How do we design with & for other species?

When we first asked ourselves some time ago what design could or should look like in the age of human-made climate change and the sixth mass extinction, two further questions arose relatively quickly: What does inclusive design mean if it were to include the species that surround us? And is there a possibility in this endeavour to learn something from other species or even to ask them for help in coping with these dramatic developments. When raised the question of "asking other species for help", we were aware of the fact that it would be a big challenge to design in a truly interspecies inclusive way. After all, we have different ways of communicating than animals, fungi or algae, and we generally know relatively little about each other, which is likely to make it difficult to even capture stakeholder needs for any intended interspecies inclusive design.

Still, our first question arose from a modest wish: within the framework of an interdisciplinary  material research project, where we as designers were not interested in designing with or through materials, but in understanding the material itself as a task of design, we wanted to produce "tasty" materials for the true "end users" of biodegradable products. However, our questioning led to headaches for us and irritated head-shaking for others. 

In the process, the question of asking other species for help in shaping our way out of the current crisis also came to a relatively simple realisation: the climate crisis is hitting us humans hard - perhaps even much harder than some other species. Each new IPCC report guarantees with higher certainty that we will not be able to continue living in a similar way as we do today - and although one might think that some change would be welcome, the climate crisis is already leading to the suffering and death of many of our fellow humans.

One surprising detail about the situation, however, is that life on Earth as a whole is not remotely threatened, even though it may mean a possible end of the "world" for us. On the contrary, many of the organisms on our home planet are well equipped to live in a changing world, and they have already demonstrated this ability many times over. Fungi, for example, are organisms whose lifespan seems to be physically unlimited, whose complex underground networks can exist seemingly indefinitely.

These organisms, which are somewhere between plant and animal, are equipped with quite a few enzymes that enable them to use many raw materials, even radioactive radiation, as a food source. A characteristic they share, at least in part, with insects such as the darkling beetle. The beetles and their larvae began their journey as cultural followers of humans and now declared large parts of the new waste streams of human culture as a food source, in addition to grain products and food waste. In fact, it has been proven for at least two different species of darkling beetles that they not only eat various plastics, but can also digest them and convert them into organic material. 

And these are just two examples to illuminate the insight underlying our question: Some organisms are very adaptable and perhaps even better equipped when it comes to responding to the coming changes. Or as Donna Haraway very aptly puts it: "Microbes will be fine - to put it mildly". But can we ask another species for help to cope better in these times? Still highly questionable, isn't it? After all, we can't talk to them, and even if we could, would we be humble enough to ask for help from beings that have neither arms, legs, eyes, some not even more than one cell? What do they know about the world? And should we put our fate, at a moment when as much is at stake as now, into their (non-existent, thus highly metaphorical) hands?

Obviously, it doesn't matter what we think about it. We are already doing it today when

we plant trees, sow algae and revive peatlands to mitigate climate change. Furthermore, we rely on them for acute problems such as toxic spills, oil spills or nuclear disasters, when humans sow thousands of canna lilies or plant miles of oyster mushrooms as part of phyto- and mycoremediation, in the hope that the species will use their talents to save us and other species from the poison we spread.

So how can we involve these talented and experienced creatures in our design in such a way that they are free to develop themselves and their potentials? And can we in this way make our own designs more inclusive, or in terms of material design more digestible, for the organisms that are inherent in and encounter them? Can we succeed in including the perspectives of other organisms in our designs, and what conditions do we need in order to recognise these perspectives  and take them seriously?

In order to explore our fundamental questions, we have theoretically engaged with approaches from biology, philosophy and ecology in the first part of our work. In addition, we examined and contrasted current and speculative approaches in design that were important for our discussion of how the process of design has already changed in times of human-made climate change.

Before we start a short disclaimer for all those who are looking for direct answers in our work, who want to get straight to the point: in this work there are no concrete answers. Rather, the aim of our approach is to work through these questions in an open and experimental way and to weigh up possible challenges and opportunities. After all, our work so far has taught us one thing above all: Which brings us to the second chapter of our work: who or what are interspecies designers and why does a textile and surface designer and a product designer deal with the needs of protozoa, bacteria, fungi, algae and beetles. Our work is accompanied by personal notes in the form of diary entries that we wrote during the project.