Tracing as a Strategy for Orienting to Nonhuman Perspectives

Trends in designing with living organisms have focused mainly on leveraging the organisms qualities for interactivity and designing for care through a more-than-human design lens. As DIS gains interest in interactions with living organisms and more-than-human design goals, we reflect upon these trends and call for practices that surface nonhuman perspectives and critically draw out our own. We propose tracing as a material practice that surfaces insights on care and relation in the rich space between the human-designer and organism. Through reflective writings, we present a first-person account of tracing slime mold through visualizations, embodied experiences, and sonifying electrical resistance. These tracings capture both the slime mold's ways and our own, inviting us to observe our actions to facilitate its life. By tracing our experiences of growing and making with slime mold, we re-orient toward nonhuman perspectives and discuss how such practices might advance capacities of design research.