Xenodesignerly Ways of Knowing

Journal of Design and Science

Xenodesignerly Ways ofKnowingJohanna Schmeer

Published on: Mar 14, 2019

License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0)

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Journal of Design and Science Xenodesignerly Ways of Knowing

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Abstract

This essay argues that human-centered design, which for many years has been the predominant paradigm

within the field of design, has in part contributed to contemporary environmental and social problems

through its servicing role within the systems that created it. It argues for resisting reduction by developing

more inclusive, multi-perspective design practices, taking the complex entanglements of humans and other

entities into consideration. The essay introduces the notion of xenodesign, an approach guided by principles

and theories from speculative design as well as from xeno discourses and speculative realism, which are

characterized by an engagement with experiences and perspectives beyond the human and an

understanding of all entities on an equal level — humans, ecologies, bacteria, air, soil, artificial

intelligences, etc. It explores what might constitute a xenodesignerly practice in three approaches,

illustrated through examples from design.

Introduction

Human-centered design has become the predominant paradigm in design for good reasons: It is a valid

and highly successful approach within select contexts. It is particularly useful to understand the

everyday human circumstances of problems a design is seeking to address. It can enable the creation

of empathetic designs that are intuitive and suited to users’ needs.

In health care, for example, close examinations of patient needs, and their involvement in the design

processes of medical products and services, have led to observable improvements in patient care and

health awareness.1 In computing, the user-centered development of intuitive and gesture-based

interfaces improved accessibility for those with limited previous experience.2

The difficulty with a human-centered approach to design is that it often fails to look beyond the

immediate user, toward the ‘‘other’’ that might be affected by a design — not only other humans, but

other-than-humans: ecologies, bacteria, air, soil, artificial intelligences, etc. Human-centered design,

applied to gain an economic advantage, all too often seeks easy solutions that satisfy users within

unsustainable systems in a world of finite resources. Design, in its servicing role within these systems,

becomes part of the problem. To address these challenges, a new design paradigm is needed.

While this short essay cannot offer an answer as to what this new paradigm might be, it attempts to

explore approaches that could lead toward it. As designers, we currently lack a framework for

strategically including perspectives of the ‘‘other.’’ Contemporary conceptual design,3 the field of

design perhaps most suited to critically exploring new approaches, has a limited reach by virtue of its

mostly niche dissemination channels. This essay seeks to contribute to the discourse about issues of


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limited perspective, and about expanding audiences — both human and nonhuman — within

conceptual product and interaction design.

First, it summarizes four key problems within human-centered design and gives examples of ways in

which these are being addressed. Then, it formulates a notion of xenodesign guided by principles and

theories from speculative realism, xeno discourses, and speculative design. It suggests three

approaches that could begin to constitute a xeno approach to design: object-centered design,

discursive approximations, and critical use.

These approaches are illustrated through examples from design practice — some previously existing,

others newly conducted. It introduces a line of thought in design which is still nascent, leaving space

for future expansion and refinement through interdisciplinary collaboration.

The Problem with Human-Centered Design

The problems connected to widespread, unquestioned use of human-centered design are fourfold. It

can create unsustainable modes of production and consumption, leaving ecological or non-human

perspectives unaccounted for. Its focus on the experience of the (human) user can limit design

considerations in ways that lead to social inequalities. It also risks suppressing radical, imaginative,

and poetic ideas by being too consensus-driven.

Though he originally advocated the approach, the design researcher Donald A. Norman critiqued the

ubiquity of human-centeredness in design. He argued in 2005 that focusing too strongly on users may

lead to advantages for some while making things worse for others.4 The platform economy exemplifies

this risk, as users often benefit from services that cause difficult working or living conditions for those

enabling these services. To solve this issue, Norman suggests a critical reconsideration of the original

user-centered design principles he introduced in the 1980s, to shift the focus from users to activities.

However, this may not suffice to address the complex and interconnected consequences a new service

or product may introduce — ecologically, economically, or socially.

Systemic approaches, such as circular design and the theorist John Wood’s concept of metadesign, seek

to un-center the human in order to address such blind spots. Wood posits that human-centered

design’s tendency of reducing complexity to increase convenience has created an artificial world that

disconnects us from the ecosystem that sustain us.5 He defines metadesign as an approach that focuses

on interactions and relations between things, and on changing behaviors to reduce the negative

environmental impacts of design. Metadesign is positioned as an alternative to the notion of design as

a catalyst for increasing consumption, similar to circular design’s approach of rethinking production,

use, and disposal streams.


