Design for the Age of Species – Exploring ways for designers to care for multispecies coexistence

Abstract

This paper presents the project The Age of Species (TAS) and the ‘multispecies approach’ addressing the who in care with the aim to disrupt human-centeredness and open up for reconfigurations of design practices to better engage with troubled presents where a myriad of other species is overlooked and becoming extinct. TAS invites designers and scientists to speculate of and design for anthropo-de-centric futures by thinking through care and coexistence. By describing and reflecting on the experiences of an initial workshop and its outcomes as well as anchoring it with theories within feminist posthumanism, the aim is to explore and define the notion of a multispecies approach. The purpose is to raise questions to be developed in the continuation of the project TAS and share insights that may contribute to a wider discourse of human de-centering design.