Conference Agenda

Ecosystems are not computers. They are alive, endlessly complex, and deeply intriguing. What if the data systems used to better understand living worlds could embed this more-than-human vitality? This paper examines ecosystem data tools in corporate sustainability, where AI tools have become key mediators in sustainable transitions. Drawing on desk research and empirical data with biodiversity specialists at 13 large corporations, it identifies four tensions that reveal deeper mismatches between computational systems and ecological worlds. These arise between demands for certainty and the unstable dynamics of ecosystems; between the need for data as neutral evidence and as arguments towards managing corporate trade-offs; between LLMs as tools for synthesis and the continued necessity of human interpretation; and between functional tool aesthetics and the vital attachments needed for regenerative change. From these findings, the paper articulates a more-than-human design space aligned with ecological dynamics, meaning-making, technosymbiotic relations, and transformative corporate change.

European AI regulation (EU AI Act) has assumed that humans will remain in control of AI systems, thanks to human-machine interfaces and a stop button (Art. 14 of the EU AI Act) as two separate static entities. This ontological blindness in legal institutions leads to a problem of making illusory mechanisms through which people relate to the more-than-human agency of AI systems, foreclosing any possibility of coexistence. Against this context, somaesthetic and affective interaction design practices can offer new possibilities of inter-relations between the more-than-human AI-data operations and the human and social institutions’ fixations on representations. This paper provides an empirical reflection on an artistic installation that, through diffracting data practices, turns a space of control into one of encounter. By taking AI oversight to be more-than-human from a soma design approach, we move from the constrained and narrow “human-in-the-loop” to “body-is-the-loop,” opening possibilities for mattering differently.

Smart city data infrastructures largely reinforce anthropocentric paradigms, neglecting the entangled relationships that shape more-than-human worlds. This paper explores synthetic data as a transformative tool to address these omissions, offering alternative ways to represent missing non-human perspectives. Through a research-through-design approach, we present Kin Bank: a speculative interface that uses synthetic data to generate poetic, transactional representations between human and non-human actors. Adopting the metaphor of a shared bank account, the system foregrounds ecological and financial interdependencies while challenging reductionist data practices. Findings from a user study show how synthetic data can surface unseen relationships, embrace ecological complexity, and provoke critical reflection. Rather than prediction, synthetic data is used as a speculative medium to produce “productive uncertainty” and foster new ways of understanding more-than-human entanglements. We argue that speculative design powered by synthetic data offers a pathway toward more inclusive, relational, and imaginative representations of urban ecologies and regenerative futures.

In an era shaped by autonomous systems, designers increasingly confront

a central question: how should responsibility and decision-making be distributed

when environmental action is partially delegated to algorithms? This article

explores how AI infrastructures in marine environmental operations reshape

relations between human intention, machine autonomy, and ecological care.

Drawing on posthuman design theory, Actor–Network Theory, and explainable AI,

the study proposes an Ethics of Autonomy framework that positions design as a

mediator between human oversight and algorithmic agency. Using a case-informed

analysis of three marine robotic systems—FloatyBoats (coral restoration),

Seaswarm (oil spill mitigation), and the autonomous surface vessel Vatoz (marine

waste collection), the paper illustrates how sensing, feedback loops, and adaptive

control enable autonomous systems to move from environmental monitoring

toward ecological intervention. The study argues that responsible innovation in

autonomous environmental technologies requires systems that are interpretable,

accountable, and embedded within transparent algorithmic decision-making

infrastructures supporting ecological responsibility.

This article argues for planetarizing artificial intelligence (AI) by re-situating its development within the terrestrial ecologies that sustain it. While dominant imaginaries frame AI as an immaterial and global technology, its infrastructures depend on geological, energetic, and social processes rooted in specific territories. Drawing on fieldwork in Penco, southern Chile—where a rare-earth mining project has sparked a complex socio-environmental controversy—we present Bajo nuestros pies, a research-creation project that develops a terrestrial cartography of AI. We propose two core operations for grounding AI: diplomacy, understood as cultivating sensitive encounters between heterogeneous temporalities and more-than-human agencies; and relationality, which interweaves geological, industrial, ecological, and social scales into a shared spatial narrative. Through these operations, our cartography exposes how the minerals enabling advanced computational systems emerge from contested ecologies and lived territories. We argue that such methods activateplanetary forms of attention, opening pathways toward a more situated and earth-oriented understanding of AI.