More Than Human-Centered Design
A peer-to-peer research project.
Read our first piece in a series with Azure Magazine
More Than Human: How Can We Design for All Planetary Life?
Expanding beyond the human
Our careers in facilitation, public interest design, and human-centred design are grounded in the pursuit of compassionately collecting, honouring, and sharing knowledge and experiences that are not our own, through personal storytelling and community conversations. Our work has been about creating spaces to centre community voices, and through that, supporting processes that ensure community-informed and community-led outcomes. Through this process, we acknowledge ourselves as individuals embedded within interdependent systems of wisdom.
An equity lens is central to advancing a more human-centred (and less institutionally focused) approach to design and decision-making. This ensures that we consider the complex conditions of people’s lives, the compounding barriers they may face, and the many identities they may hold.
Within our practice of designing and facilitating with the stories and knowledge from diverse human lived experiences, there is a huge blind spot: the more-than-human world, who have so far been left out of these conversations. The more-than-human world refers to the broad web of life in which humans exist, including individual community members like plants, animals, fungi, and whole ecosystems like rivers, mountains, plains, forests, and oceans. This belief system is core to Indigenous people of Turtle Island, and also core to the beliefs of many diverse ethnocultural groups around the world.
We are committed to evolving our design and facilitation practices to engage more meaningfully with the more-than-human world, and have chosen to learn in public as we go. We invite you to join us on our learning journey.
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Interviews
Acknowledging the broad range of experts and practices that bridge the gap with the more-than-human world, we are engaging in a series of interviews and discovery conversations, which we are recording and sharing here on the website, through blog posts, and articles.Design Tools & Tactics
To begin the shift toward more nature-centered design practices, we will begin implementing more-than-human, multispecies, and behavioral design tools & tactics across a range of projects and decision-making processes. Throughout the early prototyping process, we will document and evaluate the following:Process & outcomes
Perceived successes
Perceived obstacles
Areas of tractions
Areas of friction
Ways in which the tactics need to be adapted to be better adopted
Next steps for continued experimentation
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We are human-centred facilitators and designers. To-date, our practices include a major blindspot, in that we haven’t effectively included the voices of the more-than-human world as active participants in our facilitation practices. This effort is part of our desire to “learn in public.” Together with a community of practitioners, we would like to engage in a learning journey that redefines the communities that are part of the discussions we facilitate, and explores how best to engage them in a range of design processes.
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Here's a list of some of our inspirations and co-journeyers:
Braiding Sweetgrass and Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Psalm for the Wild Built and The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
Design Anthropology: Objects Cultures in Transition by Alison Clarke
Design Anthropological Futures by Smith, Vangkilde, Kjaersgaard, Otto, Halse and Binder
Learnings from our interviewees
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Mycopaper-making with Luz Paczka Giorgi
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Multispecies justice with Danielle Celermajer
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Decolonising design with Yaw Ofosu-Asare
Design Tools & Tactics
(some examples)
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Multispecies ethnography
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Proxy interviews
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Learning the science
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Participatory animal design
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Overcoming decision-making paralysis
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Closing the loop
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Navigating impulsive decisions
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Grounding abstract consequences
What do you think?
We’d love for you to share your thoughts and experiences with us, and may share them here on the website as they come in. Feel free to share links to your own work and writings, or to other projects, books, and articles that you think may inform our research. Thank you!
About Us
Ariel Sim
Founder & Lead Researcher
Ariel is a community-based anthropologist and designer. Ariel is currently exploring, writing and creating around the concept of "decomposing as a social process" (read article), particularly as it relates to personal and systems-level reconciliation, reparation, and regeneration. Previously a co-recipient of Fast Company’s Top 10 Ideas in Politics and Policy, Ariel has worked extensively with artists, designers, urban planners, policy makers, community-based researchers, and scholars from around the world to better engage audiences with efforts related to reimagining ecological and human futures. Most recently, Ariel served as the first Human Rights and Regenerative Design Fellow with the More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program and Future of Rights and Governance (FORGE) Program at NYU School of Law Center for Human Rights and Global Justice.
In Toronto, Ariel collaborates with Monumental Projects in support of community-based participatory research that informs emerging policies, upcoming urban developments, and the arts sector. In these projects, community conversations and art-making are often central to the collaborative research and storytelling process.
Zahra Ebrahim
Co-Journeyer
Zahra is the Co-Founder of Monumental. She is a public interest designer and strategist, and an established bridge builder across grassroots and institutional spaces. Her work has focused on community-led approaches to policy, infrastructure, and service design. Prior to Monumental, she built and led Doblin Canada, Deloitte’s Human-Centred Design practice. In her early career, Zahra led one of Canada’s first social design studios, working with communities to co-design towards better social outcomes, leading some of Canada’s most ambitious participatory infrastructure and policy programs. Zahra has taught at OCADU, MoMA, and is currently an Urbanist-in-Residence at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities. She has been recognized as a Next City Vanguard Civic Leader, Ascend Canada’s Mentor of the Year, one of “Tomorrow’s Titans” in Toronto Life magazine, one of WXN’s Top 100 Women in Canadian Business, and most recently recognized as one of the Urban Land Institute’s WLI Champions.
Zahra is currently a Board member of the Toronto Arts Council, the Canadian Urban Institute, and Board Chair for Park People. Her work has been featured across international media, and she regularly delivers speaking engagements to audiences across the country.
Hannah Seckendorf
co-Journeyer
Hannah is an interdisciplinary design strategist and researcher whose work focuses on helping organizations navigate the design challenges of emerging mediums and emergent ideas. She uses a flexible toolkit of deep research, thoughtful facilitation, and incisive strategy to help teams traverse these moments of ambiguity with confidence.
Hannah has collaborated with tech startups, design studios, cultural institutions, musicians, media organizations, and architecture firms to help navigate new frontiers in design and creative expression. In Los Angeles, she primarily collaborates with [SuperLA](https://www.super.la/), researching and strategizing how we might design homes that operate in right relation with the planet and reconnect humans with their environment.
Across disciplines and industries, she is drawn to projects that ask thoughtful questions and embrace the complexity of living systems. With a background in Cognitive Neuroscience, her approach is grounded in a deep commitment to understanding the intricacies of the human experience and ensuring those insights make their way into design decisions. With Beyond HCD, she seeks to expand this circle of care to the broader web of more-than-human life.