Editorial – Issue 02
I return again and again to an analogy that Michel Serres uses in his book The Natural Contract, in which he evokes the image of a ship that is heading for the rocks. So many climate initiatives, Serres argues, are the equivalent of the ship’s captain telling the engine room to reduce speed by ten knots. What the captain doesn’t do, is order the crew to change course. It’s an analogy that applies to contemporary design practice, which, given the overarching narrative of carbon reduction, is understandably focused on slowing down the boat. But a new direction requires a new narrative. We established Future Observatory Journal precisely to explore narratives that open new frameworks for design and that change the direction of travel.
More-than-human design is a challenge to contemporary practice in so many ways. It may, in fact, contradict the very definition of design as we currently understand it, because design has always been human centred. Indeed, ‘human-centred design’, with its endearingly humanist focus on the user experience, is still a term of approval, an aspiration. It’s a standard that much design does not yet even meet. And yet, if the Anthropocene has made anything clear, it is that we live in a time when human interests have to be tempered with the interests of the rest of the living world. What does it mean to design not just for ourselves but for other species and for the health of natural systems?
As a discipline, design is still only in the infant stage of knowing the answer to that question. More-than-human thinking has a decade or more of articulation in theory but is still utterly nascent, marginal and avant-garde when it comes to practice. It is difficult to point to. As a prospective repositioning of design, however, it involves a positively Galilean shift in perspective. What if life doesn’t revolve around the human? As Serres points out, the word ‘environment’ – that which is around us – assumes that humans are at the centre of nature. What if all the living things on our periphery were made central? Or perhaps even the idea of a centre is the problem. Surely everything is a tangled web of relations. In which case, design becomes a way of manifesting our interdependence with the living world. The philosopher Isabelle Stengers has a lovely phrase for this. She calls it ‘practice in a minor key’.
As an attitude, the minor key plays across the contents of this issue. All of the practitioners featured argue for some form of circumspection – both a literal looking around and a cautious approach to intervention. Anna Tsing addresses this most literally, with her entreaty to the ‘arts of noticing’ and her encouragement of designers to anticipate the potentially feral effects of their work. Design is an intrinsically heroic mode of practice, fraught with bold plans and solutions. More-than-human design brings in a radical hesitancy, a refusal to rush in before multiple non-human perspectives have been considered. As Dunne & Raby argue in considering what it’s like to be a bat, the human world is just one of many.
We spend little time dwelling on the inherent shortcomings of the term ‘more-than-human’ itself, though it is eminently open to critique. Rather, we embrace its subversive potential to upend conventional design thinking. In the Forecast, we adopt Donna Haraway’s term ‘worlding’ as a method of weaving narratives that depend on encounters between humans and non-humans. Central to that vision, and the concept that defines this issue, is a shift to designing with and for the living world. James Bridle looks to symbiosis as the model, while the Kenyan architects Cave_ bureau invoke the traditional pastoral routes of the Maasai to envision a more-than-human city. Designing with the living world is not easy and requires mind-bending negotiations with and on behalf of species that have never had a voice. But it is a powerful new narrative, one that moves beyond slowing down the boat – it’s a change of course.
Justin McGuirk