How might we craft a future for interspecies design? In this session, Giuliana will invite viewers to explore the research she has been working on for over a year now. Challenging paradigms around customer centricity, the design approach Giuliana calls “interspecies design” proposes a method that considers the intersecting needs of multiple stakeholders, both human and non-human. In this presentation, Giuliana will walk viewers through the powerful insights of her on-the-ground research to provoke them to think of a possible pathway forward for design, sparking thinking on how they might integrate an interspecies lens into their own practice.

Last spring, Giuliana ventured to the heart of an indigenous community in Mexico. Collaborating with the renowned biomaterial designer Fernando Laposse, she went out to explore how craft enterprises could develop viable businesses without compromising integrity to place, people and culture. Fernando is the founder of Totomoxtle: a craft enterprise working with the Mixte community in Tonahuixtla, creating a textile from rare heirloom corn varieties at risk of extinction. Through their collaboration, Giuliana’s research has manifested in the proposal of a design approach she is calling interspecies design.

Thousands of years of collaborating respectfully with nature has shown us that the most successful systems are those where all contributing actors give and receive meaningful value without jeopardizing their own survival. In knowing this, we start to understand that we as humans, communities, businesses and economies are inseparable from the natural world. Together we exist in integrated systems of wholes, made up of a spectrum of living organisms joined together through webs of value exchange.