More Than Human at the Design Museum
More Than Human sets the tone with a line from Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think (2014): “We are not the only kind of we.” It’s not a theoretical exercise, but an idea increasingly challenging how designers think about the world they help build.
The exhibition is strongest when it engages with the concrete and the material. In the section titled Shifting Perspective, artists attempt to imagine how other creatures might see – or experience – the world. Shimabuku’s Sculpture for Octopuses: Exploring for Their Favourite Colours (2010) is one of the highlights. Fragments of coloured glass lie scattered across a display, shimmering like underwater treasure. On a nearby screen, an octopus investigates the pieces, its tentacles probing blue and red shards with gentle curiosity. There’s a genuine sense of encounter here, as though the glass has become a bridge, however fragile, between human and cephalopod perception. Marlène Huissoud’s The Chair (2019) sits close by. Fashioned from unfired clay and wood, punctured with small holes, it looks part sculpture, part insect hotel. It’s not intended for human comfort or aesthetic pleasure, but instead serves as a refuge for solitary bees and butterflies, developed in collaboration with entomologists.
The show falters, however, when it leans into the conceptual without the same immediacy. Solange Pessoa’s Untitled (2020–2021), from her Sonhíferas (Dreamers) series, features three black and white oil-on-canvas forms that blur the boundaries between human, animal and plant. It’s meant to be ambiguous, but it feels neither especially novel nor charged. Ursula Biemann’s Forest Mind (2021), a multimedia work exploring interconnectedness and indigenous knowledge, features a painted circle embedded with DNA from the Amazon rainforest, but its intellectual ambition isn’t fully realised in its artistic impact.
Still, More Than Human deserves credit for attempting to push design beyond human priorities. This isn’t nature presented as pretty decoration, nor a sentimental plea to save it. Instead, it’s an invitation to think of other species as participants in – or even clients for – design. At its best, the exhibition makes us question whether design could be an act of hospitality toward creatures with senses, needs and desires entirely different from our own.
Christina Yang
Photo: Luke Hayes
More Than Human is at the Design Museum from 11th July until 10th October 2025. For further information or to book, visit the exhibition’s website here.
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