5.1 Temporalities of More-than-Human Design

Corresponding Chairs

Larissa Pschetz, University of Edinburgh, UK

Gizem Oktay, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands

Co-Chairs

Doris Kosminsky, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Fiona Bell, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, United States

Marta Ferreira, University of Lisbon, Portugal

Valentina Nisi, University of Lisbon, Portugal

Katharina Vones, Royal College of Art, UK

Jiwei Zhou, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Keili Koppel, The University of Edinburgh, UK

Abstract

Despite a tendency for designers in Western industrialised societies to focus on narratives that describe the time of humans as universalised, disembodied, increasingly accelerated and detached from entangled more-than-human rhythms (Pschetz, Bastian & Speed, 2016), there has also been increased attempts to move away from such paradigms, critically examining how different approaches to time can influence the ways we think about and act in the world (Oktay et al., 2023; Pschetz et al., 2024; Wieczorek and Forlano, 2024) - a shift that has motivated new forms of design (e.g. Bessai, Bendor, and Balkenende, 2024; Bell and Bucheley, 2024; Zhou et al. 2023; Ferreira, Nisi and Nunes, 2023; etc). This theme track attempts to leverage such emergent efforts, inviting submissions that include:

• Visual, physical, multisensorial representations that explore ways to surface entangled more-than-human temporalities —encompassing ecological rhythms, lifespans, infrastructural histories, cultural cycles, and shared practices — as well as reflections on how different temporal representations could shape sense-making and design;

• Practices and processes that consider extended temporal scales of material transformation, geological formations, and planetary life;

• Temporal design investigations that incorporate a sense of 'response-ability' (Haraway, 2008) towards planetary life, including ways of noticing, attuning and orchestrating more-than-human times

• Designerly ways of negotiating and coordinating (Gan, 2017) more-than-human temporalities, potentially situating these within dominant approaches of capitalist time

• Etico-onto-epistemological reflections on time and design, or how different temporal expressions can be seen as emerging through ‘mutual constitution of entangled agencies’ (Barad, 2007), with design facilitating/hindering these relationships and processes.

Keywords

time, more-than-human, material ecologies, sustainable design, temporal ontologies

References

Bell, F. and Buechley, L. (2024). Directions for Degradation: Multispecies Entanglements with 3D Printed Biomaterials. In Proceedings of the Halfway to the Future Symposium (HttF '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 18, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1145/3686169.3686181

Bessai, R., Bendor, R., and Balkenende, R. (2024) Designing with More-than-Human Temporalities, in Gray, C., Ciliotta Chehade, E., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.438

Pschetz, L., Gebker, M., Wieland, S., and Bastian, M. (2024) Designing Temporal Ecologies: Reframing Multispecies Temporalities through Design, in Gray, C., Ciliotta Chehade, E., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.1068

Oktay, G., Ikeya, Y., Lee, M., Barati, B., Lee, Y., Chen, Y., Pschetz, L & Ramirez-Figueroa, C. (2023). Designing with the more-than-human: Temporalities of thinking with care. In Companion Publication of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 104-106).

Zhou, J., Kim, R., Doubrovski, Z., Martins, J., Giaccardi, E., & Karana, E. (2023). Cyano-chromic Interface: Aligning Human-Microbe Temporalities Towards Noticing and Attending to Living Artefacts. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 820-838).