Beyond Human-Centered Design
Bridging research and practice to help organizations design for a more‑than‑human world.
Read our first piece in a series with Azure Magazine
More Than Human: How Can We Design for All Planetary Life?
Part research, part practice.
We are design researchers and strategists with roots in peer-to-peer research. We gather diverse multispecies & inclusive design methods into a libraries of tools and case studies.
Converting our ongoing learning into practice, we help organizations put these methods into practice — integrating more-than-human design into strategy, culture, and systems.
Why more-
than-human?
Traditional design centers human needs. But the systems we live in are shared with countless other beings and ecologies.
Within our practice of designing and facilitating with the stories and knowledge from diverse human lived experiences, there has been a huge blind spot: the more-than-human world¹, who have so far been left out of these conversations.
We are committed to evolving our design and facilitation practices to engage more meaningfully with the more-than-human world.
¹ 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.
Questions that guide us.
How can we design with, not just for, the living world?
What happens when the forest, the river, the pollinator have a seat at the table?
How do we fit the complexity of living systems into feasible design strategies?
How we work.
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. Towards this end, we believe in radical curiosity, interdisciplinary teaming, and prototyping-to-learn.
What We Do.
Bringing multispecies design into practice. Whether you’re designing a policy, a product, a place, or a program, we help you account for the needs of both human and non-human stakeholders.
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Get your team familiar with the principles and practices of designing for the more-than-human world.
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Build roadmaps that centre human and non-human needs.
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Conduct research to reveal needs, behaviours, and opportunities across species.
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Align your systems and culture with more-than-human (MOTH) principles.
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Guide your team through discovery and integration of multispecies thinking.
Research .
A living library of inclusive & multispecies design practice.
Inspirations.
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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
Design Tools & Tactics.
From behavioral frameworks to participatory animal design — with notes on process, outcomes, and lessons learned.
Multispecies Design
Multispecies ethnography, proxy interviews, learning the science, and participatory animal design
Behavioral Design
Overcoming decision-making paralysis, closing the loop, navigating impulsive decisions, and grounding abstract consequences
About Us
We began as a peer-to-peer research collective, documenting emerging methods that make design more-than-human. We share what we learn, “in public”, to advance the field. Together, with a community of practitioners, we are engaging in a learning journey that redefines the communities that are part of the discussions we facilitate and explores how best to engage them in design work.
Now, we also partner with organizations to apply these practices — facilitating learning, crafting strategy, conducting research, coaching teams, and reimagining organizational cultures so that humans — and all planetary stakeholders — are part of every design conversation.
Our dual approach keeps us tested, reliable, and deeply connected to the field — always learning, always iterating, always pulling from a broad network of practitioners and experts.
Ariel Sim
Founder & Principal
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.
Hannah Seckendorf
Associate, 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, 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.
Zahra Ebrahim
Associate, 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.
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!
