This diploma thesis traces the changing human, animal and technology assemblage after the recent emergence of wolf packs in Broumov region. As the return of wolves coincides with ecological transformations gaining in strength, the central research focus are the possibilities - and impossibilities - of local multispecies coexistence in the conditions of Anthropocene. The research draws upon methods of multispecies ethnography, building on the literature that examines the ontological aspects of multispecies coexistence, including primarily the work of Donna Haraway, Eduardo Kohn, Annemarie Mol, Anna Tsing and Rane Willerslev. The thesis analyzes several modes of situated multispecies coexistence which have been reconfigured or made possible by the return of wolves: administrative and sensual practice of shepherds, methods of mimetic empathy of wolf trackers, emergence of new actors interfering with local events (satellites, subsidy programmes, drought) and the translation of processes on pastures into politically engaged activities of local farmers. The thesis develops the employed concepts in such a way that they enable analyzing the situation in Broumov region as situated making of more-than-human sociality. Key words: multispecies ethnography, wolfs, pastoralism, trackers, more-than-human sociality

This project explores co-being and interdependencies between human and more-than-human, the microbes, through the medium of fermentation and the (hidden) communities this practice embodies. Therewith not only resisting commodification and alienation from our food but facing our very own identity, and the human-made construct of human exceptionalism and detachment of nature and culture. The cells in ’our’ human body are outnumbered by the cells of other microorganisms. They even actively influence many of the bodily functions associated with the concept of ’self‘ (our brain, immune system and genome).1 Considering this, what does it even mean to be human? What does it mean to be me, If not cherishing and embracing the more-than-human, more-than-one-culture collective? The Korean word 손맛 ’son-mat’/ ’hand-taste’ refers to the inherited quality, love and care that went into preparing the (often associated with mother‘s) dish, something uniquely connected to the cook. While the microbes in sourdough can be linked to the baker‘s hand microbes, the baker‘s microbes have also shown to beaffected by the interaction with sourdough (Herman‘s (see picture to the right) microbial culture) with the scientific findings exposing our mutual interaction. This son-mat within fermentation I see as a symbolized touching point where our human realm and the microbial invisible microcosmos meet and become tangible. To emphasize this co-being, I work with our bodily senses, using design to bridge, making the insensible sensible, tangible, and audible. Staying curious and sprawling with my design approaches of creating narratives with the more-than-human, aimed to evoke questions and reflections of us and our culture. What happens when we share culture (human and microbial)? Through our hands, eating and digesting parts of others and becoming-with. To share culture means to see that humans and ’non-humans‘ are one. To taste that our culture is shared. And to feel that nature and culture are not two but one. Can you taste it?

The ubiquitous yet opaque logic of machine learning complicates both the design process and end-use. Because of this, much of Interaction Design and HCI now focus on making this logic transparent through human-like explanations and tight control while disregarding other, non-normative human-AI interactions as technical failures. In this thesis I re-frame such interactions as generative for both material exploration and user experience in non-purpose-driven applications. By expanding on the notion of machine learning uncertainty with play, queering, and more-than human design, I try to understand them in a designerly way. This re-framing is followed by a material-centred Research through Design process that concludes with Object Detection Radio: a ludic device that sonifies Tensorflow.js Object Detection API’s prediction probabilities. The design process suggests ways of making machine learning uncertainty explicit in human-AI interaction. In addition, I propose play as an alternative way of relating to and understanding the agency of machine learning technology.