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A systemic approach can be effective in understanding a design’s wider context and implications, but

since design has been historically human-centered, it may lack the tools for including other

perspectives, and for creating empathy and a sensitivity toward the other-than-human when

evaluating, rethinking, and designing these systems. Interesting work within this realm is emerging in

a field of design research exploring human-animal-technology relations.6 A need for a different

approach to design is also being discussed in light of the fact that design users increasingly include

machines, devices, and artificial intelligences,7 as well as humans. These various user types operate on

disparate spatiotemporal scales,8 introducing new design challenges.

Without specific guiding tools or techniques, it can be challenging to open our imagination to

perspectives of the “other.” Also, focusing too strongly on people’s wishes and needs may lead to

finding only incremental or audience-specific ideas, which reinforces the status quo rather than

questioning it. It is challenging for people to imagine contexts and consequences beyond their own,

making it difficult to depart from what is taken for granted as normal or given within participatory

design processes. These processes are often decisively consensus-driven. But radical, imaginative, and

poetic ideas may benefit more from the opposite — dissent, critique, and troublemaking9 — and from

the expertise of designers, who are trained in carefully dissecting givens to imagine what could be,

outside of the existing normal.

Moving forward, a framework for practices emerging within this space of the post-human-centric

would be useful, increasing visibility and communicability. Building upon existing approaches, this can

allow for an exploration that broadens conceptual design’s audiences, and creates tools and techniques

for including other perspectives in design.

Toward Xenodesign

In philosophy, the speculative turn10 signifies a shift away from the correlationist view of the

construction of the world, centered on human cognition, which has predominated in Western thought

since Kant. Speculative realism challenges this anthropocentrism, and seeks to expand philosophical

thinking to consider perspectives and notions of the “other,” including that which lies beyond human

experience and perception. Object-oriented ontology, a subset of speculative realism, uses flat

ontologies to understand reality. This means all objects — living and nonliving entities, sometimes

even fictional objects — are considered to have the same degree of being-ness in the world.

The xeno- prefix has recently been used in the context of speculative realism-related theories to

describe techniques of alienation and other-ing as productive ways to think about the unknown. This

shift has given rise to concepts such as xenofeminism,11 xenopoetics,12 and xenoarchitecture.13

Although xenoarchitecture exists primarily as a theoretical concept, and thus its implications for

practice are not yet clearly defined, its basic principles overlap closely with conceptual design. Aside


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from including perspectives of the “other,” it describes a deliberate strangeness, a radicality of ideas

that opens up new possibilities.14 This has long been imperative in conceptual design, especially in

Dunne & Raby’s influential work on speculative design. Similarly to xenoarchitecture, speculative

design positions design as a means of asking what-if questions, and speculating about what could be,

to discuss the “kind of future people want.”15

Despite these similarities, xenoarchitecture exceeds the scope of speculative design in aiming to go

beyond what is and what could be to also engaging with “what actually happens.”16 Speculative design

projects are usually ends in themselves rather than means to an end, frequently concluding with

gallery or media dissemination. Designers seldom take part in the discussions their projects generate,

forgoing the opportunity to use the work and its discourse to engage more directly with the “real” or

the “other,” i.e. with broader audiences and perspectives.

Speculative design’s practices of engagement, and of going beyond what could be, may need to be

reconsidered. Methods from conventional human-centered, consensus-driven design practices are

possibly of limited use to address these issues if the criticality and originality of its ideas are not to be

undermined. Speculative design has a history of critiquing human-centeredness for precisely this

reason. Yet one of its primary aims of debating people’s preferences regarding the future conveys a

significant connection to the human perspective, while other perspectives are less accounted for. The

“kind of future people want”17 differs from audience to audience, and it may not be the same future

that the environment, an AI, or your gut microbiome wants.

This is where speculative realism and xeno theories may be helpful. In fusing xeno approaches with

speculative design, a practice of xenodesign can emerge, questioning who or what should be given

agency in design, and for which reasons. It can become a practice of developing techniques for

including multi-entity agency in design and for broadening both its human and non-human audiences.

