There is much talk in design about the ‘more than human’, ‘decentring the human’, ‘multi-species world building’ and other ‘related ideas’. But what does this actually mean for design practice? All too often it appears to simply be a welcoming of non-humans into a still-human world, or an expanding of the range of stakeholders in a project to include different species, or even the extension of co-design strategies to the other-thanhuman. This is all good, of course, but it still feels like a oneworld world, a human world.

Having spent many years living and working in cities, when we moved to the US we became fascinated by its many large areas of land rarely entered by humans. They feel like separate worlds where a different, non-human logic prevails. To spend any time in these places requires a great deal of preparation. You begin to see yourself not as human, but as stuff, material, part of the environment. At the same time, we moved from the city to a woodland where the walls of the house define a threshold between worlds. Inside is the human part, but directly outside is a multi-species zone, shared with many other creatures – bears, beavers, eagles, bugs, mycelia and the most extraordinary fungi.