INTERWOVEN

More-than-human Design and the Concept of Biographies

More-than-human design is an emerging field within design that extends the focus beyond human-centric perspectives, and aims to actively include nonhumans in design processes. This to challenge dominant understandings about nonhumans and our relations to them, as it is becoming more evident that this era – which is so marked by climate change – is the result of human activity.

More-than-human concerns offers design researchers the lens to consider a rich set of complex and nuanced concepts. While the theoretical frameworks are increasingly well developed, designers can struggle to apply them in their processes.

This project aims to explore the concept of biographies (introduced by Ron Wakkary in Things We Could Design for More Than Human Centered Worlds): the relation between designer and their design that continuously inscribes itself the world, and holds the designer responsible of the impact their work has. So, one might ask; how are we interwoven with the things we design?

Woven Samples with Grass Paper

For this project, I wove samples using hand-crafted grass paper on two looms; a TC2 Jacquard loom and an Erica Louët loom. The resulting samples are documented in a template and can be seen to express time in their making processes, materiality, and processes of decay. I argue that this process reveals aspects of seasonality, costs, and places, and helped me develop a better understanding of the concept of biographies, and how we as designers are interwoven with our creations.