Xenodesignerly Ways of Knowing

While it is impossible, as a human, to fully adopt an other-ed perspective, there are ways of getting

closer to it. This can be useful in order to include a variety of perspectives in the design process, but it

can also create interesting design outcomes. Such outcomes can be products or interactions that invite

an audience into the perspective of the other, becoming a tool for exploring it. While speculative

realism’s impact on fine art has been critiqued for having led to a rejection of the role of human

experience,18 xenodesign does not dismiss the human perspective, but seeks to reposition it as one

among many.

Subjectivity and tacit knowledge are a part of this as elements of design’s specific ways of knowing.19

Knowledge in design is not only describable and rationalizable, but also inherent in the objects of


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design: a subjectivity and intuition similar to that brought forward within xeno theories, when

discussing the not-fully-knowable.

The following three approaches are intended as starting points toward exploring what xenodesign

might mean in practice.

Object-Centered Design

Object-centered design describes design approaches related to concepts from object-oriented

ontology. They assist in directly engaging with perspectives of the other-than-human in design

processes and outcomes.

The works of philosophers Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, and game designer and writer Ian

Bogost, offer interesting starting points for developing techniques of xenodesign. They offer concrete

concepts and techniques for interviewing, analyzing, empathizing with, and taking into account the

“other.” In the following paragraphs, these approaches will be linked to existing and potential future

design practices, creating a set of preliminary techniques of xenodesign to encourage future

exploration among designers.

When considering the broader connections and implications of a problem or a design project, Morton’s

concept of the hyperobject can provide useful guidance. Design interacts with hyperobjects —

pervasive objects such as capitalism, or climate change — which are of “such vast temporal and spatial

dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is.”20

Given this complexity, a hyperobject’s interrelations with a design may not be fully knowable or

describable. But considering hyperobjects that are relevant to a design, and imagining a design’s

potential interactions with these, can help see the things we design on a larger scale of

interconnectedness.

Perspective descriptions can help designers consider not just larger scales, but all scales. They

attempt to describe and imagine experiences from a variety of viewpoints, as game designer IanBogost

describes in 11 variations on descriptions for an E.T. Atari game, including:

E.T. is a consumer good, a product packaged in a box and sold at retail with a printed manual and

packing cardboard, hung on a hook or placed on a shelf.

and

E.T. is a flow of RF modulations that result from user input and program flow altering the data in

memory-mapped registers on a custom graphics and sound chip called the television interface adapter

(TIA).21


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Similarly enabling perspectives and analyses across all scales, ontography is a technique described by

both Bogost and Harman to gain awareness about different objects involved in relationships with each

other and their typologies.22 Word-based ontography is often done by writing non-hierarchical lists of

all objects related to an object. Visual ontography, being closer to the world of design, describes visual

catalogues, such as documentary photography or exploded-view drawings, that lead to an

understanding of object relations.23 The book Learning from Las Vegas24 exemplifies how visual

ontography can work in the field of design. It deconstructs and catalogues the constituent parts of the

built environment of Las Vegas, revealing otherwise neglected interconnections and relations.

Processes of physically disassembling designs into their individual parts are also a type of visual

ontography, as in, for instance, Amsterdam-based design studio Formafantasma’s recent project Ore

Streams.25 The project investigated the recycling of precious electronic waste, and included taking

apart electronic devices and cataloguing their individual parts to understand these components and

their potential histories and futures within production streams.

Going beyond text-based or visual ontography are what Bogost describes as ontographic machines,26

objects which more directly help speculate about the way objects relate. Bogost gives examples from

game design, but ontographic machines exist in a similar form in conceptual product and interaction

design, in projects which include performative techniques and ways of altering perception and taking

on other perspectives, of becoming “other.”

Figure 1. Who wants to be a self-driving car? by Joey Lee, Benedikt Gro\uc0\u223, Raphael Reimann, moovel lab and

MESO (2017)


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The project Who Wants to Be a Self-Driving Car?27 conducted at urban mobility research lab moovel

(Figure 1) aims to create empathy for autonomous systems by inviting humans to take on their

perspective. It consists of a cart that can be driven by a person kneeling in it, using a joystick to steer.

