Future-first design thinking
"Future-first design thinking" by Marketa Benisek looks at contemporary approaches for the consideration of nature in design, from creating non-human personas, through Cathedral Thinking, to adopting a "sustainability-first mindset" and concludes:
Perhaps we should consider each and every one of us as the designers of a more sustainable future. In doing so, we must embrace the idea that design goes beyond aesthetics and encompasses the holistic impact of our creations. Whether physical or digital, every design choice we make has consequences, and it is our responsibility to ensure those consequences are positive and sustainable.
Update 2023-07-05 – This dissertation explores this topic in more depth:
Emīlija Veselova: ‘We should consider nature as stakeholder in design process’
In June, I remotely attended the PhD defence of Emīlija Veselova at the Aalto University Department of Design, where she presented her research about nature as a stakeholder in design processes, more specifically the "more-than-human design approach". The topic fascinates me, both from my general interest in entities affected by design that are not considered in the process (though, granted, most of my own focus has always been on human non-users, and as it had never crossed my mind to not only integrate sustainability considerations into design (there's quite a movement on that) but to specifically give them a voice as one stakeholder among others:
‘There are no easy solutions to making this shift happen in the design field. In fact, I find many attempts to include nature in design quite naïve. The thinking seems to prevail that if we include nature or nonhuman stakeholders in our research or design, it automatically makes it not non-anthropocentric, automatically contributes to sustainability, and makes it good. But I don’t think this is true.
[…]
Overall, I strive to expand the understanding within design research and education on who or what can be stakeholders, highlighting that it is not just humans or organizations. I was missing this perspective when I was learning design – both in the practical courses and the readings we had – so I want to lift this perspective.
The full text of the dissertation is openly available from the Aaltodoc library.
Just recently, I shared this article dealing with the very same questions.