Index
Theaterschlag, The Book of the Ten Thousand Things, Claudia Fontes. Image courtesy of Claudia Fontes

Worlding

Interactive Essay
4 propositions
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This forecast shares a vision for the future of design as attentive, collaborative and nurturing to our more-than-human world. It presents four propositions for designers to re-think and rebuild our relationship with more-than-humans.

Introduction

Humans tend to see the world as theirs for the taking, no matter the cost to other species and environments.

Designing for our planetary flourishing demands a shift to worlding, which Donna Haraway describes as the act of making worlds together.

Image courtesy of Vorja Sanchez

From a design perspective, worlding takes a reparative and attentive approach to imagining worlds that reconnect the human to the entangled web of more-than-human life.

By creating with more-than-humans, rather than at their expense, worlding gives agency to non-humans in our shared world.

This forecast presents designers with four propositions to reimagine our models of practice – and even ourselves – as part of a more-than-human assembly.

Detail from Apollo and Daphne. René-Antoine Houasse

Reports from Nature

Unseen Flora. Image courtesy of studio fuse*
Reports from Nature

Environmental agents, such as waterbodies, plants and animals are on the frontlines of climate collapse, sensing and recording the shifts in our environment.

Image courtesy of Noor Abuarafeh
Non Flowers for a Hoverfly. Video courtesy of Thomas Pausz Studio in collaboration with Dr. Shannon Olsson

How can these more-than-human agents inform human’s understanding of climate collapse?

Image courtesy of Ingo Arndt for Nature Picture Library and Science Photo Library
Still from MOBY DICK; or, The Whale. Directed by Wu Tsang, Produced by Schauspielhaus Zürich.
Image courtesy of Justin Silver
Alexis Pauline Gumbs

‘How can we listen across species, across extinction, across harm?’

Illustraciones de la Mecánica, Las Nietas de Nonó. Image courtesy of Paula Court and the artists

Through scent, light, sound, migration and extinction, species communicate the nuanced, localised effects of planetary change.

Internet of Elephants. Design and development by CLEVER°FRANKE
Internet of Elephants. Design and development by CLEVER°FRANKE
Internet of Elephants. Design and development by CLEVER°FRANKE

By collecting this sensory data, designers are tuning in to nature’s reports on the future of the planet.

Olfactive Evolution, Eliza Collin. Image courtesy of Dr. Ian Breckheimer
Olfactive Evolution, Eliza Collin. Image courtesy of Eliza Collin
Open-weather. Image courtesy of Aouefa Amoussouvi
Open-weather. Image courtesy of Sasha Engelmann
Open-weather. Image courtesy of Sasha Engelmann
Open-weather. Image courtesy of Sasha Engelmann
Open-weather. Image courtesy Sasha Engelmann
Open-weather. Image courtesy Sasha Engelmann

  1. Sonorous Landscapes

    Future Observatory researchers at Lancaster University are capturing environmental data – light, sound, temperature and humidity – from urban forests and gardens in Slough to measure their biodiversity and influence local rewilding initiatives.

  2. Olfactive Evolution

    Working with scientists and perfumers, Future Observatory resident Eliza Collin explores how flowers change their fragrance under climate stress. Charting the scent of jasmine under normal and drought conditions, their change in smell is a signal of climate distress.

  3. Turning the Ecological Gears

    Designer Sophie Falkeis gathers data on the changing movements of penguins, birds, prawns, butterflies and jellyfish. By mapping these migrational shifts, a feedback loop emerges, from species to scientists, on the socio-ecological impact of global warming.

Sonorous Landscapes. Image courtesy Rupert Griffith
Olfactive Evolution, Eliza Collin. Image courtesy of Alex Pannier
Turning the Ecological Gears. Image courtesy of Sophie Falkeis

While designers have started listening to the sensory lifeworlds of plants, animals and atmospheres to help humans steward ecosystems of the future, new kinds of institutions are inviting the more-than-human world into conversation.

