https://poiros.com Anton Poikolainen Rosén - Design Research Thu, 07 Aug 2025 10:42:12 +0000 https://poiros.com en https://poiros.com/Giving-Form-to-Regulatory-Entanglements-with-Yarn Thu, 07 Aug 2025 10:42:12 +0000 Anton Poikolainen Rosén - Design Research https://poiros.com/Giving-Form-to-Regulatory-Entanglements-with-Yarn &nbsp;Giving Form to Regulatory &nbsp;Entanglements with Yarn<img width="1568" height="1060" width_o="1568" height_o="1060" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3aa18076ef333943933e0d07e0806b0586151cf1437eb1f5a703d6f846f70eb1/Screenshot-2025-08-07-at-12.47.15.png" data-mid="236790291" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3aa18076ef333943933e0d07e0806b0586151cf1437eb1f5a703d6f846f70eb1/Screenshot-2025-08-07-at-12.47.15.png" />After reading and analysing hundreds of pages of policy documents on waste management, I felt: What if the entanglements of regulations, design, and sustainablity practice weren’t just words on paper, but threads you could hold in your hand?How do you visualize law? And what happens when it tangles with your everyday life – and design processes? Exploring these questions resulted in the pictorial “Yarn as a Means to Give Form to Entanglements of Regulation, Design and Sustainability Practices”.Abstract“When designing with and for complex sustainability processes like waste management, it is crucial to understand digital technologies as entangled with broader systemic factors, including physical infrastructures and regulatory instruments. Within the case of organic household waste management, this pictorial aims at making such relations visible through design methods. We have used yarn to represent the different threads of these entanglements and defined specific configurations: tangles, knots, loose ends, and frayed threads. We discuss how the design practice of giving form to these entanglements can make complex relations between digital technology, infrastructures, and regulatory instruments more visible and actionable for HCI, and explore how digital technologies are – and can be – made to work within them.” https://poiros.com/Book-More-Than-Human-Design-in-Practice Thu, 24 Oct 2024 05:43:41 +0000 Anton Poikolainen Rosén - Design Research https://poiros.com/Book-More-Than-Human-Design-in-Practice Book: More-Than-Human Design in Practice<img width="890" height="1272" width_o="890" height_o="1272" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4885016c1a2108d09b22b3ff09ec63da84352bc9ca76897b3965240ebac4a159/Cover-mockup-Mth-design-in-practice_.png" data-mid="220238114" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/890/i/4885016c1a2108d09b22b3ff09ec63da84352bc9ca76897b3965240ebac4a159/Cover-mockup-Mth-design-in-practice_.png" />I am co-editor of the book More-Than-Human Design in Practice.&nbsp;Read more and order the book by clicking on the link. &nbsp; “This book provides an overview of the diverse multidisciplinary field of more-than-human design, offering a philosophical grounding of more-than-human design in posthumanism while putting practical design examples and methods to the forefront. There is an urgent need to radically re-imagine design, as its current processes are contributing to global warming, pollution, deforestation, ocean acidification, ozone layer depletion, loss of biodiversity and species extinction. Given this need, ‘more-than-human design’ has emerged as a perspective that widens our thinking beyond solely human-oriented considerations and needs, such as animals, plants and microbes. The book explores the relationship between sustainability and design, touching on topics such as AI, systems thinking, futures studies and pedagogy, and discusses a range of case study projects that are grounded in more-than-human thinking, demonstrating how this can be incorporated into practice. This easily accessible and theoretically grounded book will provide design researchers and educators an excellent introduction to more-than-human thinking. It will also be of interest to students and scholars studying design more broadly, sustainability, environmental studies and service design, as well as to practicing designers interested in sustainability.” https://poiros.com/Articulating-Felt-Senses-for-More-Than-Human-Design Mon, 27 May 2024 13:01:45 +0000 Anton Poikolainen Rosén - Design Research https://poiros.com/Articulating-Felt-Senses-for-More-Than-Human-Design Articulating Felt Senses for More-Than-Human-DesignTo rigorously approach the more-than-human world in design research, we need to become more receptive and better equipped to describe the complexities of relationality. In response, this paper advocates for the articulation of the felt sense -or tacit knowledge residing in our bodies - as a viewpoint for noticing. Assisted by micro-phenomenological interviews, we carefully described our felt senses from our experiences with a telepresence robot and smartphone photography. We illustrate how this viewpoint allowed us to access our pre-judgemental dimension, the vivid liveliness in our experiences with technologies, and the porosity of our sense of self. We contribute the felt sense as a viewpoint for noticing to design researchers interested in integrating their somatic sensibilities into their work with the more-than-human, allowing them to attune to, describe and share with other researchers the normally unattended dimension of our experiences, including aspects concerning the