WORKSHOP
The Future of More-Than-Human Design:
A Computing Practice
in Crisis?
Organised in conjunction with
the Aarhus 2025 Conference
When: August 18, 2025
Where: Aarhus University, Denmark
Register here for participation
Workshop description
Given the current ecological crisis, the human-computer interaction (HCI) and design community is showing a growing interest in the adoption of more-than-human perspectives, challenging human-centric approaches. While this has sparked numerous research initiatives, many of them are still a far cry from providing practical solutions or transforming the industry. This also presents a hurdle for teaching more-than-human perspectives to design students, as they may feel powerless to practice those teachings in real-life industrial settings. To bring forth concrete examples of how more-than-human design practice can matter, we believe that it is now time to move beyond theorising about and advocating for the adoption of such perspectives and start a more-than-human design practice that transforms the industry.
This workshop, therefore, aims to bring together educators, researchers, and designers to discuss and co-develop strategies for transitioning more-than-human perspectives from niche/speculation to mainstream/practice in HCI and design. The workshop also aims to develop ways to empower students to work with these perspectives to bring about this transformation of the industry.
The aims of the workshop are:
- to bring together educators, researchers and designers with an interest in more-than-human perspectives in HCI
and design research, education and practice, - to share what our more-than-human notion looks like; what can we each learn from each other’s engagement
and experiments in the more-than-human space; how can the world at large benefit from our collective more-
than-human efforts, - to debate and co-develop ideas for how we can create conditions for more-than-human perspectives to really transform the industry and for how we can prepare our students to effectively play a role in this transformation.
The themes and underlying questions addressed in the workshop are:
- What does “Designing-with” mean in the context of computing (considering our different practices and points of
- departure), and what is unique about it when comparing it to designing-with in other contexts (multispecies)?
- How could we articulate more-than-human design as an affirmative reorientation to human-centered design?
What alignments and alliances can be achieved, and what shifts need to be made? - How can we go from speculation to more-than-human practice in HCI?
- What can we learn from the previous paradigm shift towards human-centred design?
- What are the current barriers in the industry for adopting more-than-human perspectives?
- How can economic factors be brought into more-than-human design approaches?
- What role do we see AI playing in this process of maturation?
- What broader movements, such as degrowth/post-growth [17, 25], circular economy and rebound effects [ 3, 4],
climate justice [2, 9, 10], and decolonisation [13, 26] should we adopt? - What other research and design fields, such as regenerative agriculture [ 11 ] and regenerative design [6], could
we engage with to have a bigger impact? - How to teach HCI and design students about more-than-human design?
Workshop program
TBA
Workshop organisers
Wolmet Barendregt, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Tilde Bekker, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Arne Berger, Hochschule Anhalt, Germany
Peter Dalsgaard, Aarhus University, Denmark
Eva Eriksson, Aarhus University, Denmark
Christopher Frauenberger, IT:U Interdisciplinary Transformation University, Austria, Austria
Batya Friedman, University of Washington, USA
Elisa Giaccardi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Anne-Marie Hansen, Malmö University, Sweden
Rikke Hagensby Jensen, Aarhus University, Denmark
Ann Light, Malmö University & University of Sussex, UK
Joseph Lindley, Lancaster University, UK
Iohanna Nicenboim, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Elisabet M. Nilsson, Malmö University, Sweden
Johan Redström, Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University, Sweden
Natalie Sontopski, Hochschule Anhalt, Germany
Ron Wakkary, Eindhoven University of Technology & Simon Fraser University, Canada
Mikael Wiberg, Umeå University, Sweden
Daisy Yoo, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands