#xenodesign

In her short essay, Johanna Schmeer contemplates about how we can/should turn to develop a more inclusive, multi-perspective design approach that utilizes xeno discourses and conceptual design. She calls this Xenodesig.

Note: Last year I started working on a design approach that puts human intelligence in the center of all decisions. I call it Human Intelligence Interaction design, or what popularly will be known as HI2. It is still in its infancy and I don’t feel ready to disclose it publicly yet but it correlates with the idea described in this article, even more, it broadens the perspective and provides the missing knowledge, practical and pragmatical thinking leading to solutions that Xenodesign aims to achieve.

As designers, we currently lack a framework for strategically including perspectives of the “other” developing more inclusive, multi-perspective design practices, taking the complex entanglements of humans and other entities into consideration.

We have a limited perspective, and about expanding audiences — both human and nonhuman — within the conceptual product and interaction design.

It becomes critical to look for engagement with experiences and perspectives beyond the human and an understanding of all entities on an equal level.

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.

This is supplementary to Papanek’s approach and the idea of human design as a meaningful link between man [read humans] and environment.

Considering and criticizing the negative impact of some multi-national corporations and their design and marketing strategies on community cohesion and both human and environmental health.

Design can create unsustainable modes of production and consumption, leaving ecological or non-human perspectives unaccounted for.

The societal and social consequences are clear: a destabilization of the family, new eating patterns that frequently result in obesity and dietary deficiencies, a debasement of the human palate forced to find the lowest common denominator, and finally a ready acceptance for horrendous garishness and visual pollution.

(Papanek, 1985, p.25) It is challenging for people to imagine contexts and consequences beyond their own. Radical, imaginative, and poetic ideas may benefit from the expertise of designers, who are trained in carefully dissecting givens to imagine what could be, outside of the existing normal.

Design centered on human cognition

Seeking to expand philosophical thinking to consider perspectives and notions of the “other,” including that which lies beyond human experience and perception.

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. Object-centered techniques reframe our perspective as being one of many, creating cross-entity empathy by engaging with perspectives of the other-than-human in design processes and outcomes. Concept of the hyperobject by philosopher Timothy Morton, or perspective descriptions by game designer IanBogost and ontography by both Bogost and Harman provide techniques to encourage future exploration.

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.

An inclusive, multi-perspective approach to design, and acknowledges our place, and design’s place, in a complex and entangled world.

Our attitudes toward design and human-centeredness need to be reexamined.

Questioning and exploring the alternatives to Human-centred design, Speculative design, Circular design, Metadesign (and other) leads us to what Johanna frames as Xenodesign. Giving this design approach a name and beginning to frame, describe, and define it surely can foster its development. However we’re going to call it, it’s important that we develop attitudes toward cross-audience sensitivity, multi-entity empathy “Becoming-with each other”.