Through a VR headset, the driver sees what a self-driving car would “see,’’ letting people

experientially approach the difficulties and conflicts that an AI may encounter. Designer and writer

Thomas Thwaites’ project GoatMan (Figure 2) creates a similarly unusual shift in perspective, which he

recounts in his book GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human.28 Thwaites spent six days

among goats in the Alps, using a set of prostheses that let him take on characteristics of goats, to

achieve a meditative state of disengagement from his humanness.

Object-centered techniques reframe our perspective as being one of many, creating cross-entity

empathy. Even though they, to a certain extent, bring complexity back to the scale of the human, they

do not do this in a human-centered manner. Rather, they work with an alienation from our usual way

of seeing the world — with human discomfort, or a strangeness of experience — to offer a change in

perspective. Ontographic machines and visual ontography can be an especially productive form of

other-ing in the design process, using tangible visual material and artifacts.

Figure 2. GoatMan by Thomas Thwaites (2016)

Photographer: Nick Ballon


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Discursive Approximations

While object-centered design is concerned primarily with other-than-human perspectives, the term

discursive approximations describes a design process with the aim of expanding human audiences

and perspectives in particular. Moving iteratively from abstract and highly fictional to concrete and

closer-to-reality29 designs, discursive approximations use speculative design projects as means to an

end, rather than ends in themselves. Striving to build a process of engagement with ‘‘what actually

happens,’’ rather than merely ‘‘what is’’ and ‘‘what could be,’’ they are concerned with staying involved

in the discussions that occur as a result of a project, and developing those results into further work.

There are two types of initial, highly fictional, abstract speculative designs that can be used in the

process of a discursive approximation, before moving closer to reality: provocations and

hyperstitions30 (Figure 3).

Provocations do not depict entirely desirable scenarios, and ideally contain a carefully crafted balance

between positive and negative implications, used as a starting point for discussions with diverse

audiences. The results of these discussions then feed back into the design process to be considered in

another iteration of the project that is less fictional and more concrete, thus moving closer to reality

Figure 3. Conceptual Design between Fiction and Reality by Johanna Schmeer (2018)


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with an enriched perspective. Hyperstitions, in contrast, are fictions that enable the conditions to

make them real, in which desirable futures are defined and worked toward. The design process

involves backcasting from fiction into reality, developing a design iteration or a strategy that could be a

first step in enabling this fiction to become reality.

Figure 4. Bioplastic Fantastic: Between Products and Organisms by Johanna Schmeer (2014)


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The concept of discursive approximations was first explored in design practice in the project Bioplastic

Fantastic31 (Figure 4), which was first developed as a provocation and iterated into the project

Autonomous Agriculture32 (Figure 5).

Bioplastic Fantastic imagines a set of domestic products with biologically reactive surfaces which

produce food through photosynthesis. With their abstract shapes and unusual interactions, the designs

are difficult for audiences to interpret or understand with certainty. The juxtaposition of aesthetically

pleasing designs and a lifestyle of utopian sustainability with dystopian artificiality, sterility, and

isolation make it a provocative starting point for debates. It is a highly fictional and abstract form of

speculative design with its radical reimagining of food, its difficult legibility, and a technological

feasibility not impossible, but set many years in the future.

At the beginning of the project, the original intent of Bioplastic Fantastic was to produce a work about

future materials, between living and non-living, that create new typologies of interactions. However,

the discourse the project generated — in the press, in exhibitions, and in related workshops using

techniques of object-centered design — later took it into a different direction, as it became heavily

centered on discussions on the future of food production and consumption.

Abstraction can be used to move humans outside of their comfort zone, going against a widespread

preference for concreteness and the human scale.33 Highly fictional, abstract designs, such as that of

Figure 5. Autonomous Agriculture (Snail Collecting Robot) by Johanna Schmeer (2016)

Photographer: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti


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Bioplastic Fantastic, create a type of alienation and other-ing by using conceptual and visual

strangeness. They can be starting points for interesting open-ended conversations, open to multiple

perspectives and interpretations instead of prescriptively steering in one direction. A certain

malleability of a project’s concept with an underlying complexity also fosters this. But perhaps most

crucial is that designers keep an open mind in the discussion and iteration of a design, as it may not be

clear from the beginning which direction a project will take. Ambiguity invites the agency of the

‘‘other.’’