felt dimension of ethics. <img width="1440" height="1920" width_o="1440" height_o="1920" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/67d4327821326931151536a9b0a6c21eee01d9e4afa30a89adf241ed9188a743/Mushrooms.jpeg" data-mid="220238166" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/67d4327821326931151536a9b0a6c21eee01d9e4afa30a89adf241ed9188a743/Mushrooms.jpeg" /> https://poiros.com/Methods-To-Be-for-Nature-Entangled-Design-Research Thu, 24 Oct 2024 05:58:40 +0000 Anton Poikolainen Rosén - Design Research https://poiros.com/Methods-To-Be-for-Nature-Entangled-Design-Research Methods-To-Be for Nature-Entangled Design ResearchIn this pictorial, we share an emergent repository of nature-entangled methods-to-be shared, experimented with, and discussed during a conference workshop. We present them in-use, as they are in formation. We do not seek to theorise or even fully articulate these methods-to-be. Rather, to make them approachable and actionable for others by showing them not fully polished. By doing this, we advocate for increased transparency in the difficulties of creating new methods, techniques, tools, and approaches. Our contribution is threefold: we provide 1) an annotated portfolio of methods-to-be; 2) illustrative examples of how cross-pollination of these methods can enrich their situated use; and 3) a discussion of ways to further articulate the methods and deepen reflection on their roles in nature-entangled design processes.<img width="1954" height="1490" width_o="1954" height_o="1490" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/de8655c0134bd33307655b1eeaa29bc587c20f956fbbc2f279832cb650b54eb8/Screenshot-2024-10-24-at-08.12.31.png" data-mid="220238405" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/de8655c0134bd33307655b1eeaa29bc587c20f956fbbc2f279832cb650b54eb8/Screenshot-2024-10-24-at-08.12.31.png" />Example page from an annotated portfolio of methods-to-be. <img width="1778" height="1164" width_o="1778" height_o="1164" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/372714b604b7a5d3e43c9d0d60d4da651322769c0ab42b794a9a390bb6586b3e/Screenshot-2024-10-24-at-08.04.15.png" data-mid="220238399" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/372714b604b7a5d3e43c9d0d60d4da651322769c0ab42b794a9a390bb6586b3e/Screenshot-2024-10-24-at-08.04.15.png" />Part of an illustrative example of how cross-pollination of methods can enrich their situated use. https://poiros.com/Listening-to-soil Mon, 27 May 2024 12:09:24 +0000 Anton Poikolainen Rosén - Design Research https://poiros.com/Listening-to-soil Listening to soil This study explores the learning possible from including the public in explorations of more-than-human future visions. An installation at a design festival gave material form to a speculative scenario that emerged from ethnographic research with urban permaculture farmers, using sounds to represent concentrations of nutrients in soil. We studied how visitors wearing a sensor ring experienced the playing of these sounds upon insertion of a finger in the installation’s soil. Responses underscore the importance of cultivating the skill of noticing through deep listening, alongside the profound connection thus established between humans and the more-than-human world.&nbsp; Read more in the DRS 2024 paper: “Does phosphorus want to sound like that?’ - Experiencing more-than-human futures”.&nbsp;The paper examines implications for practices of noticing and presents four principles for problematising and reimagining how data pertaining to the more-than-human world may be sensed and represented. https://poiros.com/The-value-of-the-Baltic-Sea Tue, 06 Jun 2023 10:19:24 +0000 Anton Poikolainen Rosén - Design Research https://poiros.com/The-value-of-the-Baltic-Sea The value of the Baltic Sea<img width="1600" height="1196" width_o="1600" height_o="1196" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e46684cd02e7251ab3f3a404636dfac9047dedadc36ec01268c0d8217281b60f/Algae_bloom_ESA346691.jpg" data-mid="213269423" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e46684cd02e7251ab3f3a404636dfac9047dedadc36ec01268c0d8217281b60f/Algae_bloom_ESA346691.jpg" /> The established framework of ecosystem services recognises how the environment has many values: aesthetic, economic, spiritual, life-support, sociocultural and ethical. If you perceive any of these values of the Baltic Sea, you can indicate them on an interactive map. You can then describe the values in more detail in free text and uppload related pictures. The answers are (optionally) shared publicly on the map.&nbsp; This open data is intended to help shape policies and sustainable design. Feel free to share the interactive map survey using this link: bit.ly/BalticSeaValues The survey is part of the project “Methodology for HCI evaluations of possible futures” at Aalto University, Department of Design in collaboration with Department of Seaweed.