Floating University. Images by Alexander Stumm and Lena Giovanazzi

  1. Interspecies Influencers

    Schools, museums and even governmental departments have invited different species into their decision-making process. Initiatives like Zoöp, Organisms Democracy and Moral Imaginations' Interspecies Council are allowing nonhuman neighbours to have a say in programming, planning and policy decisions.

  2. Interspecies Influencers

    Schools, museums and even governmental departments have invited different species into their decision-making process. Initiatives like Zoöp, Organisms Democracy and Moral Imaginations 'Interspecies Council' are allowing nonhuman neighbours to have a say in programming, planning and policy decisions.

  3. Interspecies Influencers

    Schools, museums and even governmental departments have invited different species into their decision-making process. Initiatives like Zoöp, Organisms Democracy and Interspecies Council are allowing nonhuman neighbours to have a say in programming, planning and policy decisions.

Design by VenhoevenCS and DS Landschapsarchitecten. Image courtesy of B1 design
Delegate cards for participants of the River Roding Interspecies Council, 2023. Image courtesy of Moral Imaginations
Worlds Within, In Search of the Pluriverse exhibition at Het Nieuwe Instituut. Image courtesy of Nina van Hartskamp

A future scenario by Daisy Hildyard

The first more-than-human embassy was established by multispecies accord. The assembly meets on an estuary, where the river mouth speaks to humans, and the people, who have occupied this place for thousands of years, know the voice of every bird. Crabs, microbes, pelicans and seatrout, have, over eons, created this space together. Ambassadors acquire interspecies communication skills from transdisciplinary nests and schools. The tides negotiate, back and forth.

Planted Practices

Still from Seeing the Wood for the Trees. Image courtesy of Formafantasma
Planted Practices

Plants are rooted: they stay where they are and grow from there.

Sanctuary of the Unseen Forest. Image courtesy of Marshmallow Laser Feast
Sanctuary of the Unseen Forest. Image courtesy of Marshmallow Laser Feast

Taking this situated approach to design is a form of resistance to ‘design as usual’.

Rather than growth as proliferation, this shift in practice nurtures lively local entanglements and supports an environment’s lifeworld.

Sonia Sobrino Ralston

‘The natural intelligence of plants and ecological systems [allows us to think of the] planet as its own computational system. Becoming attuned to its timescales, components, and local contexts [reveals] the environment as an informational resource to be collectively stewarded.’

Uncommon Knowledge: Practices and Protocols for Environmental Information Image courtesy of Sonia Sobrino Ralston

By staying put, designers notice the relationships between species, integrate themselves into the local ecology and create new social webs.

  1. Growing a Permaculture Network

    Exploring the ecology of Sakiya, Palestine, Permaculture Networks is an online digital project that illustrates and imagines conversations between neighbouring plants, animals, soil, water, weather and other human and non-human agents. The site works as an expanded organic community intranet.

  2. Coding in situ

    Robida Collective’s website, designed by Benjamin Earl and Kirsten Spruit, translates their mountainous village of Topolò, Italy into digital form. The website's design and navigation reflects the local topology and includes residents’ diary entries and stewarding activities.

  3. Building Feral Webs

    AWS’s (Austin Wade Smith) website is powered and influenced by elements in its local ecology. Tide times, moon phases, sunlight, seasons and whether they are home determine the user’s access to the website, embedding them in the more-than-human world.

Permaculture Network website.
Image courtesy of Kirsten Spruit
Feral Earth website.

A future scenario by Daisy Hildyard

The second internet is sited on the rapids, where the river tumbles steeply from one terrace to another. i2 also runs along migratory pathways; through mycelial networks; oceanic currents; and weather fronts linked up via satellite. It draws nutrients through the soil and extends coverage across vast biofilms. Connections ‘sleep’ in accordance with seasonal and diurnal rhythms that are sensitive to body and situation. At the winter solstice (local to the hemisphere) there is a period during which all users rest.

Multispecies Marketplace

Office Party, Chase Galis, Christina Moushoul, Sonia Sobrino Ralston with Simon Lesina-Debasi. Image courtesy of Sonia Sobrino Ralston
Multispecies Marketplace

Tawny owls, tree ferns, cactus coral, mycelial bacteria: all have different needs and design instincts to those of humans.

