Conference Agenda

This paper highlights temporality as an important more-than-human design strategy and expands multiple lenses for engaging with the temporal complexity of more-than-human. Reflecting on the dominance of anthropocentric and industrial notions of time in design, we choose plant as a paradigmatic case for otherly temporality. We take stock from interdisciplinary literatures and introduce six temporal lenses: rhythm, horizon, continuity, duration, genealogy, and incompleteness, to articulate how plants live, change, and relate through multiple overlapping temporalities. Connecting these lenses to human-plant interaction design practice, these temporal lenses enables designers to recognize temporal frictions, attend to vegetal rhythms, and cultivate responsive and situated design practices. The lenses serve as a conceptual framework for engaging with plants and other more-than-human temporalities in design processes. Ultimately, this study positions temporality as a key strategy for decentering the human in design and reimagining design as cohabitation and becoming.

This paper explores how design practices involving biomaterials can promote attuning within more-than-human temporalities. Drawing on two comparative case studies working with decomposing organisms to make and unmake materials, it examines how growth and decay unfold across different ecological timescales. Through concepts of noticing, pace, and rhythm, the studies explore how designers negotiate when to pause, accelerate, or distribute agency within multispecies collaborations. Rather than treating biomaterials as substitutes for synthetics, the paper positions them as temporal components of ecosystems shaped by humidity, temperature, and microbial diversity. Attuning emerges as a practice of more-than-human coordination and care. The findings contribute to temporal design discourse by testing theoretical promises against the pressures of practice, revealing tensions that scholarly discussion alone cannot anticipate. The paper proposes rhythm and pace as practical navigational tools through which designers can communicate ecological temporalities to clients and position themselves as facilitators of more-than-human processes.

An emerging dimension of multispecies design is the effort to attune to new sensory entanglements with the more-than-human world that foreground the alternative temporalities of multispecies life. Adding to such approaches, in this paper we want to emphasise that there is an incommensurability between the timeframes of organisms and those of human ways of thinking about time and of capitalist production. Indeed, multispecies design involves trying to work with alternative timeframes that necessarily disrupt dominant rhythms of design and production. Exploring a set of encounters with fungal time, we consider how such experiments have the capacity to plunge us into the rhythms of another organism and into the temporal ecologies of multispecies life. Rather than cultivating a romanticised sense of connection to nature, we argue, often more important is the way such encounters highlight the limits of such a sensibility: in moments of frustrated waiting, disappointment, or unexpected happenings.

In this paper we present "Plant-disco", an interactive physical design object that seeks to make activities in soil (e.g. bugs and plant growth) sensible to humans. With this, we discuss how more-than-human temporalities come to surface (such as plant, soil, microorganisms and machine) and how this creates friction in our human perception of time and interaction. The central aspect of the paper is to discuss how the design, as a result of trying to extend human appreciation of nature into soil, also intervenes in human temporalities by engaging with the seemingly slow pace of nature at a time where most digital technologies primarily seek to stimulate fast-paced sensing. Grounded in more-than-human concerns in design, we discuss some of our design choices as well as the theoretical underpinnings of different temporalities and use this to explore how the design seeks to mediate this tension between the slow and the fast-paced.

This paper reimagines material catalogues not as static inventories but as archives of deep-time and affect: tools for sensing, caring for, and reconfiguring our relationships with the more-than-human world. It presents Tagus estuary colour swatch, a Research-through-Design exploration in which bio-pigments derived from local plant, mineral, algal, and waste streams form a colour palette embodying the estuary’s ecological rhythms. The project reframes materials beyond inert resources but rather as affective mediators of and for more-than-human temporalities – by embodying and expressing temporal processes and by enabling designers and audiences to engage with them. Positioned against the extractivist legacy of traditional catalogues, the research is framed within a wider shift in design that proposes alternative bioregional approaches valuing provenance, affective relations, and care. By revealing materials’ more-than-human narratives, the research demonstrates how design tools can cultivate awareness, empathy, and connection across humans, landscapes, and the temporalities they share.

Amid the intensifying challenges of climate change, there is an emerging consensus within coastal academic and practitioner networks on the importance of integrating design led-approaches that enhance resilience and foster the long-term adaptation for coastal communities.

However, coastal environments present peculiar contexts for design actions, as the movement of water consistently challenges the boundaries between water and land, along with the relational interactions between human and non-human communities—both in cyclical and unpredictable ways. Drawing from the authors’ experiences in tidal coastal and estuarine areas across diverse geographies, this article proposes ways to cultivate design’s response-ability (Haraway, 2016) to the more-than-human temporalities of the sea and its pluriversal communities. Specifically, it argues for a seascape epistemology (Ingersoll, 2016) to engage with the fluidity of time and space in intertidal places, and reflects on how this could shape design actions and foster dialogues with plural ways-of-knowing beyond modernity.