Design Tropes of More Than Human Confusion

Abstract

This critique paper articulates a set of design tropes that evoke more-than-human confusions: The Tortured Plant, the Cyberpunk Wearable, and the Faked Human. Drawing on examples from recognized design projects across interaction design, speculative design, and media artworks, the paper highlights how these tropes surface conceptual tensions within the HCI discourse, with each trope in different ways playing with, and being played by, notions of human, non-human, and technological co-agency. Rather than presenting new design directions, the analysis focuses on how existing projects mobilize confusion, and how this may be utilized as a critical strategy to challenge anthropocentric assumptions and provoke reflection on agency, ethics, and relationality. By articulating these tropes, the paper argues that they reveal persistent struggles in the field that may help reunite theory with practice, and that these confusions thereby may offer generative openings for rethinking design's role in a more-than-human world.