More-than-human group trip - group trip to the Design Museum
- Written byLucy Jane MacAllister Dukes and Agnese Politi
- Published date 25 September 2025
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Post-Grad Interest Group leaders and Central Saint Martins, Living Systems Lab PhD students Lucy Jane MacAllister Dukes and Agnese Politi, report back on their group's recent trip to the Design Museum's More than human' exhibition and symposium.
Visit Reflection
On Tuesday 19 August we gathered at the Design Museum to visit More-than-human. We were received by Justin McGuirk (co-curator) who offered an introduction and responded to our questions. Some were addressed directly, others remained open, particularly around how speculative design could move into regulation or everyday urban practice.
We also asked ourselves what role the museum might play in this translation, perhaps as a place where designers, policymakers and communities could test how ideas move beyond the gallery.
Moving through the exhibition, different works opened different lines of thought. The Environmental Continuum of Genocide in Namibia by Forensic Architecture and Forensis showed how land, plants and people carry the memory of colonial violence, connecting ecological realities with struggles for justice and restitution.
Ursula Biemann’s Forest Mind slowed the pace, drawing us into forest intelligence as a form of relation.
Julia Lohmann’s Kelp Council arranged seaweed forms as if in assembly, asking us to imagine non-human deliberation. These works shifted attention from documentation to reflection, from evidence to imagination.
In the filmed making of Jurandir Rupã Jekupe Mirim’s Yvyrupa language drawing, we watched as Jurandir traced how in the Guarani language all words for nature are rooted in the word for water.
In summer we had a speculative reading workshop with Elisa Adami on Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Theory of Water, we’ll keep exploring these flowing and freezing rivulets.
Other pieces brought the discussion closer to application. Reef Design Lab’s Living Seawalls and modular reef structures suggested infrastructures for marine regeneration, even as questions of scale and durability remained.
The Alusta Pavilion by Elina Koivisto and Maiju Suomi proposed a multispecies architecture in urban space. Johanna Seelemann’s Oase vessels pointed to how design can reintroduce care for trees into cities.
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s tapestry Pollinator Pathmaker imagined a garden from an insect’s perspective, prompting us to ask how far representation can shift perception.
The mural by MOTH on the rights of rivers and Paulo Tavares’ mapping with Indigenous communities in Brazil highlighted how more-than-human design is also tied to law and sovereignty.
Looking through MOTH red lenses revealed otherwise obscured information, adding a needed level of interactivity grounded in insect senses. Marcus Coates’ Nature Calendar reminded us that design can also recalibrate perception: a simple calendar marking natural events each day suggested a return to ecological time.
Not all works aimed at practicality. Shimabuku’s Sculpture for Octopuses or Ant Farm’s Dolphin Embassy opened speculative encounters that sparked mixed reactions in the group. Some of us saw projection more than communication; others valued their role in expanding the horizon of what design might attempt, even when naïve; others still appreciated the play and joy that may be needed to embrace more-than-human ways of being.
Our group is heterogeneous, and our conversations reflected that. Some focused on feasibility: what it takes to move from prototype to standard. Others looked at the role of institutions: what responsibility a museum has when presenting works linked to indigenous struggles or ecological repair.
Others stayed with speculative and poetic registers, asking whether works such as Kelp Council or Pollinator Pathmaker matter most as imagination rather than solution.
These perspectives did not align, and that divergence felt important. Our conversations circled three shared threads: how to trace pathways from idea to practice, how to distinguish ecological imagery from ecological function, and how to recognise the forms of maintenance and care that sustain environments over time.
Our visit continued as a group discussion beyond the galleries. We compared notes on material performance, policy levers, and evaluation methods that could support more-than-human outcomes. We also mapped overlaps with our own projects, including possible collaborations and case studies for future sessions.
Some wished for more sensory interaction, everywhere there were still the traditional exhibition boundaries between viewer and object, signs saying “DO NOT TOUCH” repeated across each piece for understandable reasons. However, our experience as practitioners has shown us that multispecies understanding is deeply enhanced by opportunities for multisensory embodied engagement. We questioned how having samples of each piece to touch might make this more inclusive, and the value of having pieces designed especially to touch/ smell/ interact with, or perhaps pieces that are changing/ ephemeral.
Within the exhibition space humans were the main species present and we were prompted to discuss how gallery/museum spaces can physically embrace more-than-human beings, if it would make more sense for some pieces to have species growing with them site specifically or for part or the whole thing to be outdoors?
We left with questions rather than conclusions. The exhibition gave us prompts, and our group turned them into conversations. The unsettled ground between imagination and practice, politics and ecology, critique and care are not a gap to be closed but a terrain we continue to inhabit together.
Note on visiting the exhibition
The Design Museum exhibition is on until 5 October 2025 . It’s a big exhibition, many rooms lead you through layers of more-than-human ideas. Some of us who were not often drawn to video pieces found ourselves sitting quietly together watching the entirety of 20+ minute long videos, if you visit allowing plenty of time and pacing yourself will be good.
Joining the more-than-human - Post-Grad Interest Group
Visit the dedicated webpage for the More than Human Group
If you’d like to join the more-than-human group get in contact with co-conveners Sara Vanore Rewkiewicz s.vanorerewkiewicz1220211@arts.ac.uk or Lucy Jane MacAllister Dukes l.dukes1020241@arts.ac.uk.
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