Experiencing More-than-Human Through Human Augmentation
This addresses the problem of fostering ecological empathy across species boundaries for designers and researchers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing human augmentation technologies.
The paper tackles the challenge of human inability to directly experience nonhuman sensory worlds by proposing a design approach that uses human augmentation technologies to create temporary, first-person approximations of nonhuman sensory experiences, resulting in five design cases like EchoVision for bat-like echolocation and FungiSync for fungal network attunement.
The recent more-than-human turn in design calls for attentiveness to nonhuman beings. Yet -- as Thomas Nagel's famous ``What is it like to be a bat?'' thought experiment highlights -- human experience is constrained by our own sensorium and an irreducible gap in phenomenal access to nonhuman \emph{Umwelten}. Grounded in eco-phenomenology and eco-somatics, this paper proposes \textbf{Experiencing More-than-Human through Human Augmentation} (MtHtHA, or ``>HtH+''), a design approach that repurposes human augmentation technologies -- typically aimed at enhancing human capabilities for human optimization -- to create temporary, embodied, first-person experiences that modulate the human sensorium to approximate nonhuman sensory experiences, cultivating ecological awareness, empathy, and care across species boundaries. We articulate seven design principles, report five design cases -- EchoVision (bat-like echolocation), FeltSight (star-nosed-mole tactile navigation), FungiSync (fungal network attunement), TentacUs (octopus-like distributed agency), and City of Sparkles (urban data from an AI's perspective) -- and discuss implications for more-than-human aesthetics and design practice.