Image courtesy of Andy Ellison
Image by Max Liboiron

Instead of centring products, services and systems around humans, practitioners are expanding the arena for ideas and design innovation to cater across species.

Exercises in Root System Domestication. Image courtesy of Diana Scherer
Other Biological Futures, Faber Futures. Image courtesy of Justinas Vilutis

A multispecies marketplace is emerging with non-humans as agents, co-designers, teachers and partners, rather than clients, users and resources.

How can the multispecies marketplace prioritise the welfare and flourishing of other species?

Bird Palace, Studio Ossidiana. Image by Riccardo de Vecchi
Bird Palace, Studio Ossidiana. Image by Riccardo de Vecchi
MRI scan of a green beans. Iamge courtesy of Andy Ellison

Through practices of care, the multispecies marketplace becomes a site for attentive collaboration. By making with the natural world, design takes on new forms, timelines and hierarchies.

  1. Avian architectures

    Designers like Studio Ossidiana and Feral Partnerships are imagining cities designed for all inhabitants. Architectures rehome displaced owls, the dovecote becomes a dwelling for urban pigeons and 'bird palaces' invite local birds to feast, rest and play.

  2. Marine mending

    Architects like Kate Orff are developing living breakwaters and oyster-tectures, rather than hard infrastructures, to naturally protect the coast from erosion, restore marine habitats and improve water quality.

  3. Microbial economy

    The first biodesign marketplace, Normal Phenomena of Life, sells products including a jacket dyed by microbes, a lamp made from a biobased cement and artworks printed with algae-based ink.

Image courtesy of Beginner's Luck
Faber Futures, Normal Phenomena of Life. Image courtesy of IMMATERS Studio

A future scenario by Daisy Hildyard

After the collapse of international financial systems, stock market technologies were repurposed to monitor global liveliness. Species fluctuations tick across screens on the old trading floors (bird of paradise --- nomad jellyfish --- constable butterfly); losses cascade from each new eradication. The survival of the fragile, monitored through a range of sensing mechanisms relayed from algal blooms, river mouths and climate fronts, has become the standard through which new growth is measured: stable and respected as a solid gold bar.

Being Otherwise

In the Eyes of the Animal, Marshmallow Laser Feast. Image courtesy of Marshmallow Laser Feast
Being Otherwise

What’s it like to be a bat, a microbe or a pinecone?

Image courtesy of Merlin Tuttle
Let's Become Fungal! Illustrations courtesy of Rommy González
Let's Become Fungal! Illustrations courtesy of Rommy González
Let's Become Fungal! Illustrations courtesy of Rommy González

To design beyond human needs, designers are expanding their sensibilities to consider other planetary points of view.

Thinking through the perspective of living agents – like mycelium or bees – the smell, look and feel of the world changes.

Image by Marten Newhall.
Physarum polycephalum. Image by Scott Camazine, Science Source.
Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt), 2012. Image courtesy of Pierre Huyghe
Zoodram 5, 2011. Image courtesy of Pierre Huyghe

Taking on the more-than-human perspective explodes the ordered structure of humans’ sense-making. It invites messy logics, wild connections and reparative attentions to take root.

Elvia Wilk

‘Whose utopia, whose dystopia? If the human is not the protagonist, who is? A utopia for mosquitos may not be the same as mine, but from the perspective of the planetary ecosystems it may be far preferable.’

Rewilding Creativity. Image courtesy of Rose Pilkington

  1. Being forest

    In the Eyes of the Animal by Marshmallow Laser Feast uses VR to transform participants into forest species: a mosquito, a dragonfly, a frog and an owl. By adopting their visual and sensory perspectives, humans explore how these animals perceive and interact with their environments.

  2. Being mycelium

    Let’s Become Fungal!, a book by Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez, explores how mycelium’s behaviour can inspire a restructuring of human values, systems and design processes by learning from their de-centralised, collaborative forms.

