On More Than Human Design
For decades, design has told itself a simple story. The designer’s task is to serve people. We called them users, consumers, or citizens, but the underlying assumption was clear: design begins and ends with the human. Human-centered design became a mantra, reminding us to put people at the center of every process.
Yet this story no longer holds. The clients of design are no longer only human. They are systems, ecologies, and intelligences that shape outcomes just as much as we do. The climate crisis makes this obvious. A building that ignores its impact on the grid, the watershed, or the surrounding ecology cannot be considered successful. A digital platform that serves its users but destabilizes social trust or consumes vast amounts of energy cannot be considered responsible. And in more and more studios, designers are not only serving human briefs but working directly with artificial intelligence systems that generate concepts and suggest iterations of their own.
What was once understood as humans designing for humans is now evolving into systems designing for systems. This is not a passing trend. It is the new condition of design practice.These new dynamic, nonhuman stakeholders are reshaping the way that we see and execute the design of objects, products, systems, services, and spaces.
More-than-Human Clients
Cultural ethnography reminds us that this is not entirely new. Many Indigenous traditions have long recognized rivers, mountains, and animals as entities with agency, shaping human life and deserving of respect. Anthropologists such as Bruno Latour have shown how technologies and infrastructures co-create social worlds. The idea that nonhumans have a seat at the table has deep historical and cultural roots.
What is new is the scale and visibility of these nonhuman clients today. They are no longer abstract forces in the background. They are active participants in the everyday work of design. Take architecture. A building is not designed only for its occupants. It must also serve the energy grid it connects to, the watershed it alters, and the species it displaces or shelters. Generative design platforms now allow architects to test hundreds of configurations based on criteria like daylight, airflow, and structural efficiency. The architect’s role shifts from sole author to mediator, interpreting between human needs, ecological realities, and algorithmic suggestions.
Or consider product design. In footwear, AI systems generate thousands of possible sole patterns based on biomechanics, sustainability metrics, and aesthetic considerations. The designer no longer sketches one concept in isolation. Instead, they curate from a landscape of options, negotiating between machine outputs, cultural signals, and embodied human performance.
In both cases, the client is distributed. It includes humans, but it also includes the systems, ecologies, and algorithms that have their own forms of demand.
From Human-Centered to System-Centered
This raises a profound question. What does it mean to maintain humanness in design when the clients and collaborators are increasingly nonhuman?
The answer is not to retreat into an older model of human-centered design. That frame is too narrow. Instead, the task is to evolve into system-centered design, where the human is recognized as one node in a network of participants. The guiding question shifts from “What does the user need?” to “How do multiple forms of life, human and nonhuman, interact within this design?”
This reframing asks designers to develop new literacies. Environmental performance cannot be an afterthought. It must become a primary design brief. AI systems cannot be treated as black boxes. They must be interrogated, interpreted, and made transparent. Designers must learn to read ecological signals, data behaviors, and infrastructural constraints as fluently as they read user insights.
The Risk of Losing Humanness
Yet this system-to-system horizon also brings risks. When buildings are optimized entirely for energy performance, they may become inhospitable to human experience. When product design is driven by machine-learning models, cultural meaning can be flattened into what the data already contains. When services are tuned primarily for efficiency, the subtle textures of human ritual and belonging can disappear.
The challenge, then, is balance. Designers must honor the voices of nonhuman clients while also safeguarding the distinctly human dimensions of culture: embodiment, ritual, storytelling, and the search for meaning. Without this balance, design risks becoming alien to the very lives it seeks to enrich.
Toward an Ethos of Stewardship
What emerges is a new ethos of stewardship. The designer is not only an advocate for the human user but a mediator among many forms of agency. Success can no longer be measured only in customer satisfaction or market share. It must also be measured in ecological resilience, algorithmic transparency, and cultural resonance.
This is not only a technical shift. It is a cultural one. It asks us to expand our imagination of who and what design serves. It asks us to see design not as the imposition of human will but as the careful shaping of relationships within a more-than-human world.
Conclusion
The age of human-exclusive design is ending. The clients of design are now ecosystems, infrastructures, and intelligences as much as they are people. We are entering a world where systems design for systems, where the work of the designer is to translate, negotiate, and sustain balance across multiple forms of agency.
The task ahead is not to resist this shift but to engage it with care. To maintain humanness in design inputs and outputs while honoring the claims of the more-than-human. To move beyond human-centeredness without losing sight of what makes human life meaningful.
The future of design belongs to those who can hold these tensions. Those who can design not only for humans, but with and alongside the many other voices now present at the table.
