Set within the distinctive, canopied architecture of the Design Museum in Kensington, London, a quiet chorus of a multispecies world seems to hum in the margins. Seaweed hangs like suspended breath, pollen trails thread through digital gardens and ancient forest rituals echo from layered canvases. In this moment of ecological grief and reckoning, More than Human, on view from July 11 - October 5, 2025, opens not with answers, but with gestures that are tentative, interspecies and occasionally tender, geared toward a radically reimagined design practice.

Curated by Future Observatory’s director, Justin McGuirk, and its head of Curatorial Programme, Rebecca Lewin, the exhibition is positioned as the first major museum exhibition dedicated to ‘more-than-human design’—a field that challenges the anthropocentric foundations of modern design and architecture. Comprising over 140 interdisciplinary works by artists, architects and designers across five continents, spanning contemporary and traditional art, textile, interactive installations, product design and more, More than Human intends to reframe design not as a discipline of control, but of relation, repair and reverence.

“The show is ‘hopeful’ because it imagines an alternative relationship between humans and the living world, one that is respectful and supportive, one where natural bodies have rights, one where the needs of other species are catered for, one where design plays a new role in supporting the health of ecosystems,” shares McGuirk, on striking a balance between the urgency of our times and optimism, without letting the works become visual representations of environmental concern. Structured across three thematic chapters: ‘Being Landscape’, ‘Making with the World’ and ‘Shifting Perspective’, the art and design exhibition maps out a spectrum of approaches, from works rooted in ancestral knowledge to experimental prototypes, proposing ways to reimagine how design might operate within shared, interdependent worlds, as opposed to the siloed, deeply extractive paradigms set in motion by modern living. It asks what it means to live, create and intervene in a world where human needs are no longer privileged above all else.

The tone of the show—at times utopian in its aspirations—is speculative and remains deliberately irresolute. Many of the works are described as “nascent” or “exploratory”, prompting a central curatorial tension: how does one balance the imaginative space of speculative design with the material and political urgencies of ecological crises? Are there frameworks in place to assess the impact of such work beyond its conceptual contributions?

This question is especially pressing in works like Pollinator Pathmaker: Perceptual Field by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. Commissioned for the exhibition, the vibrant woven tapestry translates algorithmically generated planting patterns into visual forms, based on the perceptual experience of pollinating insects. Originally developed with the Eden Project, the work imagines a garden through the eyes of a bee, beetle or butterfly, translating as a radical act of empathy, mediated by code, cloth and human interpretation. It blurs the line between advocacy and projection, revealing the complexities of voice and authorship when designing on behalf of other species.

A deeper epistemic challenge is posed by the Indigenous contributions on display. Several multimedia installations in the exhibition draw from traditions of intergenerational knowledge, ancestral land stewardship and animist worldviews that collapse the binaries between human and non-human, living and non-living. These perspectives are not metaphorical; rather, they are positioned as lived, often threatened, systems of knowing.

In ‘Being Landscape’, Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa presents richly textured paintings wherein organic forms (flesh, soil, flora) bleed into one another. Influenced by Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian spiritualities, Pessoa’s work resists Western taxonomies. Displayed nearby are the detailed paintings of the late Hélio Melo. Melo was a rubber tapper and self-taught artist whose compositions document his deep relationship with the Amazon and its entangled histories of violence, resistance and extraction. These are not simply aesthetic responses to ecological collapse; they are part of it. They insist on the continuity of land, story and survival.

On challenging the exhibition’s central notion of ‘design’ with Indigenous contributions and whether they challenged any assumptions embedded in conventional curatorial or disciplinary frameworks, McGuirk says, “If we look to Indigenous practices and worldviews, it is because there are established traditions of co-existence with the living world that precede the colonial and industrial practices that have been so destructive. With modernity, nature becomes a resource to be extracted as efficiently as possible.”

Using this to reflect on showcases in the exhibition that work with Indigenous heritage and methods, including a map co-created by Paulo Tavares alongside the Guarani people of Brazil, which helped them legally lay claim to the Jaragua forest outside of São Paulo, along with Forensic Architecture’s Indigenous readings of the landscape of Namibia as evidence of German colonial crimes—both of which he considers striking inclusions in the show—he states, “By definition, such works challenge conventional curatorial approaches to design and architecture, which become processes of interpretation and advocacy or activism”.

The exhibition is about a shift in mindset. It is about challenging the imagination to conceive of different relations with the living world. – Justin McGuirk

In More than Human, the curators implicitly expand the definition of ‘design’ itself—positioning it beyond the narrow confines of craft, ethnography or functional problem-solving and toward more relational, world‑making practices. This approach is mirrored in the writings of theorists like Arturo Escobar, who argues in Designs for the Pluriverse (2018) that design should reflect “radical interdependence” and autonomy rooted in Indigenous and Afro-descendant cosmologies, challenging capitalist, colonial and patriarchal design legacies. Similarly, design anthropologists such as Dori Tunstall emphasise the importance of erasing the false distinctions between art, craft and design, advocating for value systems in which all culturally significant making is respected as a meaningful design activity.

