Ben Robinson & Ann Light

From knowing to flowing : More-than-human futures and the challenge of designing without a destination

The shift in design expertise from anthropocentric functionalism and capitalist productivism to a more generative care-full way of being requires us to rethink how designers engage with more-than-human futures. We will unpack the implications of moving from the planned world of modernity to the fundamentally unknowability of more-than-human climate futures, replacing the certainties of “what” with the flow of “how”. We ask if the role of a designer is optimisation within constraints for a desired outcome, how we design when we are unable, unwilling or uncomfortable putting said outcome into words. We bring together notions of complicity (Shotwell, 2016) liminality (Turner, 1974, 2011; Van Gennep et al., 2001; Szakolczai, 2009; Thomassen, 2018; Szakolczai and Thomassen, 2019), aesthetic attention (Schaeffer, 2015; Citton, 2017, 2020; Boullier, 2019), narrative identity (McAdams and McLean, 2013) and affective prefiguration (Light, 2021, 2023) to contextualise the experience of working with an immersive experience based on Dator’s Four Futures model (Dator, 2009). We aspire to contribute to a growing body of practical knowledge relating to more-than-human futures without presuming to speak for them.