Picture the last time you were immersed in nature. If you close your eyes, maybe you can tap into what it looked like, sounded like, even how it smelled. In your mind’s eye, maybe this picture has you on a trail, surrounded by forest and brush, rocks covered in moss, and decomposing logs that were once majestic trees amidst the forest canopy. You may have even thought how nice it was to be alone, to have some quiet away from the frenetic rush of urban life. We escape into nature seeking solitude, and breathe a sigh of relief at the sense of peace we feel when there’s “nothing” around.

But the truth is that these natural worlds are metropolises in their own right, hubs of more than human life — where hundreds, sometimes thousands of species of flora and fauna are busily communicating with each other. They’re sharing news of changes in weather, passing resources through their networks and coordinating emergency responses to new pests, threats and toxins. They even share news of our approach, as we humans — unaware — wander their world. 

This isn’t how we’re used to thinking. As designers, accepting all planetary life as a stakeholder engenders a radical paradigm shift. After all, even the notion of “human-centred design” is itself a relatively recent phenomenon. Until the late 20th century, the mainstream Western cultural canon positioned the designer as a “lone genius” channeling pure and universal principles of aesthetics, utility and economy. The embrace of cultural specificity — and the practice of engaging people and communities — only recently became widely adopted among designers. Beginning in the latter half of the 20th century, the nascent concept of human-centred design broadened the inputs to design, engaging the deeper social sciences of anthropology, sociology and psychology to understand the impacts of design on a broader field of human culture and politics. It invited the people who use — or are directly impacted by — a design to be part of the process of making and shaping it. Over the last two decades, this practice has grown more ubiquitous as corporations, governments, charities and other groups realized the potential of meaningfully engaging end users beyond the design of built environments — as well as services, policies, programs and infrastructure.

In our respective and collective work, we’ve woven stories and knowledge from diverse human lived experiences into the meaning-making process of design, improving the content, form and functioning of the things, places and policies we make. And we’ve seen its potential for impact. We’ve seen communities come together to co-design critically needed social infrastructure that brought their neighbourhood together after incidences of gun violence. We’ve invited seniors into the process of designing new pathways to access critical social assistance programs for them and their peers. When we designed a friendly board game that helped citizens explore the collection, storage and sharing of personal data across private and public platforms, an entirely new possibility for data management emerged: the Toronto Civic Data Trust.

For years, we’ve been evangelists for human-centred design, continually looking to deepen its impact, reevaluating its limits, more deeply embedding the lens of social equity into its approach. We navigate persistent blind spots with the ongoing question: How can we consider all of the lived experiences and possible impacts on individuals and communities impacted by design works, when there is so much diversity of experience within any given locale? Trying to get it right is a life’s work, inspiring an ongoing pursuit of participation and engagement approaches that are truly representative, inclusive, participatory and community-led. 

Yet we must also acknowledge a gaping blind spot in our field of practice. By focusing on human experiences, are we not forgetting about the more than human world? Introduced by socio-ecologist David Abram in his 1996 book The Spell of the Sensuous, the term more than human names worlds where individual community members like plants, animals and fungi speak, work and collaborate within conversations of natural design; and where whole ecosystems like rivers, mountains, plains, forests and oceans carry personality, authority and systems design expertise that guide human decision-making, engineering and relationship-building. It is a mode of thought that describes the rich world of lived experiences, languages and cultures that extend beyond our human realm — but in which our experiences are deeply embedded and interdependent.

For Western design practice, it’s a new — and radical — revelation. Yet, it draws on thousands of years of pre-colonial and traditional knowledge. Considering and collaborating with our natural environment is a practice known across many cultures and faiths. In various guises, it appears in the Quran, the Torah, the Bible, the Tao of Ching and the teachings of Buddhism. In Canada and around the world, it’s been a practice of Indigenous Nations since time immemorial. But in modern life, particularly in cities, workplaces and our private homes and apartments, the stakeholders that we engage — often without much success — are almost always human.

In the community conversations we’ve been a part of over the years, many participants — particularly Indigenous community members — increasingly name plants, animals, fungi, waters and minerals as stakeholders. They remind us that we live in a false division of the natural and the human, when in reality the human is part of nature. Our lives, wellness and success are interdependent with the lives, wellness and success of plants, animals and ecosystems. So why are we just human-centred designers?

