Abstract Contemporary design operates within conditions of ecological destabilization and distributed technological agency that challenge anthropocentric and instrumental paradigms. While participatory, regenerative, and AI-mediated design approaches have expanded disciplinary scope, their integration remains conceptually fragmented. This paper introduces Co-nature’ing as a positioning framework that reconceptualizes design as a metabolic epistemology—a relational mode of knowing and acting across Human–Nature–Intelligence ecologies. Grounded in process philosophy, complexity theory, ecological cognition, and autopoietic systems theory, the framework advances a distributed but asymmetrical triad in which biological systems and algorithmic infrastructures participate as co-constitutive agents within design processes rather than resources or tools. The Co-nature’ing spiral - Co-Sensing, Co-Growing, Co-Evolving, and Co-Flourishing - is presented as an operative translation of this epistemological shift. A pedagogical instantiation through the BIP Design Roadmap illustrates how distributed agency can be enacted within studio practice. The paper contributes a unified theoretical foundation for biodesign as cognitive ecology and relational co-evolution.
Mateus et al. (Thu,) studied this question.