Thomas Laurin
7 November 2025
The chair of the association gives the word to a participant, who shares a conversation; strong, touching, funny, and critical experiences and insights are being shared. After each sharing, the participants make a soft, appreciative sound by rubbing their fingertips together; applause would feel too intimidating at this moment.
After an hour, the meeting is over, and participants are invited to come back again in a year’s time.
The first thing we did, as a sort of warm-up, was to invite other kind of bodies to be present in the room. Everyone was asked to talk about a water body who they have a relation to. We then quickly made large name tags that included both our own names and those of the water bodies. Several of the students had chosen watercourses, which led us to discuss what the place where a watercourse flows into the sea is called in different languages. It was moving to realise that in Swedish, German, English, Hindi and Mandarin, this place is called mouth or a word derived from mouth. For us humans, the organ most closely associated with the ability to make our voices heard is surely the mouth. This analogy felt fitting for what the students were set to do this week.
The students were then given some time to read a short text by David Abrams, in which he explains what first led him to coin the term more-than-human,[2] as well as a manifesto – A More-than-Human Design Manifesto[3] – which is published in the book More-Than-Human Design in Practice.[4] We then reflected on both texts together.
After the warm-up activity, the students were asked to identify a more-than-human stakeholder in their project. New double name tags were made, and the students were also asked to create or bring a representation of the more-than-human stakeholder to the table, to make them more present in the room.
We rounded off the first day with some further reading – a guide – written by a team at the consultancy firm Ramboll/Henning Larsen, which discusses how water should be regarded as a teacher and a key stakeholder in their projects, and how water’s voice can be made heard in the spaces and processes that affect them.[5]
The next day began with a group discussion of Ramboll’s guide, and we also talked about the objects and images the students had brought into the room to make their more-than-human stakeholders more tangible and present. The next step in the process involved beginning to subjectify these stakeholders. How does that shift affect the project and the understanding of the project’s context?
A relationship between a subject and an object differs from a relationship between two subjects. Once an object has been subjectified, other kinds of interactions can emerge. All over the world, there is now a buzz of initiatives – often led by the arts and design – in which these kinds of relationships are prefigured, explored and rehearsed. All this, of course, with the understanding that this is often a perfectly normal practice amongst indigenous peoples and an integral part of their worldviews.
The day’s thought-provoking read was an interview with the philosopher and artist Eva Meijer: ”Lions can speak and we must try to understand them.” [6] The students were also given an assignment: to create a conversation of some kind between themselves and a subjectified more-than-human stakeholder inhabiting their project. And it was these conversations that the students brought with them as they entered the room, which, unbeknownst to them, had been transformed into The Annual Meeting of the Association for Boundary Breaking Conversations.
[1] Not entirely true, as I had to consider one of the course’s learning objectives: “articulate how the methodology of a self-directed design project address complex issues associated with vulnerable eco-social contexts through critical and practice-led approaches
[2] In More Than Human Rights – An Ecology of Law, Thought and Narrative for Earthly Flourishing (2024), pp. 313-315 (four first rows).
[3] A More-than-Human Design Manifesto.
[4] More-Than-Human Design in Practice(2025)
[5] Design as water – Embracing a new water paradigm (2025)
[6] Lions can speak and we must try to understand them (2025)