Our work lives in a container of exponentially increasing climate and human rights emergencies. In recent years, the appetite for equity-centred approaches has grown within the larger public conscience as we and our peers increasingly think about decolonizing design through explorations of power, communication styles and providing meaningful support for those who want to participate in public and private design works. And yet, we’ve been dissatisfied with our ability as designers and facilitators to fully rise to the moment. Even the best efforts to combine equity-centred and ecologically-embedded design are frustratingly incomplete.

We sit at a precipice — a messy beginning for practitioners first dipping their toes into engaging with the more than human world, and a muddled middle for more advanced multispecies design practitioners. Fortunately, there are precedents to build on. Nature-centred methods are already in use in pockets of the design field, and we want to extend the reach of those existing methods. For instance, the fast-growing design practice of biomimicry draws on nature to shape built form, using the structure of plants and organic life as inspiration for efficient (and beautiful) feats of engineering. Meanwhile, the field of multispecies design elevates plants, animals and other creatures into active stakeholders in the design process. Extensive scholarship — primarily from feminist, Black, and Indigenous practitioners — now argues for a “kincentric approach” as part of a “relational turn” for human societies, a way to be less extractive in our interactions with both human and more-than-human kin, potentially providing the opportunity for productive discourse at a time of pronounced divides in civil society.

Across these practices and movements, there are tactics and tools that we can integrate into our design processes. For example, engaging with proxies, where designers invite Western and Indigenous scientists to represent the voices of non-humans, contributing their expertise and knowledge of other species and their ability to relationally think about human relationships with other systems of life. Beyond design, proxies are increasingly being appointed to governing boards to help organizations increasingly acknowledge nature as an active stakeholder in their work. Other design tools that open our field of vision to the more than human include nature immersions, multispecies ethnography and participatory animal design, to name a few. 

We feel both excitement and tension. Excitement because we know that we stand on fertile ground to collectively embed new practices. Tension because it will not be an easy journey. Within our current systems, we still face ongoing challenges to shift institutions toward equity-driven and human-centred approaches, so we do the best we can within our constraints. Meaningfully engaging beyond the human requires us to further adapt and shift our processes and approaches, interrupting business as usual to start experimenting with new modes and methods. This shift will disrupt the flow of everyday business — and echo a transformation we’ve lived through before. When human-centred design was becoming established as a mainstream methodology at the turn of the millennium, institutions and practitioners faced growing pains — and resistance — before adapting design processes to embrace increasingly participatory methods. Just as human-centred design was (and often still is) a source of discomfort, transitioning to more than human-centred design will necessitate difficult adjustments and substantial change-management efforts to help us shift the way we work. 

We believe it will be worth it. We imagine near futures in which we are in productive creation with many species. Within the human world, we exchange visions of a design field decolonized, with harmonious collaboration among many groups and cultures. We extend that vision of re-imagining a more inclusive design future to include multiple species, communicating, listening and living together. In this world, the effort of cross-cultural communication, participation, agency and rights extend beyond a narrow view of the human, acknowledging the plants, animals, soil and water that occupy space with us.

Our work now is to listen deeply and learn, and to begin to engage new templates and methods that we can fold into our design practice. We are embarking on a journey of public learning together with designers, biologists, Indigenous scientists, artists, tradition keepers and many others who practice in this space to further develop our toolkit. Over the coming months, we will be hosting a series of interviews and discovery conversations with experts like Danielle Celermajer (multispecies justice), and Yaw Ofosu-Asare (decolonizing design), sharing what we learn as we work with new templates and tools. We have more questions than answers, as we reconsider who is part of the discussions we facilitate and how best to engage them. The work is just beginning. We invite you to follow along with us and shape a future that includes all of us.

Ariel Sim and Zahra Ebrahim are the co-founders of Beyond HCD, a peer-to-peer research project committed to evolving design and facilitation practices to engage more meaningfully with the more-than-human world. Zahra Ebrahim is also Co-Founder of Monumental Projects, a public interest design firm and social purpose business working to advance equitable city-building and urban development. She is an Urbanist-in-Residence at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities. Ariel Sim is Founder and Principal of Conscious Creator, a design, research, and facilitation company supporting environmental, human rights, wellness, and industrial design projects. She recently completed her term as Human Rights and Regenerative Design Fellow with NYU School of Law.

Lead image by Milica Prokic. The photograph depicts Scotland’s Cove Park, an artist residency embedded deep into the coastal region’s natural landscape.