This article explores how design can reintroduce elements of wildness into urban environments through artifacts that foster multispecies interaction. Wildness is not defined as a return to nature, but as a relational and semiotic rupture of control. It is an opportunity for nonhuman agency to emerge within human-managed spaces. Drawing on theories of affordances, play, cultural heritage, and metacommunication, we investigate how artifacts can function as semiotic prompts for interspecies encounters, and how cultural familiarity can afford ecological disruption. We use design interventions in a Stockholm allotment garden as our example, where prototypes created as habitat elements for newts also provoked human curiosity, connections to gardening traditions, and multispecies activity. We argue that design should prioritize attunement, ambiguity, and divergence over mastery or harmony, thus supporting new forms of cohabitation within the constraints of urban life.

This workshop will engage participants in an exercise that conceives experimental design practices that involve communication with other-than-human species. The process encourages a shift away from human-centred control, creating conditions that allow other species to manifest their own behaviours. This is important since the dominant global material culture of design does not acknowledge the presence and interaction of other species with things designed, erasing biodiversity as human habits repeat anthropocentric and destructive ecological patterns. Building on the work of J. J. Gibson’s concept of affordances, and other work that conform the emerging field that today is understood as posthumanism, the workshop will speculate upon possibilities of cohabitation with ‘umbrella’ or keystone species of different locations.

Esta presentación reflexiona sobre como el diseño, a través de generar cosas nuevas, altera las relaciones con quienes viven en un entorno, generando inclusiones y exclusiones, hospitalidad y hostilidad. Cuestionando la norma antropocéntrica que domina la práctica global del diseño, la presentación nos confronta con las posibilidades y tensiones de cuidar de como nuestro materializar puede conducir a crear y participar en ecologías de lo artificial que afirmen lo vivo.

The presentation gives an overview of the book Designing for Interdependence: A Poetics of Relating which is about the practice of designing and design’s capacity to relate (or not) to beings of all kinds, human and others, in ways that are life-affirming. Sensitive to power differentials and the responsibility that this entails, the author develops the notion of alter-natives, a concept that exposes the alterity of artificial things and the potential of these things to participate in the sustainment of environments. The notion of alter-natives indicates the alterity of a thing, its own foreignness to environments by being artificial, fabricated by humans. It demands thinking how some-thing alters the relations to those that live in an environment, how it makes them different in some way. It suggests the possibility that these ‘others’ (alterity) may enter a process of ‘nativization’, if they are designed within the ecological and biological constraints of the particular places where they will be used. Finally, the notion of alter-natives does not explain, does not explicate; it demands answers, the implications need to be unfolded, traced, maintained. Alter-natives emphasize vulnerability in order to become life-affirming. The book immerses the reader in a poetics of relating, a semiotic practice of interrelating humans, artificial things and other-than-human species, a design practice that can make us more explicitly dependable on life and communication across species, a designing for interdependence that can support the necessary rewilding that must happen if we are to contribute to the stabilization of planetary dynamics and the affirmation of cultural and biological diversity. By challenging anthropocentrism through design, a practice emerges from questioning human mastery, and thus a poetics of relating is developed by means of a letting go of control acknowledging other-than-human needs and capacities. In this sense the book is about control, at least to the extent that a human can let go of control by designing something that affirms her living. Avoiding dualistic thinking and the dichotomies harmful-benefit, construction-destruction, natural-artificial, and life-death, the author pursues the work of caring for how our mattering through design becomes both, constructive and destructive in more-than-human ecologies.

Feminist theories have long been concerned with the violent impact of (normative) Universal Man on society and nature, aconsequence of a modern phantasy divide between Nature and Culture. In this planetary era some call the Anthropocene, it isclearer to us how the environment is in us, and we humans are fully in the environment. The modern Nature/Culture divideimplodes violently on itself. For too long those regarded as less cultured, less-than-human and particularly nonhumans,like the very ecologies that sustains us, have been approached as mere resours or background for Universal Man. What canbe done - in practice, in thinking and in scholarship in such a situation?The present postnatural situation disrupts modern figurations of thought and scholarly practice, and begs new ones. Withclimate change, oceanic disturbance, habitat loss and rampant species extinction on the one hand, and new syntheticbiologies, technobodies and algorithms we live by on the other, it asks feminist sciences and arts for extradisciplinaryresponses, for new designs of practice.No longer can a division of academic labour be sustained, where technoscience does naked facts, use/abuse nonhumans andextract raw nature while artistic research, humanities and social science does culture, ethics and politics. Spurred by morethan-human feminisms, thicker forms of situated knowing have already emerged, for instance as practices of critical, creativeand feminist posthumanities.Such more-than-human humanities come in response to the pressing need to a) alter and decolonize such dividing knowledgeforms and to b) change the very ways we think, eat, and live with nonhumans in society. Sharing a Darwinian feeling forhow everything is connected, critically and creatively, with a relational ethics of care and concern, more-than-humanfeminisms and postdisciplinary disciplines, have paved way for environmental humanities and other more-than-human formsof the posthumanities. What are the stakes and challenges in these transformations? Why do we need them? And whatfeminist genealogies gets recognized?This lively round-table talk brings diverse scholars together for a spirited conversation on the usefulness and potential impactof feminist theorizing on sustainability, design, and on how to bring art and science to the social humanities, and insights tothe people living in a more-than-human world. It will be fun, but deadly serious.