Drawing upon the the discourse generated by Bioplastic Fantastic, a design brief for a new project was

drafted. This included food-related aspects in the context of self-sufficiency and autonomous systems,

and the question of how technology might merge with ecologies in ways that benefit not only humans.

Autonomous Agriculture seeks to explore these themes, becoming a materialization of the discussions

surrounding Bioplastic Fantastic and moving it into a more concrete space, closer to technological

feasibility. It consists of prototypes of an autonomous network of farming and foraging robots,

operated by algorithms as an independent business with no human employees. The network makes

profits by selling locally collected and produced goods, eventually buying the land it is operating on

and expanding toward other areas.

The project implies both potential positive and negative consequences, and it is not fully functional.

Moving forward in discursive approximations would mean to take the most interesting aspects of it, to

develop these into a design that would be feasible and implementable today — creating a design that

remains critical, but goes beyond thought experiments, by critiquing and raising questions through its

use.

As the discussions of Bioplastic Fantastic were heavily influenced by being situated in the mainly

Western European cultural institutions of large cities, with technophile audiences, it was interesting to

take the conversation from Berlin to a rural Slovenian village, Lendava, where the Autonomous

Agriculture prototypes were displayed along a cultural walking path with design interventions in the

countryside. Positioned in the location the robots were designed for — in a field of grass, interacting

with insects, snails, and soil — the design also directly engaged with its other-than-human audiences.

Even though this project iteration seemed closer to reality than those that influenced its development

in the design process, in the rural Slovenian countryside it appeared quite displaced, uncovering

interesting cross-audience misunderstandings, agreements, disagreements, and interests.

Discursive approximations can foster an engagement with a variety of audiences. Those in gallery

contexts (where highly fictional, abstract projects are usually disseminated) are different from those

that come in contact with closer to reality work, which could eventually be disseminated as functional

products and prototypes. But what might characterize these functional products needs to be


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investigated and defined. The following concept of “critical use” is an exploration of one way of doing

so.

Critical Use

In contemporary product design, there is a dichotomy between “design for debate” and “design for

use,” with few projects incorporating both. Critical use describes design which aims to transcend this

dichotomy, creating tools for use and for thinking, to allow for access to a wider range of audiences,

and a more direct engagement with the ‘real.’ It enables the reflection and discussion of ideas through

action.

While in 1960s Italian radical design it was common for designers to produce conceptual products and

furniture which could be purchased and used, this practice has diminished in more recent conceptual

product design, with a few exceptions.34 When speculative and critical design developed in the 90s /

00s, its complete separation from commercial design was productive to create a space for critique, to

not have to adhere to market pressures. Speculative designs often include non-functional models,

displayed in galleries, museums, or the media. But today, in a time when more accessible

manufacturing, production, and financing processes have made it much easier for independent

designers to bring their own products to the market, it is worth investigating whether a rejection of

conceptual design as usable, potentially commercial products is still valid.

Perhaps it can be useful to compare this dichotomy in conceptual design to Heidegger’s concepts of the

‘‘present-at-hand’’ vs. ‘‘the ready-to-hand.’’35 These concepts describe how certain properties or events

related to objects can change our perceptions. When a thing is ready-to-hand, it is used as a tool, to

serve a purpose — a hammer in his example — and the person using it gives little thought to the tool

itself. Instead, all thought focuses on the task to be done — hammering in nails or joining wood. But

when the hammer breaks, or if it is used for other purposes for which its use is difficult, it becomes

present-at-hand, allowing for reflections on the hammer itself and its characteristics. Or, put in a

different way, there needs to be a disruption or difficulty in an object’s use in order to create an

alienating shift in perception that triggers a process of reflective thought.

The project The inside is always a folding of the outside36 tests this concept in practice. It includes, among

other elements, the design of a modular plug-and-play kit in which plants can be grown in

microclimates that simulate potential future atmospheric or geological conditions, such as extreme CO2

levels, processes of arctic thawing, or highly saline soil. The plants are selected based on their abilities

to thrive in extreme conditions, as well as their potential use for biological geoengineering. They grow

within possible future microecologies, experiencing these future environmental conditions, and in

reaction changing their own and their environment’s biochemical and mineral compositions. The

plants can later be consumed, allowing humans to ‘‘ingest’’ potential futures.


