ABSTRACT

This book explores the work of important authors in the search for a transition towards more ethical design focused on more-than-human coexistence.

In a time of environmental crises in which the human species threatens its own survival and the highest level of exacerbation of the idea of a future and technological innovation, it is important to discard certain anthropocentric categories in order to situate design beyond the role that it traditionally held in the capitalist world, creating opportunities to create more just and sustainable worlds. This book is an invitation to travel new paths for design framed by ethics of more-than-human coexistence that breaks with the unsustainability installed in the designs that outfit our lives. Questioning the notion of human-centered design is central to this discussion. It is not only a theoretical and methodological concern, but an ethical need to critically rethink the modern, colonialist, and anthropocentric inheritance that resonates in design culture. The authors in this book explore the ideas oriented to form new relations with the more-than-human and with the planet, using design as a form of political enquiry.

This book will be of interest to academics and students from the world of design and particularly those involved in emerging branches of the field such as speculative design, critical design, non-anthropocentric design, and design for transition.

chapter |28 pages

Introduction: Design for more-than-human futures

Towards post-anthropocentric and decolonial perspectives
ByMartín Tironi

chapter 1|22 pages

Notes on excess

Towards pluriversal design
ByMarisol de la Cadena, Arturo Escobar

chapter 2|7 pages

Anticipations of more-than-human futures

Social innovation as a decentring, engendering, reframing, and caring practice
ByEzio Manzini, Virginia Tassinari

chapter 3|14 pages

Design's intimacies

The indeterminacy of design with machines and mushrooms
ByLaura Forlano

chapter 4|16 pages

Growing materials

Technical and caring processes as rooted design practices
ByNicole Cristi

chapter 5|4 pages

Learning from accidental abundance

ByCarl DiSalvo

chapter 6|11 pages

How would animals and architects co-design if we built the right contract?

ByIgnacio Farías, Tomás Sánchez Criado, Felix Remter

chapter 7|9 pages

Before the idiot, the poet? Aesthetic figures and design

ByAlex Wilkie, Mike Michael

chapter 8|18 pages

Revisiting empathy by gentrifying our guts

Exploring design as a cosmopolitical diplomacy practice through microbial fruits of Istanbul
ByUriel Fogué, Orkan Telhan, Eva Gil Lopesino, Carlos Palacios Rodríguez

chapter 9|11 pages

Design beyond human concerns

A sancocho-style approach
ByLeonardo Parra-Agudelo, Edgard David Rincón Quijano

chapter 10|27 pages

Furrowing the Maraña

Designing to sail out of the Anthropocene
ByPablo Hermansen, José Guerra Solano