Designing for multispecies partnerships

Designing for multispecies partnerships is an art-based Ph.D.-research project that operates from a relational ontology, positioned within the field of transition and multispecies design. The project is rooted in former textile dye houses in Denmark to provide an understanding of production and site ecologies relation entangled within past, present, and future activities. The aim is to explore how this relational understanding can become part of new holistic systems and tools to locally dye textiles with woad in collaboration with the site ecology; hence the arthropods as earthworms and springtails live and work in the soil, providing good conditions for woad to grow in.

To understand this relation, I use mixed-method approaches between quantitative soil analysis and qualitative sensory-, participatory-, and multispecies design practices.

The project emphasises design in the green transition, proposing speculative futures, that engage sensory, and multispecies design practices for designers to holistically collaborate with the arthropods living in the soil.