Pluriversal More-than-Human Design

Annan Zuo, Claudia Westermann, and Frederick Steier

Pluriversal More-than-Human Design explores designing as a relational process that exceeds the human and unfolds across multiple cultural worlds. The track begins from the proposition that animals, plants, landscapes, materials, technologies, and spirits may participate in the constitution of living systems rather than appear only as resources or contexts for human action. Drawing on pluriversal, ecological, and more-than-human approaches, the contributions consider how cybernetics can support forms of world-making in which agency is distributed and knowledge emerges through situated relations.

Across the programme, this relational orientation is developed through diverse practices and scales. Contributions examine conversational forms of human–AI design, ecological rhythms and succession, symbiosis and multispecies interdependence, alternative cosmologies, material and artistic practices, and forms of environmental and landscape inquiry. Several contributions challenge the assumption that design proceeds from an autonomous human observer toward a passive world. Instead, they foreground reciprocal perception, feedback, temporal attunement, and the capacity of other beings and systems to perturb, redirect, and participate in design processes. Performativity and narration become methods for encountering other perspectives rather than simply representing them.

The track’s pluriversal stance also resists collapsing distinct cosmologies into a universal account of relationality. Similarities among practices can become points of connection, but difference remains constitutive. Cybernetics is thus approached less as a master framework than as a conversational resource for attending to interdependence, circularity, and observer participation. The resulting design orientation is ecological and reflexive: it asks how artefacts, interfaces, architectures, landscapes, and speculative practices might be developed with greater sensitivity to the multiple beings, histories, and relations through which worlds are continually made and remade. This stance challenges anthropocentric design assumptions and asks what genuine co-creation requires when the participants in a design situation do not share the same forms of sensing, agency, or expression.