As a designer,
The ethical duty I wish to embrace is to promote and foster the conditions that can help humans to care for the world around them — not only other humans, but also the environments, eco-systems, and non-human lives we are interconnected with.
Would you like to know what lies behind this desire?
(Get ready because it's not that easy)
1/7 HISTORICAL PREMISES
Looking for sustainability, design has gradually embraced more collaborative and context-aware practices the so colled "co-design" approach. More recently, this shift has expanded beyond a strictly human-centered worldview into what is often called “more-than-human” design — a perspective that considers non-humans as actors to be included into design processes.
What's the problem?
2/7 AN ETHICAL GAP
While methods have evolved, the ethical foundations of design are still often under-explored. This becomes particularly risky when adopting a more-than-human perspective, as it may unintentionally reproduce forms of exclusion or discrimination.
For this reason, in my thesis I investigated the ethical values that underpin our design actions.
What did I come to understand?
3/7 HUMANS vs NATURE
As a practice of innovation, design often derives its guiding values from the very idea of innovation itself. And is here that a criticality emerges: our understanding of innovation is still largely rooted in a Western narrative of endless progress and modernisation.
This inevitably creates tension with emerging more-than-human perspectives that view the world as interconnected rather than divided between “humans” and “nature.”
So I asked myself:
Is there an alternative ethos for innovation?
4/7 CARE ETHICS
I found my answer in the concept of Care — an ethical framework developed within feminist scholarship. In simple terms:
Care means actively maintaining, supporting, and repairing our world so that life — human and non-human — can continue and flourish in the long term.
But isn’t care already embedded in design thinking?
5/7 A MISUNDERSTANDING
Not entirely. The misunderstanding lies in how we interpret care. We often assume that "to care" is simply the altruistic behave toward someone or something in need. However, this is just a restricted interpretation of it.
The key is to understand that "to care" is never automatic, and it is never neutral. Rather it requires the individual a process of continuous judgment. It asks us to decide what matters, who is affected, and how we choose to respond.
How can this judgment be fostered through design?
6/7 TWO CONDITIONS
Drawing from key texts, two conditions enable the individual to exercise this judgment:
1/
A sense of interdependence
An individual cares when it recognises that is connected to and affected by others.
2/
Proximity
An individual cares more when it’s close — physically and temporally — to what is at stake.
What is the challenge then?
7/7 A STRUCTURAL ISSUE
If we aim to include the more-than-human world, we must confront a structural issue:
When ecological and social consequences are distant, abstract, or invisible, our capacity to care remains limited.
If the environments we design, and live in, continue to prioritise human and technological perspectives while obscuring broader – ecological – interdependencies, a more than human design cannot fully emerge.
So, what can I do as designer?
