Decentring the Designer
Positionality, Relational Practice, and Decentring in Design
In the first part of this article, I traced how modernist epistemology, anthropocentric metaphors, and colonial knowledge shaped more-than-human design. In this section, we turn to a more intimate and structural question: who designs?
The problem of the designer
Design positioning is rarely neutral. The designer's role is not only that of a solution realiser, but also of a knowledge producer. From user-centred design to speculative design, the designer is often imagined as a kind of visionary mediator. They translate complexities into clarity, make systems visible, and guide us through the path to a preferred future. Whether in tech companies, sustainability labs, or activist space, the designer’s power is legitimised by their capacity to intervene and offer an alternative. This authority rests on an assumption that designers can stand outside the system they’re engaging, that knowledge can be extracted and reassembled, and that design is a neutral act of positivity.
More-than-human design in particular cannot afford to leave the designer’s position unexamined. If our goal is to move beyond anthropocentric logics, we have to question and reposition the designer as an authority who can speak on behalf of others. Decolonial thinkers have long warned us that inclusion without structural change can become a form of capture. Similarly, expanding the designer’s moral scope without decentring their epistemic role risks enforcing the centrality of humans all over again.
Decentring the designer, decentring design
To imagine alternative futures, we first have to imagine alternative positions from which design is practiced. A starting point for such reflection is to recognise that design is always already shaping worlds in ways that often go unacknowledged. This lens of viewing design as an ontological act has been one of the core ideas of Winograd and Flores (1986) and Escobar (2018) who remind us that in designing tools, systems, and interfaces, we are designing ways of beings. Every design decision we make is reconfiguring what counts as real, what kinds of relations are possible, and who gets to act.
To decentre the designer is to challenge the illusion of neutrality and control by rejecting the idea that designers can operate outside the system and are capable of observing and intervening from an abstract distance. Instead, designers should be understood as a relational actor embedded within networks of human and non-human agencies, histories, and knowledge systems.
This shift requires moving beyond inclusion and empathy as they may reinforce design’s epistemic central positioning. Empathy, in particular, assumes that designers can access and represent the lifeworlds of others. This assumption risks oversimplification and epistemic overreach especially when working with more-than-human relations, a realm which we may never fully know. Instead, designers’ values in multispecies design should ground in attunement, partiality, and co-becoming. Rather than representing non-human lifeworlds for human understanding, the designer reorients the systems while remaining in relation with them.
In an earlier essay, I described this orientation as Decentred Design (Sukprasong 2022). It was a first attempt to explore how designers might engage with more-than-human and multispecies worlds. That piece suggested practical steps grounded in the proposal that design must shift away from control toward relationality. This current reflection builds upon that foundation and refines the ideas into broader reorientations for how design might move when the designer is no longer at the centre. The following three orientations offer a way of noticing and moving differently in design practice.
1. Discovering more actants
The first orientation involves broadening the attention. It refuses the reduction of worlds into users, stakeholders, or audiences, and instead seeks “actants” who are already in the system but may have been overlooked. This includes not only human participants but also non-human beings, material systems, and environmental forces.
This is not a metaphorical inclusion but a process of actively identifying them and recognising their agencies and positionality within the context. In this way, discovering more actants becomes an act of broadening who is present as a step to challenge what counts.
2. Repositioning the designer
A second orientation is repositioning the designer not as an expert, but as a situated participant in the meshwork of relations. This means recognising that designers always arrive with their own assumption, tools, epistemologies, and agenda which in turn impact what is made visible and deemed possible.
This reorientation also challenges the dominant design posture of mastery and the idea that design can optimise for impact without consequences. Decentring the designer requires awareness of one’s own limits, intervening carefully, and approaching design not as a solution-making process but a world shaping engagement.
3. Focusing on relationality
The third orientation involves shifting attention from objects, beings, or solutions toward relations. Rather than designing for a goal, designers should look at what relationships are being formed, altered, or transformed through the intervention. Design from this view is not primarily about producing things, services, or strategies but shaping how actants relate.
Looking at how things relate also challenges the speed and outputs often expected in design work. Especially in more-than-human design, focusing on relations suggests that designers become attune to rhythms and cycles that may be foreign to humans and beyond our control. Focusing on relationality becomes a practice of care by shifting the focus to the space between actants rather than “optimising” the actant themselves.
Situated design and the Wood Wide Web reimagined
To understand what it means to decentre design in practice, we return to the Wood Wide Web (WWW). As discussed in Part I, the WWW is an example of a modernist design epistemology. Though it might be effective to gain public interests, it frames forest ecologies according to human-centric narratives. It also enables design interventions that prioritise legibility over entanglements by “translating” the forest for human comprehension, often through visualisation, sensor technology, or speculative storytelling.
Decentring design does not mean rejecting the WWW as an object of attention, but rethinking the positionality from which we engage it. Rather than focusing on rendering non-human communication into human-legible sign systems, the approach would start with discovering different existing epistemologies used to understand the forests, detangling the meshwork of actants that are easily visible and hardly noticeable, and questioning the relationships that are already at play. This requires situating ourselves within the ontological logics of the forest, not as observers but as participants in a living meaning, history, and interdependence.
From this perspective, the forest is not a metaphor of networked technology, it is a world that is already densely inhabited by more-than-human relations. And it is here that, after dentring the designer, we turn to pluriversal design (Escobar 2018) by resisting the urge to universalise human frames of reference, and instead honouring the multiplicity of ontological realities. In the case of the WWW, it might mean refusing the impulse to “listen to trees” through sensors or AI, and instead engaging with the forest through local practices, sensory rhythms, and Indigenous knowledge that already sustain relational accountability.
For instance, many Indigenous cosmologies treat trees as kin, ancestors, or teachers. These are not symbolic but ontological. From such a worldview, the design question is no longer “How might we extract meanings from the forest?,” but “how do we live well with the forest even if it may exceed our understanding?” It is a shift from designing above non-humans, to working with them within situated ecologies.
Conclusion
Revisiting the Wood Wide Web reveals how even a well-meaning design project can still recentre human centrality. I have argued that to address the epistemological and ontological violence woven through dominant design paradigms, we must begin by decentring the designer. This is not simply a matter of humility but an ontological repositioning of where we stand and from where we practice. It is an encouragement to design not as a neutral expert or visionary problem-solver, but as an embedded participant.
To support the shift, I proposed three reorientations: discovering actants, repositioning the designer, and focusing on relationality. They are not meant as a rigid and stabilised practice, but a starting point for us to remain in the complexity, between the tension of knowing and unknowing, action and restraint, clarity and ambiguity.
So, what does it mean to design when the designer is no longer the centre? It means reframing the scope of what counts as design and redefining the purpose and posture of the profession, while opening up a place that allows a slow, emergent, and non-instrumental approach to the practice. It also means encouraging designers to practice with the willingness to be shaped by new encounters, to be proven wrong, and to co-become. It is, ultimately, to treat design as a practice of inhabiting the in-between.
References:
Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press.
Ingold, T. (2011). Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge.
Slavin, K. (2016). 'Design as Participation', Journal of Design and Science, 24 February.
Sukprasong, F. (2022). ‘Beyond Human-Centred Design: An Introductory Guide to Decentred Design’, Medium, 27 September.
Winograd, T. and Flores, F. (1986). Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation.