More-Than-Post: A Five-Step Recipe for Decentring Design

Adopt a more-than-human design culture. This is the first recommendation of the New European Bauhaus Concept Paper (2021). A sentence that, however paradoxical it may sound, finally tackles, from an institutional perspective, one of the major contradictions of our contemporary common condition. That which concerns the role of humankind in its constructive relationship with the world and the effects of its impact on the natural balance of the planet. A contradiction that, over the last fifty years, has been addressed by a series of proposals characterized by a utilitarian principle of environmentalist nature, based only on the acknowledgment of human needs, and which today, by contrast, with a greater awareness of the interconnection of ecosystems, requires architectural design to consider different species and technologies as a subject of reference, either in terms of fruition or agency. This is, in a few words, what the posthuman position refers to. Not the end of humanity or its replacement by something else, but its definitive extension to an expanded creative subjectivity, which is simultaneously multiform and interconnected, situated and culturally differentiated. A position that asks architectural design to imagine the world through connections rather than divisions, and to welcome different subjects, both natural and artificial, in a perspective of coexistence and collaboration that, however, still struggles to emerge from a methodological point of view. For this reason, after a research comparing over three hundred references, two hundred paradigmatic examples, and twenty case studies, the article will highlight, by intersection, the common principles underlying what can be considered a posthuman project, and will translate them into a series of steps to develop, in practical terms, a more-than-human design approach beyond any typological or scalar differentiation. In so doing, shifting from a problem-solving to a problem-setting perspective, it will deepen, from an operative point of view, themes such as the value of situated knowledge, the generative field of thirdness, the role of disturbance, and the concept of resonance chambers, to confirm the political relevance of architecture as a historically constituted symbolic system. And it will present these principles, also thanks to a graphic apparatus produced for this purpose, in the form of simple indications thought to both be ready-to-use and revive and update the tradition of radical design cookbooks.