Bioinclusive ethic and collaborative design: Implications for research and practice

Human society is unsustainable, and solving the environmental crisis has become a pressing, urgent matter. The underlying cause of the crisis seems to be the anthropocentric culture of humans. This human-centric culture shapes opinions and behaviours of humans. Their worldviews and actions are also formed by design. Design has been one of the disciplines that explicitly acknowledges and promotes its human-centric value base. It has instilled these values into the society through design processes and solutions. Collaborative and Participatory Design (C&PD) has especially focused on the human-centric perspectives. Thus, reimagining this sub-field of design might be a starting point to envision a less human-centric design practice overall. To envision a less anthropocentric C&PD, this thesis has gathered inspiration from the bioinclusive ethical framework. This ethical framework views humans as part of nature and urges humans to rethink their perspectives on and relationship with nature. To view Collaborative and Participatory Design through this bioinclusive lens, the researcher conducted two systematic literature reviews, distilled key insights about the ethic and C&PD and, then, integrated these insights to identify potential implication for design research and practice. These implications suggest that C&PD might evolve into a less human-centric design sub-field if it explicitly acknowledges natural entities as non-designers who might be involved in design processes to a varying extent. The field might need to include the necessity to and benefits of natural entity participation in its core drivers and principles. The key approach groups within C&PD might want to envision principles, processes and methods that involve natural entities, embrace their perspectives and provide them sufficient decision-making power. These developments in C&PD field might lead to a less human-centric and more nature-inclusive design. In turn, the renewed value base of design might have the power to shift the anthropocentric positions of the society and address the sustainability crisis

Multispecies Communities

Prof. Dr. Jens Schröter, Dr. Pablo Abend und Prof. Dr. Benjamin Beil sind Herausgeber der Reihe. Die Herausgeber*innen der einzelnen Hefte sind renommierte Wissenschaftler*innen aus dem In- und Ausland."Multispecies Communities" sind nicht mehr alleine auf den Menschen fixiert und bringen andere Akteure ins Spiel. Damit ergeben sich neue Formen der Kommunikationen und Kollaborationen, der Verantwortlichkeiten und der Rücksichtnahmen (awareness), der Vergemeinschaftungen und der Teilhaben: Diese finden statt zwischen Menschen und Tieren, Pflanzen und Algorithmen, Artefakten und Biofakten, Maschinen und Medien; zwischen den Sphären von belebt und unbelebt, real und virtuell, unberührt und augmentiert. Der Umgang mit Technik ist längst kein menschliches Privileg mehr, wie die Ausdifferenzierungen von Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI) oder Plant-Computer Interaction (PCI) verdeutlichen. Diese Ausdifferenzierungen finden ihren Niederschlag ebenso in den verschiedenen Disziplinen der Wissenschaft und in der Kunst sowie in gesellschaftlichen, sozialen, ethischen und politischen Aushandlungen des gemeinsamen Miteinanders. In dieser Ausgabe sind für diesen Diskussionszusammenhang relevante programmatische Texte versammelt und erstmals für den deutschsprachigen Raum zugänglich gemacht."Multispecies communities" are no longer focused on humans alone and bring other actors into play. This results in new forms of communication and collaboration, of responsibilities and awareness, of communalisation and participation: These take place between humans and animals, plants and algorithms, artefacts and biofacts, machines and media; between the spheres of animate and inanimate, real and virtual, untouched and augmented. Dealing with technology is no longer a human privilege, as the differentiations from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) into Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI) or Plant-Computer Interaction (PCI) exemplify. These differentiations are also reflected in the various disciplines of science and art as well as in societal, social, ethical and political negotiations of shared interaction. In this issue, relevant programmatic texts have been collected for this discussion context and made available for the first time for the German-speaking area