Embracing the More-than-Human Perspective in Art and Design Practice

A personal reflection on pausing, rethinking, and returning differently

Working on-site in the bauxite cave in Puglia, Italy

I bring nearly 25 years of experience in the design field — as co-founder of InvisibleStudio, facilitating Design Thinking workshops, developing visual strategies, and helping cultural institutions find ways to connect meaningfully with their audiences.

Alongside that, my art practice has always been rooted in nature, empathy, and a search for harmony with the world around me. I also teach visual communication for the arts at university level, which has further deepened my interest in how meaning is constructed through images, symbols, and systems of representation.

The pandemic and my experience with Long Covid, forced me to stop, to rest, and to turn inward. That involuntary pause reshaped my trajectory. Not only did I begin to question the relevance of human-centred design as a guiding methodology, but I also began to sense that my artistic practice, while grounded in nature, was still operating within a framework that subtly prioritised the human perspective.

In response, I made the decision to begin a Master’s in Fine Art, as a process of unlearning and reorientation —artistically, ethically, and politically.

Learning to Think With the World

Since beginning the MFA, I’ve been diving deeper into a body of theoretical and artistic work that is significantly reshaping the way I think about art, design, and agency. Thinkers such as Donna Haraway (Staying with the Trouble), Anna Tsing (The Mushroom at the End of the World), and Karen Barad (Meeting the Universe Halfway) have provided critical lenses through which to rethink not only representation, but relation.

Their work has allowed me to articulate an intuition I had long felt: that our creative practices — whether artistic, pedagogical, or strategic — must move beyond the human as the sole point of reference.

While empathy, sensitivity, and ecological awareness have always shaped my approach, I now recognise how subtly embedded anthropocentrism can be—even in practices that seem outwardly aligned with environmental ethics. The assumption that humans are the primary audience, the main agents, or the ultimate end-users feels untenable.

A Shift Toward the More-than-Human

This recognition has gradually reshaped both my facilitation practice and my artistic methods. I’ve started integrating approaches aligned with what is referred to as more-than-human or planet-centric design.

Such approaches foreground interdependence over dominance, entanglement over extraction. They challenge us to design with, not simply for, a living world that includes nonhuman actors: animals, plants, watersheds, soil, air, and microbial life.

In my design workshops, this has meant expanding stakeholder frameworks to include environmental systems or future nonhuman impacts. In my art practice, I’ve become more attuned to material agency — working with sediment, tidal movement, and decomposition not as metaphors, but as co-creative forces.

I’ve become less interested in clarity and more compelled by complexity.

Less inclined to frame nature as a subject, and more drawn to working with natural processes.

Reconfiguring Practice

Today, I no longer see my design and art practices as separate. Both are forms of relational inquiry. Both are shaped by questions of attention, responsibility, and reciprocity.

Whether I’m supporting a cultural institution in rethinking its communication strategy, or composing a site-responsive artwork that incorporates soil and sound, I now begin from a different set of questions:

• Who (or what) is involved here, beyond the human?

• What materials are speaking, resisting, or transforming?

• Which timescales—seasonal, geological, ancestral—are we ignoring?

• How might we shift from extraction toward collaboration?

These questions are not only relevant to my personal practice, they increasingly inform how I teach, how I facilitate, and how I understand what it means to work in the cultural field during a time of ecological crisis.