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.

Seit Paul Crutzens Intervention auf der Jahrestagung des IGBP im Jahr 2000 hat das menschliche Wirken einen prägnanten Namen: Mit dem Begriff ‚Anthropozän‘ hat sich sprachlich manifestiert, was sich wissenschaftlich messen lässt. Der Mensch – oder eher Teile der Menschheit, weshalb auch andere Begriffe wie Capitalocene oder Plantationocene (Davis et al., 2019) diskutiert werden, um die Verknüpfung zu Kolonialismus, Kapitalismus und ‚racial hierarchies‘ aufzuzeigen – hat als ‚geologische Kraft‘ (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000) das Klima auf der Erde geprägt (oder gestaltet?) – und auch wenn wir die Dimensionen dieses Einflusses vielleicht noch nicht vollumfänglich begreifen können, so ist die drohende klimatische Katastrophe im Begriff, real zu werden.

In the current climate crisis, creating a symbiotic collaboration between all members of an ecosystem has become a prominent topic. By reevaluating human-centered methodologies through a cultural probe and an orienting activity, I address notions of collaboration, cohabitation and extending one’s body beyond the skin. I explore the concept of care in human-plant relationships, along with understanding the trouble with designing for and with care in the context of human-nature-technology kinship. The cultural probe, through its ambiguity, has prompted reflections on care and multispecies kinship, whereas the orienting activity has been an attempt to potentially shift to a non-anthropocentric perspective. A materialization of speculative thinking, these activities are a first step in challenging human exceptionalism, a new approach to viewing the human as decentered in design. This paper positions care as a premise in addressing human-centered methodologies to include non-human actors, with prototypes and speculative design as techniques that facilitate approaching a challenging and complex topic as one of more-than-human assemblages. / I den nuvarande klimatkrisen har skapandet av symbiotiska sammarbeten mellan alla deltagare av ett ekosystem blivit ett viktigt ämne. Genom att omvärdera människocentrerade metodiker genom en cultural probe och en orienterande aktivitet adresserar jag idéer om sammarbete, samlevnad och förlängningen av ens kropp bortom huden. Jag utforskar konceptet handomtagande i människo-plant-relationer tillsammans med förståelsen för mödorna med att designa för och med handomtagande i kontexten människa-natur-teknologi-släktskap. En cultural probe har genom dess tvetydighet drivit reflektioner kring handomtagande och mångfaldsläktskap, där den orienterade aktiviteten var ett försök till ett potentiellt shifte till ett icke-antropocentriskt perspektiv. Dessa aktiviteter, som är material från spekulativt tänkade, är ett tillvägagångasätt och första steg i att utmana människocenterad exceptionalism i design. Denna artikel positionerar handomtagande som en premiss i adresserandet av människocentrerade metodiker till att inkludera icke-mänskliga aktörer genom användandet av prototyper och spekulativ design som underlättande tekniker till utmaningar och komplexa ämnen som mer-än-mänskliga församlingar.