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While consisting of a series of aesthetically pleasing devices to grow plants in in the home — ready-to-

hand tools for use — the designs also become present-at-hand through their more ‘‘noir’’ functions. A

deliberate interaction is required to continuously subject plants to extreme conditions of climate

change, making direct and domestic what is otherwise indirect and spatiotemporally distributed. The

project makes the negative impacts of climate change tangible, but does not remain within the realm

of dystopia. It is at the same time positioned as a tool to prototype biological remediation and

geoengineering strategies, for example testing the use of bright plants to increase surface albedo and

act as an insulator to keep thawing soil cool. It becomes hyperstitional in its advocacy and prototyping

of these biological ‘‘soft’’ approaches to geoengineering. And it becomes a poetic tool to experience and

discuss our entanglement with the landscape and its ecologies. Elevated CO2 levels, for example,

impact the nutrient composition of plants37 — the outside directly affects the inside, both in the plant

as well as in the human who ingests it.

But critical use can also take on a simpler, playful form in conceptual design, as in the case of German

design studio Ding3000’s Kerzenhaltding38 (“Candleholdthing,” Figure 6). It is a candleholder which,

instead of being placed on a table, can only be used if it is plugged into an electricity socket. Its

contradiction of creating light through fire, while blocking the use of electricity at that location,

encourages a reflection on personal electricity use. Electricity is usually ready-to-hand, used without

contemplation. Through Kerzenhaltding’s purposeful user-unfriendliness, it becomes present-at-hand,

yet the product is still a ready-to-hand candleholder.

Figure 6. Kerzenhaltding by Ding3000 (Carsten Schelling, Ralf Webermann, Sven Rudolph) (2004)


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A concept that philosopher Armen Avanessian describes as “metanoia,”39 a change in mind or a new

way of seeing that can happen after reading a text, can also become an ambition for design. Critical use

proposes to design for metanoia through the use and experience of a designed object. Rather than a

critique and reflection triggered during a visit to a gallery or museum, it aims to enable critique and

reflection embedded within the actions of everyday life.

Moving Forward

These three approaches to xenodesign — object-centered design, discursive approximations, and

critical use — should not be understood as disparate, but as interrelated. Their use may be most

effective when combined, expanding and interweaving both human and other-than-human

perspectives and audiences. Xenodesign encourages an inclusive, multi-perspective approach to

design, and acknowledges our place, and design’s place, in a complex and entangled world. It is an

approach in which the fictional aims to permeate the real directly, without losing strangeness, poetry,

and criticality within the process.

Revisiting the four key issues of human-centered design identified earlier, it becomes apparent that

the approaches of xenodesign described in this essay address some more effectively than others.

While these approaches are especially suitable for attending to problems of limited perspective and

imagination, they may be less useful for engaging with potential social imbalances or systemic

consequences of a design, as they touch on these issues only implicitly. An exploration of a systemic

approach to xenodesign, and of techniques for engaging with potential indirect consequences, would

be a valuable addition to the discourse.

As this essay illustrates, xenodesignerly practice already exists in its beginnings, even if it is not

declared as such by its practitioners. Giving this design approach a name and beginning to frame,

describe, and define it can foster its development. It can offer a platform for testing alternatives to the

paradigm of human-centered-design, which might later also find application beyond conceptual

design in more applied design practices.

In times when robots are granted citizenship and residency rights,40 forests and mountains are given

the same legal status as humans to protect them from ecological disaster,41 and in which we now

understand that humans are to a large extent other-than-human, hosting more microbial cells in our

body than human cells,42 our attitudes toward design and human-centeredness need to be

reexamined. A resistance of reduction in design is necessary, shaped by cross-audience sensitivity,

multi-entity empathy, and a reconsideration of agency. “Becoming-with each other,”43 as Donna

Haraway would say. Perhaps xenodesign can help.


