More-than-human design invites designers to consider how design interventions can engage the capabilities of non-humans and improve their access to these necessities. It looks for opportunities in urban environments to provide novel habitats, improve connectivity, and promote positive human non-human interactions via design and education.
By necessity, it engages with interdisciplinary collaborators to provide in-depth knowledge of non-human behaviours, preferences, and life histories. Understanding these patterns is analogous to how human designers build a brief in collaboration with a client.
It moves beyond anthropocentric conceptions of nature as providing a service for humans, e.g., improvements to air quality, mental health, and so on, to celebrate more-than-human lifeforms and grant them the autonomy that urbanisation and human activity has heavily degraded.
Generally, design interventions are best placed to provide shelter and habitat connectivity.
Non-human requirements
Humans and the majority of non-human animals invariably need “consumable resources such as food and water, shelter for refuge or nesting, and safe ways to move between things.”
Shelter
Non-human species, like humans, prefer shelters that they have acclimatised to over millennia of evolutionary development. These shelters have specific dimensions, temperatures, insulation, materiality, and context.
Generally, non-human animals also account for the structure of the surrounding environment when selecting a habitat.
Consumables
All life (with some exceptions) needs access to stable sources of food and water.
Movement
Connectivity between habitat fragments is perhaps the most important factor in achieving biodiverse, resilient urban habitats.
Urbanisation
Urbanisation threatens all these needs by reducing diversity of species and therefore ecosystem resilience. Consumables and habitats become polluted. Movement is curtailed by infrastructure like transit networks, reflective glass that disorients birds, malicious and hostile actions by humans, and the dominance of invasive species.