&nbsp; https://poiros.com/A-more-than-human-design-manifesto Thu, 04 May 2023 06:48:30 +0000 Anton Poikolainen Rosén - Design Research https://poiros.com/A-more-than-human-design-manifesto A More-Than-Human Design Manifesto We cannot separate human needs from those of other organisms in our environment. Many organisms, including humans, benefit from considering design spaces as holistic and relational. More-than-human design focuses on this mutual interdependence. More-than-human design resists binaries and blurs notions such as nature/culture, self/environment, digital/physical, mind/body, human/technology, and human/non-human. More-than-human design highlights the sentience, intelligence, and agency of other organisms. This implies that we need to seriously consider the needs of all organisms, their sensory capacities, and their capability for interaction. We are humble in recognising that we will never fully understand others. More-than-human design recognises that everything is understood from a perspective. We explore how our limited human perspectives can be enriched, strengthened, and augmented in ways that increase our understanding of the more-than-human world. There are many ways to sense and make sense. Technology can be helpful when we reach the limits of our senses. It can amplify, augment and make perceptible the seemingly imperceptible. Simultaneously, we acknowledge that technology has detrimental impacts on more-than-human worlds. It is important to be aware of the resource use and environmental harm of technologies, as well as their potential benefits. We who practice more-than-human design are not a monolithic category but bring to our practice diverse personal and disciplinary backgrounds. Our intersectional positionalities, including privileges, oppressions and lived experiences of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability shape how we think and practice design. More-than-human design aims to widen the scope of action through the creative development of methods for noticing, knowing and making the more-than-human world. More-than-human design works with the co-creative capacities of living entities, lively matters and machines. We design (into) relational systems, rather than (contributing) single artefacts. More-than-human design recognises the direct and indirect effects of design, over time and across space, for a multitude of species. It is both microscopic and planetary, with impacts beyond. More-than-human design recognises diverse temporalities: the millennial lifecycle of a boulder, the centennial lifecycle of an oak and the brief lifecycle of a dayfly or a microbe. We work with regenerative systems sustaining themselves but also recognise the linear reality of natural history. Nature is in constant becoming, nothing stays the same. Everything in nature is slowly changing at the pace of biological evolution – but we want to avoid abrupt harmful disturbances and mass extinction. As humans, we must tread lightly to contribute with generative suggestions rather than disturbances. We recognise multiple and complex experiences of time including linear, non-linear and more. We resist cries for perfection and imaginaries of perfect futures. We consider diverse and conflicting needs and focus on how we make things resilient for ourselves and other organisms. We “stay with the trouble”. We live with tricky questions about justice, acknowledging that the inquiry into more-than-human design is never settled. We are in a constant process of critical reflection and becoming, not always finding answers or solutions. We recognise that the oppression of human hierarchies and extractive abuses makes all forms of life suffer and that the living world's struggles with human patterns of domination are aligned in politics, if not the impacts experienced. This brings the suffering and abuse of humans into the frame of more-than-human design. This is only the first part of the manifesto. The second part is inscribed in leaves and rocks, and all the more-than-human world. We need to go out and notice these inscriptions. What can we see, hear, smell, feel and taste? What might be beyond our senses? By being spokespersons, ombudsmen and diplomats, we advocate for what we notice and more - for all that is still, and might forever be, beyond our human ability to notice, understand and grasp. https://poiros.com/PhD-Thesis-Noticing-Nature Fri, 07 Oct 2022 14:53:25 +0000 Anton Poikolainen Rosén - Design Research https://poiros.com/PhD-Thesis-Noticing-Nature PhD Thesis: Noticing Nature My Phd Thesis “Noticing Nature: Exploring More-Than-Human-Centred Design in Urban Farming” Is available here.&nbsp; <img width="742" height="1102" width_o="742" height_o="1102" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9c796f9c67a9527c3a48ab8a1107c26be52ef1cbf31bb81fe738ab7c896ca0c9/Screenshot-2022-09-08-at-10.18.56.png" data-mid="155228344" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/742/i/9c796f9c67a9527c3a48ab8a1107c26be52ef1cbf31bb81fe738ab7c896ca0c9/Screenshot-2022-09-08-at-10.18.56.png" />This thesis articulates, theorises and furthers the concept of “more-than-human-centred design” by studying the use and design of technology for noticing nature and caring for nature. The emerging field of more-than-human-centred design focuses on the mutual interdependence between humans and non-humans (e.g. organisms such as animals, plants and microbes, as well as autonomous technologies). It is a step away from seeing other organisms as inferior to humans or valuable only as resources. This implies that design research frameworks and methods need to be remade. How can we design for and with other organisms? What needs to be accommodated in a paradigm that allows for more-than-human-centred design? What are concrete design examples and implications of this kind of thinking? In short, there is a need to investigate what it means to design for more-than-human worlds. This is investigated in the thesis