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Footnotes

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Footnotes

�. For example Winchester, W., 2009. “Catalyzing a Perfect Storm: Mobile Phone-Based HIV-

Prevention Behavioral Interventions.” In: Interactions, November + December 2009. pp. 6-12. and

Gustafson, D. H., 1999. “Impact of a patient-centered, computer-based health information/support

system.” In: American Journal of Preventive Medicine, January 1999. Volume 16, Issue 1. pp. 1–9. ↩

�. Nielsen, M., Störring, M., Moeslund, T. B., Granum, E., 2003. “A Procedure for Developing

Intuitive and Ergonomic Gesture Interfaces for Man-Machine Interaction.” In: Lecture Notes in

Computer Science, LNCS, volume 2915, pp. 409–420. ↩

�. Conceptual design is design that is predominantly about ideas and modes of questioning and

discussing, rather than problem-solving; e.g., Italian radical design of the 1960s (Didero, 2017),

speculative and critical design (Dunne & Raby, 2013), design fiction (Sterling, 2009 and Bleeker,

2011), adversarial design (Di Salvo, 2012), and critical jugaad (Butoliya, 2018). ↩

�. Norman, D. A., 2005. “Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful.” In: Interactions, July +

August 2005. ↩

�.

Wood, J., 2012. “Why User-Centered Design is Not Enough.” Core77 [online magazine]. Available at:

http://www.core77.com/posts/23465/Why-User-Centered-Design-is-Not-Enough-by-John-Wood.

[Accessed 25 May 2018]. ↩

�. See Mancini, C., 2011. “Animal-computer Interaction: A Manifesto.” In: Interactions 18 (4). pp. 69–

73. and the work of Galloway, A., et al. at the “More than Human Lab,” Victoria University of

Wellington, New Zealand Available at: http://morethanhumanlab.org [Accessed 25 May 2018]. ↩

�. Cruickshank, L., Trivedi, N., 2017. “When Your Toaster is a Client, how do you design? Going

Beyond Human Centred Design.” In: The Design Journal, Volume 20, 2017. ↩

�.

Bratton, B., 2013. “Some Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene: On Accelerationist Geopolitical

Aesthetics.” In: e-flux Journal #46 - June 2013. Available at:

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/46/60076/some-trace-effects-of-the-post-anthropocene-on-

accelerationist-geopolitical-aesthetics/ [Accessed: 25 May 2018] ↩

�. Miessen, M., 2010. The Nightmare of Participation. Berlin: Sternberg Press and Charlan, N., 2018.

In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business. New York: Basic Books. ↩

http://www.core77.com/posts/23465/Why-User-Centered-Design-is-Not-Enough-by-John-Wood

http://morethanhumanlab.org/

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/46/60076/some-trace-effects-of-the-post-anthropocene-on-accelerationist-geopolitical-aesthetics/


20

��. Bryant, L., Srnicek, N, Harman, G. (eds.), 2011. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and

Realism. Melbourne: re.press. ↩

��. Hester, H., 2018. Xenofeminism. Cambridge, UK: Polity. ↩

��. Carruthers, A. J., Ireland, A., 2016. “Poetry is Cosmic War (Interview).” In: Rabbit Poetry Journal,

Issue 17. Melbourne: Rabbit Poetry. ↩

��.

Hugill, A., 2017. “Interview with Lietje Bauwens, Wouter De Raeve and Alice Haddad – Xeno-

Architecture: Radical Spatial Practice and the Politics of Alienation.” Archinect [online magazine].

Available at:

https://archinect.com/features/article/149992400/xeno-architecture-radical-spatial-practice-and-

the-politics-of-alienation [Accessed 19 May 2018]. ↩

��. ibid. ↩

��. Dunne, A., Raby, F. 2013. Speculative Everything. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p. 2. ↩

��.

Bauwens, L., De Raeve, W., Haddad, A., 2018. “Preface.” In: Avanessian, A., et al. (eds.), 2018

[forthcoming] Perhaps it is high time for a xeno-architecture to match. Berlin: Sternberg Press. p. 3.

Available at:

http://www.perhapsitishightimeforaxenoarchitecturetomatch.org/wp-

content/uploads/2017/12/Pre-pub-preface_def.pdf Accessed: 10 May 2018. ↩

��. Dunne, A., Raby, F., 2013, op. cit. ↩

��. Charlesworth, J.J., 2015. “The end of human experience.” In: ArtReview, Summer 2015 Issue.

