5.4 Designing more-than-human climate futures: aesthetics, affect and relational practices

Corresponding Chairs

Rachel Clarke, University of the Arts London, UK

Michelle Westerlaken, MIT, USA

Co-Chairs

Sara Heitlinger, City, University of London, UK

Anton Poikolainen Rosén, Stockholm University, Sweden

Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands

Abstract

In this track we invite dialogue on how emergent more-than-human design practice can generate alternative - plural, situated, and relational - approaches to climate futures grounded in emotion, aesthetics, and care. More-than-human design can forefront the embodied, felt, and sensed worlds of multiple species, processes and digital-material entities and their co-existence. With the uncertainty of the climate crisis, understood here as a polycrisis of interconnected ecological, political, cultural, and epistemic concerns, such existences persist within transdisciplinary worlds that are often contradictory, incommensurable, and unequally recognised. 

We encourage contributions including – but not limited to – practical case studies, discursive propositions, methodological inquiries, and speculations that explore: 

• emergent aesthetics and affects (e.g. atmospheric, microbial, chemical, acoustic) that can reconfigure practice towards more equitable, reparative, and care-full climate futures.

• responses to climate polycrises across scientific, political, or community domains that make space for aesthetic and affective transdisciplinary exchange.

• design approaches that address multiple affective scales and registers, from the microscopic, through the body (multiple), to broader eco-systems.

• moving beyond sustainability rhetoric challenging green/white washing and techno-solutionism towards genuinely affective regenerative practices.

• design responses to issues such as net zero, material circularity, energy, migration, biodiversity, and systems thinking, that demand designers to question existing values to resist extractivist, colonial, and capitalist logics.

• circulation and manifestations of affect in design practice that responds to emotional depth and breadth including feelings of urgency, despair, discomfort, grief, hope, joy and practices of healing.

Keywords

affective design, emotion, more-than-human futures, regenerative design, climate polycrisis

References

Choi, J. H. jeong, Botero, A., Dolejšová, M., & Sleight, L. 2024. Messy, entangled, and shapeshifting: Feral Mapping. International Journal of Cartography, 10(2), 144–166. 

Coops, F., Schröder, A.,and Hamilton-Jones, D. 2025. Exploring affective dimensions of the ecological crisis in design: a reflective manifesto writing workshop, in Brandt, E., Markussen, T., Berglund, E., Julier, G., Linde, P. (eds.), Nordes 2025: Relational Design, 6-8 August, Oslo, Norway.

Heitlinger, S., Foth, M. Clarke, R. (Eds.) 2024. Designing More-than-Human Smart Cities: Beyond Sustainability, Towards Co-Habitation. Oxford University Press. 

Lindström, K., Jönsson, Li., & Hillgren, P.A. 2024. Reorientations: Practicing Grief and Hope in Post-Carbon Futures. In Participatory Design Conference 2024 (PDC ’24 Vol. 1), August 11–16, 2024, Sibu, Malaysia. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 10 pages. 

Poikolainen Rosén, A., Sanchez, C., and Anand Epp, F. 2024. ‘Does Phosphorus Want to Sound Like That?’: Experiencing More-Than-Human Futures, in Gray, C., Ciliotta Chehade, E., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. 

Westerlaken, M. 2025. Designing Biodiversity Systems via Digital Kinships: Insights from Community Data Processes and Creative Practice. Computer Supported Cooperative Work .