Designing with an Assembly of Many

Despite ongoing work in the context of posthuman research in HCI and design, practitioners still face uncertainty about how to meaningfully engage, embody and design with the perspective of nonhumans in their practices. In this pictorial we present Eden X, a digital assembly which re-imagines the participation of nonhuman entities in decision-making processes regarding environmental concerns. It reports specifically on the third iteration of the project which grouped 13 participants in a conversation themed around rivers as precursors of nature rights and shares a methodology for the representation of nonhumans within a discussion assembly. Drawing from the notions of “constituency” and “speaking subject” introduced by Ron Wakkary, this pictorial contributes with an example of these concepts at work while addressing design exploratory methods to de-center the human from the radial point of thought and decision-making.