Four years ago, in the Arsenale, I stood with French artist Marguerite Humeau in front of three beings she had named after ocean currents, and nobody could agree on what they were. Her own friends had called them animals, plants and flowers, and she had decided it did not matter, so there they hung, built from seaweed and bone and ocean plastic, with skin she had given pores and freckles to so that we might feel something for a creature we could not name. ‘I thought that maybe because of climate change and mass extinctions, animals are also getting conscious of their own death, and maybe they’re developing their own rituals, mythologies, and spirituality,’ she told me. Our conversation came back to me recently, as governments prepare for COP31, their thirty-first annual review of progress on limiting climate change, which felt like as good a reason as any to dedicate a chapter to those already working for somebody other than ourselves.
We have built to our own measure for as long as we have built anything, with the foot and the cubit lifted straight off the body and Vitruvius taking a temple’s proportions from a man’s, and Le Corbusier was still at it in the late 1940s, scaling his Modulor to a man six feet tall. Those were ideals, though, and an ideal at least admits that someone chose it. What changed in the 1950s is that the body became a dataset, and one of those datasets was called Josephine. She arrived with Joe and a boy called Joe Jr, drawn for Henry Dreyfuss by Alvin Tilley, and the three of them became the proportions every industrial designer worked from. They are the reason the doorway you walked through this morning is the height that it is: three drawings, and out of them a world. It worked, and it had exactly one client.
The client list has been getting longer ever since, slowly and then less slowly. Ian McHarg was already arguing for it in 1969 in Design with Nature, which taught a generation of planners to read a landscape before drawing on it. He was not alone either: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, which followed DDT up the food chain and set the modern environmental movement going, the Earthrise photograph and Stewart Brand’s first Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Victor Papanek opening Design for the Real World in 1971 with the observation that ‘there are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few of them’, and then 1972 arriving all at once with The Limits to Growth and its model of what happens if we simply keep going, the first United Nations environment conference, the law professor Christopher Stone asking whether trees should have standing, and James Lovelock’s first papers on Gaia.
Since then the argument has been turning into law and policy: Ecuador wrote the rights of nature into its constitution in 2008, New Zealand granted the Whanganui River legal personhood in 2017, and Kongjian Yu spent three decades insisting that cities should drink water rather than flush it, long enough to watch sponge cities become Chinese national policy before he died last year.
In Posthuman Utopias, we are asking what a world looks like when we stop designing on the planet, and learn to design with it. To be clear, this is not a chapter that excludes us. It would be difficult to imagine a utopia without ourselves in it, or at least to go on calling it one. What it proposes is an expansion of the frame, moving the human out of the center and making room for the needs, and perhaps the desires and the fears, of everything we share it with. What does a house look like when it is designed from the perspective of a cat? What does a seawall look like when the client is an oyster, a garden when it is planted for a bee’s vision rather than ours, or a bridge whose only users are deer and mountain lions?
The stories ahead cluster around those shifts, and around what mutualism looks like in practice: studios working with bacteria and algae as collaborators rather than materials, sensors that turn forests into something that can be listened to, buildings that are drawn to decay gracefully back into deep time rather than stand forever, new technologies turned on damage that older ones caused, and infrastructure built for, and with, animals, plants and oceans.
When I asked Humeau about the third of her three imaginary beings, the one that is neither collapsing nor carrying anything, she said it was much more hopeful, ‘almost like a wave coming out and showing the way. We don’t really know where it’s heading to, but it’s heading somewhere.’ Our direction may not be settled yet, and it is no longer being set by us alone, but this chapter belongs to those are already out there pointing it somewhere. And there is hope in that.
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