Conference Agenda

This paper extends cosmopolitical prototyping into the olfactory domain to examine how smell can operate as a diplomatic device for interspecies coexistence. Building on a longitudinal, autoethnographic research through design project, we report multi session fieldwork with two captive pumas—Huilo (older, methodical) and Maqui (younger, playful)—at Refugio Animal Cascada, Chile. The study sought not to apply enrichment as an external fix, but to co constitute a situated more than human we in which animal, designer, materials, climate and infrastructures jointly stage conditions for safe relationality.

We designed textile olfactory braids (reused cotton braids and burlap sachets) infused with botanicals (e.g., lavender, hibiscus, rose; rue, parsley, cilantro, rosemary) and deliberately excluded food rewards to avoid prey without prey frustration and to privilege curiosity led engagement. Braids were mounted on the shared boundary fence, intentionally leveraging it as an interface that both separates and enables contact.

Dutchmen like to pride themselves on having ‘successfully conquered nature’ through engineering, management and design. Currently, however, this triumphant spirit has been dampened by global, regional, and local developments that expose established Dutch notions of malleability and control as fallacies. This paper uses the unsolicited return of wolves to the Netherlands as an explanatory case study to illustrate how in this unfolding controversy problem and solution spaces co-evolve and thus call for all-but-reductionist design and management approaches. Building on the crucial difference between problems (that can be solved) and issues (that can be stabilised), a model is proposed that explicates how problem and solution spaces can nest inside an overarching issue space. After analysing how Dutch citizens and officials respond to uncalled-for circumstances caused by the wolf’s uninvited homecoming, this model is used to argue for co-evolutionary thinking and acting to support harmonious more-than-human cohabitation in the Netherlands and beyond.

Office plants are ubiquitous in urban workplaces, yet they are often treated as disposable decoration rather than living co-inhabitants. This paper examines how interaction design can reconfigure this cultural framing. Using a research-through-design approach that combines interviews, the creation of an aesthetic biofeedback artefact, and a longitudinal deployment, we explore how plant vitality, expressed through light and sound, shapes everyday encounters between employees and plants. Rather than improving maintenance efficiency, the artefact functions as a relational probe. Participants described empathy, comfort, and companionship, alongside guilt, pressure, and resistance when the plant’s expressions demanded attention. These tensions show how care for nonhuman beings emerges through sensory attunement, workplace rhythms, and ongoing ethical negotiation. We contribute to more-than-human design by demonstrating how aesthetic biofeedback shifts plants from background decoration to perceptible co-presence and by identifying relational mechanisms through which care and responsibility are enacted in workplace settings.

This paper explores shape-changing materials as agents of material diplomacy within More-than-Human Design. Drawing from Latour’s Parliament of Things, posthumanism, and new materialism, it investigates how responsive materials mediate ecological and interspecies relations. Through a multiple-case study approach, ten design projects are analyzed using a five-dimensional framework—environmental attunement, ecological flourishing, expressive vitality, co-existence and augmentation, and relational mediation. The analysis explores how these materials can perform communicative and political roles, positioning design as a diplomatic practice that negotiates shared concerns among species, technologies, and environments. It attempts to question extractivist models, support ecological repair, and cultivate forms of interspecies attentiveness. The paper contributes to debates on More-than-Human Design by proposing micro-parliaments of care—small-scale socio-material infrastructures that translate environmental processes into collective awareness and action. It proposes materials as participants in planetary politics and indicates a pathway for design to move beyond representation toward the collective governance of life.

This research explores how Inclusive design can be expanded to recognise nonhuman stakeholders by engaging perspectives from the More-than-Human turn. Using Research-through-Design, the study combines literature, semi-structured interviews, and case studies to identify barriers to designers’ responsible engagement with nonhuman entities. The findings reveal that while designers are open to widening inclusion, current practices remain centred on human empathy, usability, and evidence, leaving nonhuman concerns unaccounted for. Instead of expanding the repertoire of prescriptive tools, what is needed is the cultivation of attentiveness and care that enables designers to engage meaningfully with nonhuman agencies. This research offers two contributions: (1) a sensitising concept: More-than-Human Inclusion, which reframes inclusion as relational accountability that extends inclusion to nonhuman stakeholders while remaining accountable to historically excluded human voices, and (2) a speculative provotype composed of audio-narrated nonhuman stories that materialises the concept and proposes how such sensibilities might be cultivated in practice.