Available at: https://artreview.com/opinion/summer_2015_opinion_jj_charlesworth/ [Accessed 15

May 2018]. ↩

��. Cross, N., 1982. “Designerly ways of knowing.” In: Design Studies, 3 (4). pp. 221-227. ↩

��. Morton, T., 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press. ↩

��. Bogost, I., 2012. Alien Phenomenology, or What it’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press. pp. 17-18. ↩

��. Harman, G., 2011. The Quadruple Object. Alresford, UK: Zero Books. pp. 124-135. ↩

https://archinect.com/features/article/149992400/xeno-architecture-radical-spatial-practice-and-the-politics-of-alienation

http://www.perhapsitishightimeforaxenoarchitecturetomatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Pre-pub-preface_def.pdf

https://artreview.com/opinion/summer_2015_opinion_jj_charlesworth/


21

��. Bogost, I., op.cit., pp. 45-52. ↩

��. Venturi, R., Brown, D. S., Izenour, S., 1977. Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ↩

��.

Formafantsma (Farresin, S., Trimarchi, A.), 2017. Ore Streams [design project]. Available at:

http://www.formafantasma.com/Ore-Streams-1 [Accessed 20 May 2018]. ↩

��. Bogost, I., op cit., pp. 52-59. ↩

��. Lee, J., Groß B., Reimann, R., moovel lab and MESO, 2017. Who Wants to Be a Self-Driving Car?

[design project]. Available at: https://lab.moovel.com/projects/self-driving [Accessed 20 May 2018].

↩

��. Thwaites, T., 2016. Goat Man: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human. New York: Princeton

Architectural Press. ↩

��. The term ‘reality’ can be problematic, given that reality is not singular and always a question of

perspective. When using the term ‘closer to reality‘ in this essay, what is meant is design closer to

feasibility or use, for instance functional conceptual products and prototypes rather than non-

functional models. ↩

��. The term was first introduced by Nick Land and Sadie Plant in the 1990s at the Cybernetic

Culture Research Unit (CCRU) at Warwick University, to describe fictional ideas which bring about

their own reality. See Land, N., 2013. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007. London:

Urbanomic. p. 26. ↩

��. Schmeer, J., 2014. Bioplastic Fantastic [design project]. Available at: www.johannaschmeer.com

[Accessed 20 May 2018]. ↩

��. Schmeer, J., 2016. Autonomous Agriculture [design project]. Available at:

www.johannaschmeer.com [Accessed 20 May 2018]. ↩

��. Reed, P., 2017. Xenophily and Computational Denaturalization. In: e-flux Architecture [online

magazine] Artificial Labor, eds. Nick Axel, et al. Available at: ↩

��. For example the conceptual products sold by the Dutch design label Droog, or the Berlin-based

product and fashion label Bless. Most design within this realm tends to be playful and lighthearted,

often addressing ideas related to aesthetics, rather than more complex ethical, social, or

technological issues, as in speculative design. ↩

http://www.formafantasma.com/Ore-Streams-1

file:///tmp/%3C/span


22

��. Heidegger, M., 1967, Being and Time. [2001 edition] Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. p. 200. ↩

��. Schmeer, J., 2018. The inside is always a folding of the outside (working title) [design project, work

in progress]. The title paraphrases a Mark Fisher quote from The Weird and the Eerie, 2016. ↩

��. Myers, S., et al., 2014. “Increasing CO2 threatens human nutrition.” In: Nature,

Volume 510, pp. 139–142. ↩

��. Ding3000 (Rudolph, S., Schelling, C., Webermann, R.), 2004. Kerzenhaltding [design project].

Available at: [http://www.ding3000.com/en/kerzenhaltding.html]. [Accessed 28 May 2018]. ↩

��. Avanessian, A., Hennig, A., 2017. Metanoia: A Speculative Ontology of Language, Thinking, and the

Brain. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ↩

��. Saudi Arabia granted Sophia, the first robot to receive citizenship in a country, citizen rights in

October 2016. In 2017, a chatbot was granted residency in the Tokyo district of Shibuya. ↩

��. In 2014, New Zealand granted the same legal status as humans to the Te Uruwera forest; the

Whanganui river and Mount Taranaki followed in 2017. ↩

��. Sender, R., Fuchs, S., Milo, R., 2016. “Revised estimates for the number of human and bacteria

cells in the body.” In: PLOS Biology, August 2016. ↩

��. Haraway, D. J., 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke

University Press. ↩

http://www.ding3000.com/en/kerzenhaltding.html

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