Designing for societal engagement and benefit, aiming for the inclusion of humans, has been largely implemented within interaction design research. However, recent studies on entanglements and more-than-human worlds in interaction design, participatory and speculative design, in combination with Science & Technology Studies (STS) and ANT (Actor-network theories), revealed new opportunities for designers for the development of methods and practices, particularly about designing new forms of engagement with and through design artefacts for the benefit of the natural environment in the city. Through an RtD process, this thesis explores current relations between humans and nonhumans by establishing a more-than-human design space that embraces participatory and speculative methods. The aim is to implement more-than-human theories into the design practice to contribute to Posthuman Interaction design and Non-anthropocentric design. Therefore, this thesis presents Internet of Beings, a series of speculative design artefacts that aim to rebalance power structures and enable collaborative more-than-human interactions in the city. Internet of Beings stems from the desire of speculating on possible more-than-human futures, where cohabitation and care are at the base for the future of urban species. While humans are asked to reattune, be curious, notice again and collaborate with nature, nonhuman species start to have agency in the decision-making to thrive in a collaborative, sustainable more-than-human city. Thus, Internet of Beings represents a way of "staying with the trouble" (Haraway, 2016) for a collaborative future (Tsing, 2015) in the urban environment.

This research paper delves into the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in the process of user experience (UX) design resulting in more-than-human-made designs. Specifically, the study focuses on the utilization of the text-to-image AI tool, Midjourney. The primary research questions addressed in this paper are twofold: 1) How do AI tools influence the current UX design process of a high-fidelity prototype? and 2) How do more-than-human-made high-fidelity prototypes compare with human-made high-fidelity prototypes in terms of UX? To answer these research questions, a two-method study design was employed. Firstly, two focus groups with in total of 8 designers as participants were formed, with one group utilizing Midjourney to investigate its influence on the design process and to compare the two groups regarding their workwise. The aim was to create two comparable prototypes within a specific e-commerce setting. Secondly, a between-subjects design user study with 32 participants was conducted to test the high-fidelity prototypes and to assess any potential disparities in UX quality between them. The findings regarding the first research question indicate that Midjourney primarily serves as an inspirational tool. Designers were able to harness the AI tool to generate dark mode images, with the final chosen dark mode exemplifying the impact of Midjourney. Additionally, designers attempted to utilize the tool for creating icons. Regarding the second research question, the user study revealed that, despite similar and comparable use cases, there were only minor significant differences in terms of UX quality. The overall scores in System Usability Scale (SUS) and User Experience Questionnaire Plus (UEQ+) did not exhibit any significant disparity. This study suggests that while Midjourney proves to be a useful tool within the design process, its current influence on designers' UX design process and the ultimate performance of the final prototype remains relatively modest. Further research and development may be required to enhance its impact in the field of UX design and the study design should be used to test other AI tools in comparable settings.

More-than-human design represents a paradigm shift that decentralises the human in relation to the rest of the living world. As part of this movement, scholars call for a new worldview that recognizes the interconnectedness between human and non-human beings. Prior studies have focused on the experience of human-human connections, leaving the more- than-human largely unexplored. Addressing this gap, this study explores design strategies for fostering feelings and reflections of interconnectedness towards the more-than-human world and associated emotions. With a research-through-design methodology, two workshops were conducted, resulting in six key design strategies and an "interconnectedness experience framework". The strategies were evaluated through a prototype in partnership with AquaPrint, a Swedish company that up-cycles fishing nets into designer furniture. Future research should evaluate the strategies individually and in combinations as well as in a field setting. The presented framework and strategies are intended for practitioners as inspiration in design projects to promote noticing the more-than-human world, and encouraging a posthuman perspective.

The promise of smart cities to deliver new urban efficiencies and optimizations for sustainability is increasingly being questioned for its anthropocentric, universal, and top-down perspectives. Framingcities as computers has been critiqued for its limiting understanding of cities, as well as its lack of dealing with the complexities of real messy cities, with diverse knowledge and lived experiences. However, smart technologies have also been highlighted as having the potential to help us better understand more-than-human perspectives and to reconnect us to the world around us. Situated in thefield of design for social innovation, this thesis contributes to the emerging body of work that is exploring how digital urban environments can include local knowledge and more-than-human perspectives. In a co-design process with the urban agriculture community of Sjöbergen in the city of Gothenburg in Sweden, this thesis explores how local knowledge and values about- and in urban nature can help us think differently about the future of sustainable smart city concepts. With a design process guided by research through design and co-design, this thesis is imagining other smart city narratives that go away from the current top-down and universal perspectives and instead are inspired by values of Sjöbergen of reuse, maintenance, collectivity, and knowledge sharing. The design contribution of this work is a design proposal of a smart city service that reuses old smartphones of citizens into smart city technologies for individual and situated purposes. The design proposal aims to show an alternative view of smart cities grounded in local values and more-than-human perspectives.