The materiality of the exhibition is also key. In ‘Making with the World’, we see examples of ecological design that are as much about process as they are about the product. Led by industrial designer Alex Goad, Melbourne-based multidisciplinary studio Reef Design Lab’s Living Seawalls and Modular Artificial Reef Structure II (2022) use marine-grade concrete structures designed to support marine biodiversity and help restore damaged underwater ecosystems to a more natural state. These interventions are already in use – deployed along coastlines, providing habitat for sea life. Unlike speculative gestures, these designs have measurable ecological impacts, offering an important counterpoint to the more conceptual works in the show. Additionally, the architectural centrepiece of this section is the Alusta Pavilion by Finnish architects Elina Koivisto and Maiju Suomi. Reconstructed in the gallery using unfired insulation bricks, the structure creates a space for both human visitors and insect inhabitants, with carved cavities and soft thresholds that invite cohabitation. It suggests, gently but insistently, that urban design need not centre only on human needs; design not just for but with other species.

Nonetheless, what does it mean to collaborate across species lines? As the exhibition shifts into its final section, ‘Shifting Perspective’, the question of reciprocity comes to the fore. In Sculpture for Octopuses by Japanese artist Shimabuku, glass spheres are made to explore what colours octopuses prefer. While charming in concept, the work prompts a deeper inquiry: what are the limits of speaking for—or designing with—non-human life? In a museum context, how do we acknowledge the impossibility of consent while still striving for care? Similar tensions surface in Superflux’s Nobody Told Me Rivers Dream (2025), which places AI-equipped sensors along the River Thames to register phenomena that humans often miss—birdsong before storms, wind over water, tidal rhythms—translating them into a shared ecological intelligence. Additionally, Parsons & Charlesworth’s Multispecies Inc. takes the form of a speculative consultancy for non-human lives, testing how design shifts when freed from anthropocentric bias. Together, they confront the improbability of consent while still striving for care.

In addressing how to negotiate the rift between showcasing speculative design and driving tangible change as a curator and the impact of these works beyond the exhibition, McGuirk tells STIR, “[Sometimes] it feels as though narratives such as ‘sustainability’ and ‘net-zero’ fail to address the scale of the planetary crisis, which is not just a crisis of carbon but a crisis of the living world. So More than Human is an attempt to shift design discourse beyond technocratic solutions and towards a focus on natural ecosystems and an awareness of life in all its forms. We say ‘nascent’ because while more-than-human thinking has a three-decade history in theory, it is very, very new in design practice. The show is not full of ready solutions—although there are several—because they largely do not exist yet in the tangible form we associate with ‘design’.”

More than Human is an attempt to shift design discourse beyond technocratic solutions and towards a focus on natural ecosystems and an awareness of life in all its forms. – Justin McGuirk

This tension is central to the show’s more provocative claims. The exhibition doesn’t just advocate designing for nature but asks what it means to design with or even as nature. This proposition, while compelling, invites caution. Without robust ethical and epistemological frameworks, such gestures risk reabsorbing non-human beings into human narratives. Collaboration, after all, is not a metaphor; it implies responsibility, listening and the possibility of refusal. Still, there is an emotional undertone to More than Human that sets it apart from more didactic or solutionist environmental shows. Fragility and grief thread through the exhibition, but seldom dominate it. Hope surfaces not through slogans, but through the materials themselves.

Known for her critical, research-led approach, German-born designer Julia Lohmann’s Kelp Council, an immersive installation composed of five sculptural forms made from laminated seaweed, is emblematic of this. Examining the ethical and material frameworks that define how humans relate to plants and animals, Lohmann’s choice of material is no accident. Seaweed is fast-growing, regenerative and absorbs carbon. Floating somewhere between marine architecture and organic myth, the kelp forms resist easy interpretation, inviting slowness, not spectacle. A similar ethos shapes Accalmie by designer Corentin Mahieu, Bento Architecture and Sonian, where salvaged logs in a pool shelter wildlife as they decay. Nearby, a mycelium-grown table extends this meditation on time, decay and renewal.

When considering the shift from designing for nature to designing with it and grappling with the limits of authorship, consent, or agency when working with non-human life forms in a museum context, McGuirk shares, “It perhaps comes across most clearly in works that are designed with living materials such as mycelium, algae, bacteria or grasses. Here, the designer by definition cedes some of their agency to natural processes that are unpredictable and difficult to control, which by definition is a form of co-design. Beyond materials, it is trickier. Designing with – or ‘making-with’ to quote Donna Haraway – is a process of negotiation or diplomacy. I cannot make any claims about other species being active agents in that process except through the human’s attentiveness to their worlds, and the willingness to bring their perspectives into the design process. That is already a huge leap.”

Rather than offering certainty, More than Human thus situates itself in the ethical and epistemic ground of multispecies design, a field that foregrounds reciprocity, unpredictability and relational accountability. The design installations do not speak for non-human life; many works enact a stance of following, sensing and entangling with other-than-human perspectives as a form of design inquiry. It does not provide a blueprint for planetary repair. What it offers is more fragile and perhaps more urgent: a set of proposals, provocations and possibilities for how we might design otherwise, where impact is measured in relationships, resonance and responsiveness to the interdependent ecologies often made invisible by dominant capitalist and other socio-political paradigms.

‘More Than Human’ is on view from July 11 – October 5, 2025, at the Design Museum, Kensington, London.