NON-HUMAN-DESIGN
GENERAL INFO
- LOCATION
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Boisbuchet
- DATE
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August 2021
- TYPOLOGY
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Design, Research
In a time when nature can no longer be romanticized or treated as a passive backdrop, our workshop at Boisbuchet set out to challenge the entrenched dichotomy between Nature and Culture. We approached nature not as something external to us, but as a complex, political, and entangled subject—one that demands new ways of thinking, sensing, and designing.
At Boisbuchet, the act of designing was deeply informed by the territory itself. The Domaine’s landscape—its iconic Sequoia tree, the Japanese bamboo grove, the man-made lake—became both site and collaborator in our creative process. Each of these features held postnatural histories that reflected colonial, ecological, and aesthetic entanglements. The Sequoia, for example, stood not simply as a symbol, but as a living record of botanical diplomacy and transatlantic movement—a remnant of extractive histories that link Europe to the Americas.
Throughout the week, we shifted our attention toward these overlooked narratives. The terrain revealed itself as an archive of human and non-human relations, as well as a dynamic actor in its own right.
Project Projections on existing vegetation
By listening closely to the rhythms, patterns, and silences of the landscape, participants engaged with the question: what does it mean to design for, or with, a non-human entity?
Rather than solving problems in conventional, anthropocentric terms, we explored design as a process—an open-ended, situated response to the needs and agency of more-than-human worlds. We moved away from human-centered modes of thinking—social, ergonomic, and utilitarian—and instead asked: what does a forest require? What does a lake resist? How can we collaborate with a soil, a wind, a system in flux?
Through fieldwork, speculative prototyping, and collective reflection, the workshop became a space to question the very foundations of design practice. Participants experimented with new methodologies that decentered the human and opened up possibilities for ecological reciprocity and coexistence. Design became less about control or output, and more about listening, witnessing, and learning from place.
