As cities worldwide adopt data-driven approaches to optimize urban forests, computational tools like agent-based models (ABMs) are increasingly popular to simulate forest growth and inform planting decisions. However, ABMs often focus on individual metrics, neglecting forests as interdependent ecosystems. Rooted in anthropocentric ideals, these models risk reducing forests to infrastructures for human benefit, undermining their long-term resilience. This pictorial challenges these limitations by exploring how interface design can transcend reductive, agent-centric representations to foster relational understandings of forest ecosystems as more-than-human bodies. Drawing on feminist theorist Karen Barad's concepts of “diffraction” and “agential cuts,” we craft a repertoire of diffractive interfaces that engage with forest simulation data, revealing how more-than-human bodies can be encountered across diverse temporal, spatial, and agential scales. Through this design exploration, we operationalize more-than- human perspectives in data practices, deepening our understanding of the performative dimensions of interfaces and advancing nuanced, practical approaches to more-than-human design.

Human activities have drastically altered the planet, with design playing a significant role. While design may intend to do good, its consequences are not always positive: from climate change to resource depletion to unforeseen social dynamics. These transformations also include ourselves, as our relationships with new technologies blur and complicate previous human and machine agency distinctions. Increasingly, design has become a matter of defining what it means to be human. This special issue explores the proposition that conventional human-centered design approaches may not adequately address the complex challenges we face, and that there is instead a need to ground design in more-than-human perspectives. This introduction outlines the evolving landscape of more-than-human design in the context of HCI. Articulating a series of emerging research trajectories, we aim to illuminate the transformative potential of more-than-human orientations to design, including how they both extend and depart from familiar lines of inquiry in HCI – for example, how designers are redefining data, interfaces, and responsibility, and reshaping posthuman knowledge through design. Ultimately, this special issue aims to explore new pathways for designing in the era of the more-than-human, challenging the perceived divide between practice and theory to imagine alternative futures for HCI.

While decentering the human has been a key approach in posthumanist HCI, there are still questions and tensions around it.To address them, we outline emergent notions of decentering, tracing it back from HCI to critical posthumanism and connecting epistemological developments in the humanities to design scholarship.Then, reviewing how decentering is understood and practiced in HCI, we distill five emerging dimensions for articulating more-thanhuman practices.We conclude by unpacking "decentering through design" as an ongoing material practice through which more-than-human designers not only materialize (apply) posthuman theory but also "make" posthuman knowledge in their own unique ways.

This article explores the intersections and resonances between unmaking and more-than-human design. We begin by aligning unmaking with decentering, a fundamental practice in more-than-human design, through their shared movement and materiality. Using Lindström and Ståhl’s notion of the double movement in un/making, we analyze a series of workshops focused on designing with AI, annotating what was un/made and de/centered during the workshops’ activities. Through this analysis, we introduce two key contributions that highlight some opportunities in the diffractive alignment between unmaking and more-than-human design: firstly, the notion of “unmaking-with” as an emergent concept to describe a posthumanist unmaking practice, and secondly, three decentering tactics—situating, materializing, and enacting—that instantiate this practice through design. Finally, we discuss how unmaking can enrich more-than-human design and, conversely, how more-than-human design can help define the epistemological scope of unmaking.

In this pictorial, we illustrate steps towards a novel approach that situates connected technologies for older people as resources. In contrast to mainstream approaches in gerontechnology that consider elderly as frail and passive, we aim to complement older people's vital competences by designing technologies that can be used in less prescriptive, and broader ways. The pictorial describes our design process in which resourceful strategies were identified through thing ethnography and used as inspiration to create a series of new connected objects conceived as resources.

In research on health and wellbeing, resourcefulness is seen as an important skill that can improve quality of life. In design and HCI literature, it has long been acknowledged that resourcefulness is about more than human skills and involves the adaptation, modification and reinvention of technologies in everyday life. In this paper we argue how certain aspects of resourcefulness have so far remained under-theorized, and present a new design perspective on resourcefulness that is grounded in practice theory. In this view, resourcefulness is conceptualised as the dispersed practice of dealing with everyday crises of routine. By elaborating on the complex interplay between means and purpose, we tease out resourcefulness as a practice of reconfiguration. The paper closes by discussing implications of this conceptualisation by zooming in on ways of capturing and designing for resourcefulness.