Decentring the Designer: Part I
Do Trees Speak English? Translation, Colonial Logic, and Universalism in More-than-Human Design
This is the first of a two-part reflection on design, semiotics, and more-than-human worlds.
Introduction
“...learning to attend to the kinds of lives that exist beyond the human (and beyond the moral), in ways that allow the logics of life beyond the human to work their ways through us, is itself an ethical practice.”
Eduardo Kohn in How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (2013)
More-than-human centred design emerges as a movement to address ecological crises, technological acceleration, and the epistemological shifts that question human exceptionalism in design. In recent years, a growing number of designers and researchers turn toward multispecies systems, symbiotic futures, and non-human ecologies as inspirations and fields of work. The Wood-Wide-Web (WWW) has gained popularity for making non-human communication legible to humans through metaphors of networks, collaboration, and, to a certain extent, empathy. While the scientific grounding of such a project is based on observable biochemical processes, the semiotic framing and design implication of the WWW deserve critical investigation.
The “human” in “non-human”
“Do trees speak English?”, as absurd as it may sound, actually encapsulates the tension within the WWW movement. Translating how trees communicate into a human language is a great example of a modernist epistemology.
The assumption that there exists a single, universal reality reflects a modernist approach to knowledge. Modernist epistemology assumes that reality can be made visible and understood universally through observation, measurement, and abstraction. Its underlying premise is that the world is composed of concrete elements that can be decoded and explained through rationalisation and scientific methods. In design, this means the belief in clarity, functionality, and problem-solving, which often comes at the cost of context, specificity and contingency.
In the Wood Wide Web, the measurements of biochemical signals become proxies for “communication.” The proxies are then translated into metaphors that conform with human experiences such as collaboration, empathy, and altruism. While this interpretation is successful for public engagement, it reduces complex multispecies relationships to functional human values.
This reduction is not benign. It reflects a broad tendency in design and science to universalise knowledge and consequently erases differences in culture, ecology, and relational particularities. It exemplifies the modernist logic of representation where non-humans can be made knowable, but only to the extent that it aligns with human systems of meaning. In this sense, the WWW becomes a tool for reproducing the very anthropocentric framework it tries to challenge.
Translating trees: Semiotics, metaphors, and colonial logics
Interpreting or translating non-human communication is essentially an attempt to transform forest dynamics into human-readable symbols. Within this modernist semiotic paradigm, trees “share” nutrients, “warn” each other of threats, and “work together” as a part of a community, reflecting the values resonated with human moral and social structures. Though compelling and idyllic, it distorts the logic of non-human sign processes.
In his monumental book “How Forests Think,” Eduardo Kohn proposes that all life forms engage in sign processes to navigate their environments. While doing so, they create a semiotic fabric that extends beyond human thought and language. Non-humans use iconic signs (those that resemble what they represent) and indexical signs (those that form direct causal continuity in specific temporal and spatial embeddedness) to communicate. These signs emerge from spatial and temporal relations within specific ecologies and are independent from human sign systems. Trees, fungi, and other non-humans do not “speak”, they communicate through signs and relations that are context-specific and embedded in their ecological contexts. Attempting to render these signs as symbolic (e.g. a tree said there is danger) is flattening the ontologies of non-humans.
By replacing ecological indexicality with human-centric interpretability, the WWW engages in a form of semiotic colonisation. This kind of interpretation often reflects Eurocentric value systems. It priorities what is understandable within dominant knowledge systems over what is ontologically true to the organisms. Saying that trees “share nutrients” has a connotation larger than just anthropomorphisation; it imposes human ethics and ideals of mutual benefits. The WWW tells a story that humans want to believe.
Beyond the ontological misrepresentation, this process of translation also marginalises other epistemologies. Excluded from the WWW are Indigenous knowledge and relational ontologies that understand forests as living communities of kins, ancestors, or spirits. The WWW’s semiotic simplification, therefore, risks being an extractive act. It turns relational dynamics into metaphors (that inscribe technological universalism), metaphors into design principles (that treat nature as a system of symbols), and design principles into marketable interventions. In doing so, design reproduces the human-centeredness it sets out to decentre.
Such process of translation and design often reinforces the hegemony of western epistemologies. The efforts to “empathise” with nature or “listen” to forests are frequently mediated by technologies such as sensors, data visualisation, and AI models embedded in the same extractive logic that drives environmental degradation. Paradoxically, the tools that are supposed to challenge the dominant narrative may actually contribute to the marginalisation of the lifeworlds they claim to bring to light.
Confronting this tension may require not only a thorough critique of design methodological assumptions but also a decolonial orientation that refuses universalism and centres on ontological sovereignty and ecological specificity. This means designing with non-humans and radically different knowledge systems as co-constitutive agents, and not as data points or the mirror of human values.
References:
Descola, P. (2014). 'All too human (still): A comment on Eduardo Kohn's How forests think', HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(2), pp. 267–273.
Di Giminiani, P. and Haines, S. (2020). 'Introduction: Translating Environments', Ethnos, 85(1), pp. 1-16.
Kohn, E. (2013). How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Simard, S. (2021). Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
In the second part, I’ll explore what it means to design with more-than-human worlds. Drawing on pluriversal method and relational thinking, Part 2 offers pathways toward ethical, situated, and ontologically humble design practices.
Also working on this, with the added angle of neoliberalism.
Great write-up; excited to see more!
ROCK ON I say let life design again, I’m content to steward ;)