  3. Being pollinator

    The artwork Pollinator Pathmaker by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg reimagines garden design from the perspective of bees and other pollinators. She developed an algorithmic tool that generates the planting designs for gardens by selecting and arranging plants to best support the maximum number of local pollinators.

  4. Being city

    The Alluvials, a video game by Alice Bucknell, is set in a water-scarce near-future Los Angeles. It gives players the ecosystem’s experience of drought by going through the game as the L.A. River, a Joshua Tree moth, wildfire and the ghost of a mountain lion.

In the Eyes of the Animal, Marshmallow Laser Feast. Image courtesy of Marshmallow Laser Feast
Let's Become Fungal! Illustrations courtesy of Rommy González
Pollinator Pathmaker Image courtesy of Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
The Alluvials. Image courtesy of Alice Bucknell

A future scenario by Daisy Hildyard

After GAME OVER, the game resets. Back at the beginning, there is a hidden level. Inside the hidden level is a new world. The landscape looks familiar, but the scenery and non-playable characters: rivers and moths; vipers and apple seeds; meteorites and algae, have come to life.

Your new challenge is infinitely complex and cannot be paused. Your leaves transpire; your dusty grey wings lift the night; your scales draw you toward warm prey; your networks invest the earth with life. As you move within this altered world, spreading over biofilm, flowing into an estuary or networking the rainforest, the game implants its alien awareness of the space that is environing your body as it looks at this screen, inside this room, on this planet, right now.

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Captions:

Abby Rose, founder of Farmerama podcast.

Alenda Y. Chang, associate professor in film and media studies at UC Santa Barbara.

Alice Bucknell, artist, writer and educator.

Avery P. Hill, postdoctoral researcher in the Center for Biodiversity and Community Science at the California Academy of Sciences.

AWS (Austin Wade Smith) , artist and executive director of the Regen Foundation.

Benjamin Earl, designer and researcher.

Elvia Wilk, writer and editor. Author of Oval (2019) and Death by Landscape (2022).

Gabriel Alonso and Yuri Tuma, co-founders of the Institute for Postnatural Studies.

Jessie Beier, assistant professor in art education at Concordia University.

Katie Lawson, curator, writer, PhD researcher in art and visual culture at Western University.

LinYee Yuan, founder of MOLD Magazine and Field Meridians.

Mali Weil, artist and independent researcher. Founder of the School of Interspecies Diplomacies and Werewolfish Studies.

Michael Marder, Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, Vitoria-Gasteiz.

Nick Dunn and Rupert Griffiths, researchers at University of Lancaster.

Phoebe Tickell, founder and CEO of Moral Imaginations.

Radha D’Souza, professor of international law, development and conflict studies at the University of Westminster and co-founder of the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes.

Robida Collective, editorial and radio project.

Seth Denizen, landscape architect, geographer and co-author of Thinking through Soil (2024).

Shannon Mattern, associate professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York.

Sophie Chao, DECRA Fellow and Lecturer (US: Assistant Professor) at the University of Sydney.

Sophie Dyer and Sasha Engelmann, co-leaders of open-weather.

Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez, founder and director of the Green Art Lab Alliance and author of Let's become Fungal! Mycelium Teachings and the Arts (2023).

Project team

Cher Potter, creative direction

Jennifer Cunningham, forecast research

Lila Boschet, creative production

Andrea Conde Pereira, image research

Daisy Hildyard, future scenario writer

Studio Airport, art direction

Footnotes:

1 Theaterschlag, The Book of the Ten Thousand Things, Claudia Fontes. Image courtesy of Claudia Fontes
2 Image courtesy of Vorja Sanchez
3 Detail from Apollo and Daphne. René-Antoine Houasse
4 Unseen Flora. Image courtesy of studio fuse*
5 Image courtesy of Noor Abuarafeh
6 Non Flowers for a Hoverfly. Video courtesy of Thomas Pausz Studio in collaboration with Dr. Shannon Olsson
7 Image courtesy of Ingo Arndt for Nature Picture Library and Science Photo Library
8 Still from MOBY DICK; or, The Whale. Directed by Wu Tsang, Produced by Schauspielhaus Zürich.
9 Image courtesy of Justin Silver
10 Illustraciones de la Mecánica, Las Nietas de Nonó. Image courtesy of Paula Court and the artists
11 Internet of Elephants. Design and development by CLEVER°FRANKE
12 Internet of Elephants. Design and development by CLEVER°FRANKE
13 Internet of Elephants. Design and development by CLEVER°FRANKE
14 Olfactive Evolution, Eliza Collin. Image courtesy of Dr. Ian Breckheimer
15 Olfactive Evolution, Eliza Collin. Image courtesy of Eliza Collin
16 Open-weather. Image courtesy of Aouefa Amoussouvi
17 Open-weather. Image courtesy of Sasha Engelmann
18 Open-weather. Image courtesy of Sasha Engelmann
19 Open-weather. Image courtesy of Sasha Engelmann
20 Open-weather. Image courtesy Sasha Engelmann
21 Open-weather. Image courtesy Sasha Engelmann
22 Sonorous Landscapes. Image courtesy Rupert Griffith
23 Olfactive Evolution, Eliza Collin. Image courtesy of Alex Pannier
24 Turning the Ecological Gears. Image courtesy of Sophie Falkeis
25 Floating University. Images by Alexander Stumm and Lena Giovanazzi
26 Design by VenhoevenCS and DS Landschapsarchitecten. Image courtesy of B1 design
27 Delegate cards for participants of the River Roding Interspecies Council, 2023. Image courtesy of Moral Imaginations
28 Worlds Within, In Search of the Pluriverse exhibition at Het Nieuwe Instituut. Image courtesy of Nina van Hartskamp
29 Still from Seeing the Wood for the Trees. Image courtesy of Formafantasma
30 Sanctuary of the Unseen Forest. Image courtesy of Marshmallow Laser Feast
31 Sanctuary of the Unseen Forest. Image courtesy of Marshmallow Laser Feast
32 Uncommon Knowledge: Practices and Protocols for Environmental Information Image courtesy of Sonia Sobrino Ralston
33 Permaculture Network website.
34 Image courtesy of Kirsten Spruit
35 Feral Earth website.
36 Office Party, Chase Galis, Christina Moushoul, Sonia Sobrino Ralston with Simon Lesina-Debasi. Image courtesy of Sonia Sobrino Ralston
37 Image courtesy of Andy Ellison
38 Image by Max Liboiron
39 Exercises in Root System Domestication. Image courtesy of Diana Scherer
40 Other Biological Futures, Faber Futures. Image courtesy of Justinas Vilutis
41 Bird Palace, Studio Ossidiana. Image by Riccardo de Vecchi
42 Bird Palace, Studio Ossidiana. Image by Riccardo de Vecchi
43 MRI scan of a green beans. Iamge courtesy of Andy Ellison
44 Image courtesy of Beginner's Luck
45 Faber Futures, Normal Phenomena of Life. Image courtesy of IMMATERS Studio
46 In the Eyes of the Animal, Marshmallow Laser Feast. Image courtesy of Marshmallow Laser Feast
47 Image courtesy of Merlin Tuttle
48 Let's Become Fungal! Illustrations courtesy of Rommy González
49 Let's Become Fungal! Illustrations courtesy of Rommy González
50 Let's Become Fungal! Illustrations courtesy of Rommy González
51 Image by Marten Newhall.
52 Physarum polycephalum. Image by Scott Camazine, Science Source.
53 Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt), 2012. Image courtesy of Pierre Huyghe
54 Zoodram 5, 2011. Image courtesy of Pierre Huyghe
55 Rewilding Creativity. Image courtesy of Rose Pilkington
56 In the Eyes of the Animal, Marshmallow Laser Feast. Image courtesy of Marshmallow Laser Feast
57 Let's Become Fungal! Illustrations courtesy of Rommy González
58 Pollinator Pathmaker Image courtesy of Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
59 The Alluvials. Image courtesy of Alice Bucknell