Design Beyond the Human. Transdisciplinary Conversations about the Planet, an anthology edited by Elio Caccavale and Gordon Hush.
I’ve heard endless variations on the theme “Design Can Change the World”. While i never blamed the entire design community for the slogan, its pomposity never failed to irk me. Design Beyond the Human lays bare just how heavy and embarrassing the burden of this world-saving claim has become for many designers.
The editors of this collection of essays say outright that design’s heritage is toxic. The discipline has been, throughout history, complicit in the Global North’s techno industrial logic and language, framing the planet as a warehouse of “natural resources” and “ecosystem services” and other beings as mere property.
While critical of their own discipline, Caccavale and Hush remain incorrigibly hopeful. They believe that by reaching beyond the human, design can help restore our fractured relationship with the living world.
To stay relevant in an era of environmental degradation, design must shed its Anglo-European anthropocentrism and cultivate transcultural, interdisciplinary dialogue. The future of design, they insist, lies in decentering the focus of design from a selected group of humans associated with the “Global North” to all the inhabitants of the planet, human and non-human alike. The book illustrates this more-than-human perspective by weaving together the voices of experts in multispecies justice, farmers, indigenous design researchers, professors of anthropology, researchers in storytelling and other thinkers whose discourses are too often siloed.
In a world that feels vicious and bleak, it’s heartening to encounter a book that is pragmatic, yet optimistic. It’s also reassuring to know that people somewhere still have faith that humans (in particular the ones belonging to the Global North crowd) are capable of self-critical introspection and humility.
Before I go any further, I’d like to share two personal reflections about the book. The first one is that I am far more familiar with the art world than with the design one. Transdisciplinary conversations and critique of our narrow anthropocentric, Westerncentric biases have been key features of art discussions for the past 10 to 15 years. It’s sometimes a bit clumsy, try-hard and even affected but i believe we’re making progress. I’m glad i got my hands on this book. Because (and it pains me to admit it) art can learn from design too. Art is edgier, faster and bolder but it remains stuck in its own happy bubble. Design, by contrast, is embedded in daily life and taken seriously. There might be something for art to learn here.
My second remark is “Beware! The optimism of Design Beyond the Human can be contagious!”
Studio Formafantasma, Ore Stream, 2017
Here’s a quick overview of the most interesting ideas and essays i discovered in the book:
Professor of sociology and social policy Danielle Celermajer and architect Matthew Darmour-Paul reflect on the principles and challenges of multispecies justice. This form of radical solidarity with all living beings, including humans, mediates possible conflicts between species and facilitates harmony without asserting dominance. Multispecies justice demands that architects reimagine material practices. Celermajer and Darmour-Paul use the glass building as metaphor a for multispecies injustice. Large transparent panels create spaces of beauty and comfort for humans but they are deadly to birds and insects.
Professor of social anthropology Noboru Ishikawa charts the homogenisation of the world’s flora since the Columbian Exchange. Some of the facts and stories Ishikawa shares are jaw-dropping. In the paragraphs summing up the migratory history of the Pará rubber tree, he states that during the last quarter of the 19th century, “the total cultivated area of major rubber producing areas in South Eastern Asia expanded some 16,000 fold.”
Ishikawa’s paragraphs on the historical trajectories of oil palm from one equatorial zone to another is equally fascinating. Oil palms were first domesticated in Western African groves. Europeans transplanted them to South East Asia where their intensive cultivation wiped out local ecologies. In recent years, multinational producers of palm oil from South East Asia are seeking to buy land for cultivation in Africa. So far, they have encountered resistance from communities and environmental groups who are weary of replicating the damage of massive plantations observed in Asia. One of the reasons for such resistance is that local populations in Africa have maintained a symbolic relationship with oil palm for over 4000 years. What matters to them (thankfully) is that seeds remain accessible to anyone and that oil can be produced through reciprocal labour exchange, not industrial exploitation.
James and Joyce Skeet founded Spirit Farm in 2014 in New Mexico, an indigenous-led regenerative teaching farm that combines indigenous spiritual and farming practices with modern techniques. Located in area known for its harsh desert conditions, the farm employs techniques such as water harvesting, composting, agroforestry, intercropping and crop rotations but it also revived a pre-Columbian terrace system that used different kinds of soil collected across the Incan empire to grow a huge variety of crops.
The Agave, designed by Desiree Hernandez Ibinarriaga and supported by Dan Tanner, Dan Truscott and Carlo Gigliotti. Image by wāni
Independent scholar François-Xavier Nzi iyo Nsenga examines the production and use of artefacts in pre-colonial sub-Saharan Africa. While he challenges the Global North technoscientific tradition which relies on a dualistic understanding of nature and society, the design thinker doesn’t completely dismiss the Global North practices. Instead, he advocates for a hybrid approach, one that would combine Euro-North American knowledge with millennia of non-Euro-American traditions. For designers, this means learning about traditional and Indigenous cultures of the Global South. At least, as he notes, what remains “after six centuries of colonisation, stifling and plundering,” he added.
He also shared this quote by designer Victor Papanek who, in 1972, castigated design for being among the most harmful of all occupations:
“There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. And possibly only one profession is phonier. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today.
Cath Le Couteur and Nick Ryan, Project Adrift, Debris-o-Gram, (live holographic projection of the Earth with each dot in the visualisation representing one of 52,829 pieces of catalogued space junk, with its position calculated in real time), 2017
Alice Twemlow considers the estimated 100 trillion pieces of space debris cluttering Low Earth Orbit. What would the famous the Earthrise photo look like if it were to be taken today?
For the design historian, space junk epitomises design’s relentless focus on production, consumption, and, more recently, mediation. To truly grasp material culture’s environmental impact, she argues, we must urgently add a fourth area of concern: disposal.
Felipe Viveros, meanwhile, discusses indigenous epistemologies that emphasise care as response to the challenges of a world in crisis. At some point in his essay, he evokes Wetiko, a cannibalistic spirit driven by greed. Native Americans drew parallels between Wetiko and the West’s extractivist vision of progress.
KTK-BELT, BELT Campuses
Priyanka Bista writes about a (brilliant) project of KTK-BELT. The Vertical University (VU) supports marginalised Indigenous Communities in easterm Nepal. The program partners with local farmers, whose profound knowledge of native flora transforms them into the ideal professors, and the forest itself into a living classroom.
Studio Formafantasma, Moulding Tradition, 2010
Studio Formafantasma, Cambio, 2020
Design historian and curator Domitilla Dardi writes about Formafantasma‘s investigation into the environmental and political fallout from the unsustainable extraction, distribution and consumption of raw materials worldwide.
Kris Spiros of the Cellular Agriculture Society wrote the most surprising essay. He dissects the design challenges behind making lab-grown meat appealing to consumers. It’s not the end product that turns people off, but the industrial process itself and the stigma of ultra-processed food. Spiros suggests to compare the production of cellular meat to the production of filtered water. The public associate the latter with health and purity but never think about the kind of facility that produces water filters.
Image on the homepage: Formafantasma with Emanuele Coccia, Quercus, 2020 (still)