By: Iohanna Nicenboim
Part of State of Responsible Tech 2025, Generative Things
Nicenboim, I. (2025). More-than-human-AI. In RIOT 2025, State of Responsible Tech – Generative Things (pp. 63-70). Stichting ThingsCon Amsterdam
https://thingscon.org/publications/riot-2025/more-than-human-ai-riot-2025/
Abstact (generated):
In response to the planetary scale, material entanglements, and epistemic blind spots of contemporary artificial intelligence, this essay proposes a shift from human-centered to more-than-human design approaches in AI development. Drawing from feminist technoscience, critical HCI, and ecological theory, Nicenboim argues that AI is not merely a computational artifact but a socio-technical and planetary system—shaped by extractive infrastructures, colonial legacies, and anthropocentric paradigms. Human-centered design, while promoting trust and fairness, remains bounded by liberal Western notions of the human, risking exclusion and perpetuating structural bias. Through a critical reframing, the paper outlines how more-than-human design can support designers in recognizing the relational, embodied, and ecological dimensions of AI, expanding notions of agency, responsibility, and inclusion. By acknowledging AI’s material origins and its capacity to shape both human and nonhuman lives, the work calls for “designing-with AI” that foregrounds situated knowledge, response-ability, and post-anthropocentric futures. This contribution advances design discourse by asserting that AI can—and must—be remade to support plural, regenerative, and relational worlds.