Design Beyond the Human: Transdisciplinary Conversations about the Planet

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How can design shine a light on humanitys relationship with the planet, its ecosystems and inhabitants, now and in the future

Global challenges like climate change and ecosystem degradation are proving that a singular disciplinary approach is inadequate to respond to issues where societal behaviours, individual choices, political decisions, economic, technological and scientific developments are so densely entangled - not least in design. But what happens when we turn things around and decenter the human to look at our relationship with the planet, its ecosystems and inhabitants beyond the capitalist human-nature binary worldview

Design Beyond the Human is a collection of essays by international scholars, designers and engaged citizens traversing activism, anthropology, conservation, creating writing, design practice, design theory, economics, education, environmental humanities, ethics, history, indigenous knowledge, law, philosophy, poetry, politics, regenerative agriculture, science, sociology and technology. Divided into three sections - We Are Not Alone, Design Beyond the Human, and Mediating HumanNon-Human Relations Through Design - the text generates an interdisciplinary conversation capable of thinking about life on planet Earth, challenging the Anglo-European anthropocentric conceptualisation of design that dominates practice, education, and academic discourse. Each section is unique: charting the transdisciplinary cultural perspective that is required to comprehend our predicament, the critique of human-centred design and its interdependence with capitalism, and the nascent design practices and projects that are attempting to reconcile humanity's possible relationship with the planet, its ecosystems and inhabitants.

The book offers the reader an opportunity to engage with expertise, knowledge, methodologies and lived experiences from across disciplines shaped by shared concerns and provides an opportunity to question if design in a more than human way might reimagine designs relationship to capitalism and contemporary lifestyles. Will our planetary future be merely an ecologically aware version of today, or, in going beyond the human, might we develop a transdisciplinary perspective capable of imagining an alternative vision of life on Earth

Reviews

Connecting relevant dots in an emerging transdisciplinary discourse - both well-known positions and weak signals. The broad disciplinary nature of this book allows and encourages thinking and exploration of design for social, ecological, and political transformations. It could become a compass for entering uncharted territory for Humanity! * Philipp Heidkamp, Kln International School of Design, Germany *

Author Bio

Elio Caccavale is a Designer and Design Researcher at the Glasgow School of Art, UK, exploring human-non-human relations, and visual and three-dimensional collaborative design vocabularies for thinking about ethical and social issues in the sciences and technology. He has authored chapters in numerous books, including Design as Future-Making published by Bloomsbury, a book which explores how design draws on and informs disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science and psychology.

Professor Gordon Hush is Head of the Innovation School at The Glasgow School of Art, UK. He is a Sociologist, with an interest in the way that design-led innovation initiates and accelerates social, economic and ecological change. He is keen to explore the ways in which scientific or technological expertise are incorporated within or applied to the material circumstances and design outcomes which inform human experience, and the consequences that these have for life on the planet.