Abstract
More-than-human approaches in design require openness to experimentation and debate, highlighting the need to rethink our approaches, methods, and tools for making and designing.
This paper explores what it means to make and design in a plural world, where both human and non-human entities actively participate in creative processes. Drawing on insights from the design-led and interdisciplinary WOLB Wollelab project in South Tyrol, Italy – combining mountain wool (often wasted in tones), open-design, digital fabrication, and craft techniques – we examine how local wool production can be reimagined through a more-than-human perspective. The research methodologies include workshops, eth- nographic inquiry, participant observation, interviews, hands-on felting experiments, pro- totyping, and testing to engage with the entities involved in the making process. Findings reveal how plurality in making emerges through diverse attitudes, approaches, frictions, agreements, and disagreements among human and non-human participants. Drawing on the insights, we introduce three conceptual tools – thing ego, thing self, and silent plural- ism – within the framework of agonistic plural making, offering ways to navigate relational and often conflictual dynamics in collaborative design. These conceptual tools serve as invitations rather than fixed constructs, aiming at guiding designers and researchers to attend better to thing agency, and engage ethically, inclusively, and critically with the com- plex entanglements of plural making.