods; record costs, risks, unintended effects, ecological impact, life-cycle performance, and stakeholder feedback.
• Maintain installations and adapt designs through iterative learning.
• Refine designs and prepare for broader deployment or commercialisation.
• Share data openly for critique, reuse, and meta-analysis.
• Inspire and provoke through exhibitions, talks, and media.
• Engage communities through workshops, citizen science, and citizen design.
• Influence policy through guidelines, standards, and planning frameworks.
• Contribute to theory by offering cases and questions; support and build inclusive, informed worldviews that respect all life.