through a series of studies and design experiments, including ethnography (participant observation, interviews, surveys and workshops), design projects (design ideation, development and analysis of prototypes) and design critique of existing artefacts. Most of these studies are conducted within a four-year ethnography of a regenerative urban farming community in Stockholm, Sweden. The thesis draws on posthuman theory. This theory examines the implications of expanding concern and subjectivities beyond the human, and aims to understand the human subject and its relationship to the world in a non-anthropocentric light. Phenomenological analysis is further applied to articulate and understand the human-technology-nature relationship as it is experienced first-person. The thesis contributes an articulation of a more-than-human-centred design programme. Here, two design implications are suggested, “expanding the sensible” and “design for sensory-rich experiences”. Methods for noticing the more-than-human world are suggested, along with principles for designing for and with other organisms, such as finding leverage points in systems and providing a scaffold for naturally occurring processes. The meaning of “design”, “the designer” and “the user” is discussed. Lastly, a manifesto for more-than-human-centred design is proposed. https://poiros.com/How-Leaving-Civilization-Behind-is-Leaving-Patriarchy-Behind Wed, 09 Mar 2022 11:13:29 +0000 Anton Poikolainen Rosén - Design Research https://poiros.com/How-Leaving-Civilization-Behind-is-Leaving-Patriarchy-Behind How Leaving Civilization Behind is Leaving Patriarchy Behind&nbsp; <img width="912" height="587" width_o="912" height_o="587" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/950325f545861c230617bfc4ec85a5f4f749f1a2c908fdc1be91e8eae94454df/compost_sensor_hands.jpg" data-mid="154894882" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/912/i/950325f545861c230617bfc4ec85a5f4f749f1a2c908fdc1be91e8eae94454df/compost_sensor_hands.jpg" />The notion of the interconnectedness of all life is central to ecology and most transition narratives. In line with this, many feminist perspectives suggest that ”what is needed is a politics for another civilization that respects, and builds on, the interconnectedness of all life, based on a spirituality of the Earth that nourishes community because it acknowledges that love and emotion are important elements of knowledge and of all of life” (Escobar 2018). I offer an experimental feminist and queer reading of using a repurposed digital meat thermometer to measure the temperature of a heat compost made with horse manure in this position paper for the CHI2022 workshop Feminist Ecologies. I view the example from the perspective of the breakdown of human civilization (and hence patriarchy) to something more primal and relational. The workshop description and position papers of the other participants are available here.&nbsp; https://poiros.com/Design-Probes-for-More-Than-Human-Centered-Design Fri, 12 Nov 2021 12:30:16 +0000 Anton Poikolainen Rosén - Design Research https://poiros.com/Design-Probes-for-More-Than-Human-Centered-Design Design Probes for More-Than-Human Design <img width="4032" height="3024" width_o="4032" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0e356236f444b6c1d99d576c371da562ec604337614e72da16178de02427e7f7/Uee_of_toolkit.jpg" data-mid="124355700" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0e356236f444b6c1d99d576c371da562ec604337614e72da16178de02427e7f7/Uee_of_toolkit.jpg" /> More-than-human-centered design is a growing approach that accounts for non-human actors in design. However, the considerations, frameworks, and theories of this approach are not widely spread and concretely accessible in design processes. I propose a set of design probes that targets this gap. The probes are based on findings from four years of ethnographic design work with an urban farming community. The development of the design probes included iterative tests with designers, researchers, students, and urban farmers. The two first probes focus on worldviews, definitions, and characteristics, and show how the understanding of several phenomena must be expanded as plural, non-binary and even unknown. The third probe focuses on the analytical process of selecting which parts of a system to focus on in a design process. The fourth probe focuses on finding rational and sensible points for intervention in such systems. Download the design probes version 3.1. The design probes are continuously updated and refined as they are used in workshops and education. Any feedback is appreciated. Send a&nbsp;mail here. &nbsp; <img width="4032" height="3024" width_o="4032" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/431ff1ce27927ab747dd32b0c19b2167f6c7c5796c87478fc05fd96baecec3b7/Toolkit_discussion.jpg" data-mid="124355133" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/431ff1ce27927ab747dd32b0c19b2167f6c7c5796c87478fc05fd96baecec3b7/Toolkit_discussion.jpg" /> The probes spur discussions on more-than-human concepts. <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/01a005e24316cc59f2637c24f57adda7344258a3ce489653025d98dea2bb255e/More-than-human-resesrch-participant.jpg" data-mid="124355486" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/01a005e24316cc59f2637c24f57adda7344258a3ce489653025d98dea2bb255e/More-than-human-resesrch-participant.jpg" />A more-than-human research participant?