Poikolainen Rosén, A. and Heitlinger, S. (2025) ‘Introducing More-Than-Human Design in Practice’, Interactions, 32(2), pp. 54–56.

Poikolainen Rosén and Heitlinger’s “Introducing More-Than-Human Design in Practice” argues that design must move beyond the inherited primacy of the human user and confront its implication in ecological crisis. Their intervention begins from a critique of human-centred design, whose emphasis on usability, access and participation remains valuable yet insufficient when nonhuman species, habitats, air, water and planetary systems are treated as peripheral to design’s ethical field. The article’s conceptual development situates more-than-human design within posthumanism, new materialism, Indigenous and pluriversal thought, animal-computer interaction and systems theory, thereby reframing design as participation within networks of mutual influence rather than as unilateral service to human preference. Its specific case study is the living root bridge in Meghalaya, India, illustrated on page 3: a design that challenges the assumption that organisms must be killed before becoming design materials, while also exposing the unresolved difficulty of scaling such practices. The authors’ synthesis is resolutely practical: they call for methods, implementations and scaling strategies capable of representing nonhuman stakeholders, evaluating multispecies outcomes, and negotiating conflicting ecological needs. The conclusion is therefore methodological and political. More-than-human design is not merely a speculative aesthetic or ethical gesture; it is an emerging discipline of relational accountability, asking who counts as a participant, whose flourishing is measured, and how interactive technologies might support justice across species.