Session #108

– Paper Presentations –

We invite proposals for a conference panel on the theme of Caring for All Forms of Life, designing for multispecies care. This panel seeks to explore design principles, ideas, and examples that support mutual care in multispecies settings. Our focus is on the intersection of design innovation and more-than-human ethics, and we are particularly interested in works that combine rigor and evidence with expanded imagination and interdisciplinary collaborations.

As architects and designers, we understand care as a pervasive set of practices that underpins all life on Earth. Our aim is to go beyond anthropocentric approaches and deliberately embrace more-than-human perspectives. We believe that design has a particular distinction in engaging with issues of care, as it focuses on the future and has methods that can support the imagination of multispecies collectives.

We welcome proposals from architects, landscape architects, urban planners, and other designers, especially those working in collaboration with scientists, philosophers, ecologists, and other disciplines. We are open to multiple ways of telling design stories and happy to consider textual, visual, moving-image, and performance-based presentations.

Relevant topics for this panel include (but are not limited to):

• Non-anthropocentric ethics and politics that aim to include all living and abiotic systems.
• More-than-human, multispecies, interspecies, and ecocentric approaches to design.
• Epistemological pluralism, including nonhuman and Indigenous knowledge practices.
• Ways to imagine the future, including methods from future studies such as scenarios, backcasting, or speculative design.
• Innovative technologies that support multispecies care, including computation, digital fabrication and construction, novel materials, data analysis, visualization, simulation, and modelling.
• Innovative social practices and support systems, including participatory design approaches.

We encourage futuristic or practical ideas and projects that prototype objects, systems, or scenarios for multispecies care. Join us in exploring how design practice and research can support mutual care in multispecies settings. Please submit 200-300 word abstracts for 15-20 minutes contributions.

Session Chairs:

Rochus Hinkel is Associate Professor for Architecture and Design at the Melbourne School of Design (MSD) and co-director of the Advanced Digital Design + Fabrication (ADD+F) research hub at the ABP Faculty at the University of Melbourne. His research and practice use digital and analogue technologies to create novel narratives using artefacts, spatial installations, and immersive environments. Rochus was the inaugural recipient of The University of South Australia, Society of Interior Designers of Australia (SIDA) and The David Roche Foundation (TDRF) Curatorial Research Fellowship (2020-2022). His recent works have been exhibited at Ars Electronica (2020), The Grainger Museum in Melbourne (2022), The David Roche Foundation in Adelaide (2022), and the Melbourne Design Week (2023).

Stanislav Roudavski is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne and the founder of Deep Design Lab, a collective researching more-than-human design. His work explores practical and theoretical issues of more-than-human relationships in ecology, technology, design, and architecture. Stanislav’s publications discuss engagements with nonhuman agents in design imagination, creative computing, digital fabrication, and other topics. He participated in many international exhibitions and won multiple awards and competitions. Prior to his current academic position, Stanislav worked on research projects at the University of Cambridge, had a teaching engagement at MIT and practiced architecture in several European countries.