Affective Ontological Disruption (AOD): a speculative co-design method for early-stage more-than-human interaction design

Affective Ontological Disruption (AOD) is a bounded speculative co-design method for the early phases of more-than-human interaction design, including problem framing, ideation, and early concept development. It supports design teams in making non-human and technology-related concerns explicit, when traces, observation, or presence of non-human entities are unavailable. AOD proceeds through four linked activities: Tech-as-Entity cards, Ontographic mapping, Speculative narrative, and Speculative prototyping, with lightweight diagnostics closing each step. The method is grounded in Object-Oriented Ontology in a bounded way, taking from it the premise that entities exceed any single human reading, prompting designers to use indirect, speculative prompts to interrupt human-centred defaults and articulate concept commitments. Across two 3-hour workshops with four design teams (N = 26), participants produced 22 provisional wellbeing indicators – brief, checkable statements of what an entity or technology needs to fare well – and portable artefacts, including Entity Wellbeing Briefs, annotated prototypes, and trade-off statements. The speculative narrative step appeared especially important for decentring and translating broad concerns into design commitments. We present these findings as formative rather than confirmatory. The paper contributes a bounded method, an artefact ecology that preserves traceability, formative empirical observations, and a critical account of the method’s limits.