5.3 More-than-human Data Practices: Mattering and Interfacing with More-than-human Worlds

Corresponding Chairs

Elisa Giaccardi, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy

Sara Lenzi, University of Deusto, Bilbao, Spain

Co-Chairs

Chris Speed, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia

Vasiliki Tsaknaki, IT University, Copenhagen. Denmark

Jiwei Zhou, KTH, Stockholm, Sweden

Abstract

How can data be troubled, transformed, or made to speak otherwise? Grounded within post-anthropocentrism and post-humanism, this track explores more-than-human data practices that challenge dominant data paradigms and cultivate alternative engagements, from the microbial to the planetary.

We invite contributions that reimagine data representation, interaction, and infrastructuring to give voice to the invisible or the silenced, foreground relational knowledge practices, and reconfigure the cosmopolitics of data production and classification. We are particularly interested in work in data visualization, interaction design, biodesign, and governance where more-than-human agencies and plural epistemologies counter extractivism and static ontologies, informing ecologically attuned, caring, and regenerative approaches.

We welcome frameworks, methodologies, and case studies exploring:

• How data might be diffracted, augmented, or otherwise reconfigured (e.g., through autographic, embodied, or synthetic means) to better include more-than-human lifeworlds and attune to the temporal, spatial, and agential scales through which other-than-human entities perceive, act, and relate.

• How bio-based, somaesthetic, and multisensorial interfaces (e.g., living artifacts, tangible and embodied forms of actuation, sonification, vibrational sensing, or scent-based interaction) can mediate alternative forms of attunement and awareness that disrupt visual dominance and evoke more affective, situated, and ecological modes of knowing and becoming.

• How data can be co-produced or co-responded to in ways that recognize multispecies and multibeing entanglements, not as metaphor, but as epistemic collaboration, addressing the responsibilities this places on the designer.

Through this interdisciplinary dialogue, the track aims to engage with what data is, who it serves, and how it participates in the making and unmaking of worlds.

Keywords

More-than-human data practices; Multispecies lifeworlds; Microbial to planetary scales; Cosmopolitics of data production and classification; Mattering and interfacing

References

Michael Dunbar and Chris Speed. 2024. Data Sets for Regenerative Futures: Cultivating Relational Ontologies. HttF ‘24. ACM, Article 39, 1–4.

Elisa Giaccardi, Seowoo Nam, and Iohanna Nicenboim. 2025. Diffractive Interfaces: Facilitating Agential Cuts in Forest Data Across More-than-human Scales. Proc. DIS ‘25. ACM.

Sara Lenzi, Paolo Ciuccarelli, and Dietmar Offenhuber. 2024. Towards a Definition of Autographic Sonifications: Listening as an Act of Knowledge, in Gray, C., Ciliotta Chehade, E., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA.

Pedro Sanches, Noura Howell, Vasiliki Tsaknaki, Tom Jenkins, and Karey Helms. 2022. Diffraction-in-Action: Designerly Explorations of Agential Realism Through Lived Data. In Proc. CHI ‘22. ACM, Article 540, 1–18.

Jiwei Zhou, Raphael Kim, Zjenja Doubrovski, Joana Martins, Elisa Giaccardi, and Elvin Karana. 2023. Cyano-chromic Interface: Aligning Human-Microbe Temporalities Towards Noticing and Attending to Living Artefacts. In Proc. DIS '23. ACM, 820–838.