About the Session
What if design stopped asking “What do humans need?” and instead began with a more challenging, more urgent question:
“What does the ecosystem need — with or without us?”
For centuries, design has placed human comfort, speed and extraction at the centre. Yet the non-human world is always in the room: insects, microbes, soil networks, water systems, materials that degrade or regenerate, atmospheres that absorb or collapse. This panel explores how design might transform if humans were no longer treated as the primary beneficiaries — and if ecological systems and multi-species wellbeing became the starting point.
Bringing together three distinct voices:
- Judith van den Boom (Central Saint Martins), whose regenerative design practice reframes materials, ecosystems and care as living collaborators;
- Ceri Almrott (TU Dublin) who challenges overconsumption and asks how design can slow down, reduce harm and restore planetary balance; and
- Peter Evers (IADT) whose speculative research imagines design from the viewpoint of insects and other non-human intelligences, who will be our moderator.
Together they ask: How do we design with ecosystems instead of against them?
And what kinds of futures emerge when we dare to imagine a world not centred on ourselves?