This thesis project explores combining interactive technology and the natural world, through a more-than-human design approach. This project aims to step away from an industry-driven design by valuing plants as equal in the design process. Throughout this report, an overview of the relevant theory and examples are elaborated on. This overview has informed the project in two ways. It formed the foundation of a concept aiming to improve the user’s interconnectedness with nature and it formed the foundation of an evaluation tool developed for aiding designers in design for plants by addressing three design fields: Design for Care, Design for Cohabitation, and Design for Noticing. The concept and the evaluation tool have been developed in parallel and informed each other throughout the project. The final concept contributes to the discussion about addressing more-than-human actors in design. In this case by addressing plant blindness. The evaluation tool contributes to more-than-human design as a tool to evaluate ideas and projects. This project included an extensive analysis of a design collection, workshops regarding the materiality of living plants and assessment of the evaluation tool, an interdisciplinary design approach, and a prototyping phase during which assumptions regarding the concept were tested.

This qualitative multiple case study explored human-elephant conflict-coexistence relationships and issues of conservation in Namibia (Damaraland) and Sri Lanka (Wasgamuwa) from a posthumanist, multispecies perspective. Within each region, conflict between humans and elephants is considered high, elephants are considered endangered and are of high conservation priority, the human population has grown significantly, and community-based organizations are implementing holistic approaches to increase positive relations between humans and elephants. This study was guided by research questions that explored the current landscape of the human-elephant-conservation nexus within each region, the shared histories between humans and elephants over time, and the value in utilizing more-than-human theoretical and methodological frameworks to enhance human-elephant relationships and support conservation efforts. Data collection methods included participant observation, naturalistic observation, interviews, visual data, and documents. Data was triangulated and analyzed within each case, as well as across cases. Major themes were identified within each case that describe unique contexts, cultures, and shared histories. These findings were then analyzed comparatively. Emergent themes across cases identified ways that a more-than-human framework may be useful in fostering coexistence between humans and elephants and supporting conservation efforts. This study contributes to the evolving scholarship on multispecies approaches to inquiry and methodology from the position of conflict resolution scholar, supports a more inclusive framework for analyzing human-wildlife conflicts, discusses theoretical and methodological implications in multispecies research, and provides recommendations for future research.

This study discusses the difference between thinking with and about the island of Ai Stratis for knowledge production, advocating for situated research and embodied experience. Having conducted an ethnographic study, on the island of Ai Stratis in the North Aegean region of Greece in the summer of 2021, I look out from the island, assuming a tree-fold research field, including the physical island of Ai Stratis, a plane of reflexivity, as well as a literary plane. From there, I propose that research method assemblages perform reality,rather than solely describing it, and that foregrounding and backgrounding voices is a micro-political process with far-reaching consequences. I look at what is meant by a multiple reality, the relevance of ethics and care in more-than-human entanglements, and multiple worldings for sustainability understood as futurity. What more, I speak about how those entanglements blur species and material boundaries and how things and beings become with one another through molecular contagion whilst forming shifting assemblages. Discussing Ai Stratis as an island, I speak about some of the lure and danger of falling into geographical determinism and representational thinking. Further, I propose that dwelling in landscape whilst using all the senses (not only sight) may be a step towards practicing noticing and learning to be affected. I argue against strictly representational thinking and against a faceless mass of uniformity, and for the individual, intimate, face-to-face, situated, and embodied. Finally, I extend an invitation to have a conversation about guest-host relations, founded on particular, situated relationships of trust, care, respect, and a willingness to engage with change. I discuss this in the context of my entanglement as a stranger with the human and non-human hosts on Ai Stratis, as well as in a multispecies and a more-than-human, and metaphysical context of sustainability