A Poem of More than Human, co-authored with the Sky over Fife

Each day, an image of the sky over North-East Fife.
A quiet ritual. A slow witnessing.

These images are not authored by me alone.
They are co-created with light, cloud, sea air, data, and time.
The sky becoming a collaborator —
a more-than-human actor in an unfolding dialogue.

This process began on the first day of my PhD —
on ongoing study into place within Human-Computer Interaction and Design.

Here, place is not treated as a neutral backdrop,
but as a dynamic constellation of relations.
It is lived, felt, and situated —
holding tradition, memory, emotions, values and care.
It is through place that regenerative design takes root:
not as invention, but as deep entanglement.

Framed through a critical post-humanist lens
my research draws on feminist theory and neo-materialism
to challenge anthropocentric perspectives.
It seeks to decentralise the human,
to resist human-exceptionalism,
and to acknowledge the agency of things, environments, and non-humans.

How might we design with what exceeds us?
What does it mean to co-create with atmospheric and material conditions,
to attend to difference, to relation, to becoming?

To make, as praxis, things not for humans alone,
but with the world —
things that listen, respond, decay, persist.

What becomes possible when we design more-than-human things —
entangled with place, rather than abstracted from it?

Poster Created for Doors Open, St. Andrews, May 2025. Depicts a daily image of the sky over northeast Fife, started in September 2024.