As a research agenda, Designing Temporal Ecologies draws attention to the plurality of times in the world while making a case for an ethical and political agenda that calls us to rethink the way design mediates and defines more-than-human times. By reframing the ways we think about, experience, imagine and interfere in the temporality of more-than-human entities it attempts to better align design with planetary processes, co-exist with more diverse ecologies and find its way into more sustainable futures.

A temporal ecology is therefore not just about “time” in a clock sense, but about different entangled temporalities—cycles, paces, durations, recurrences—that exist across living and non-living beings. Such temporalities influence one another in a push and pull of forces exerted by interdependent beings. Designing temporal ecologies therefore rejects the idea that time is a neutral, external metric, and treats it as relational and co-constructed—something that emerges from the interactions among species, materials, and environments.

Designing Temporal Ecologies therefore means to recognise that humans have always affected and designed time—for example, through agriculture, cities, technologies – but also to see that such design has often privileged universal, linear, progress-oriented “clock time”, which subjugates more-than-human temporalities to capitalist ones. Therefore, it ultimately means to intentionally rethink and redesign how design interacts with time, aiming to restore balance among the multiple temporal modes of our more-than-human world.

The concept emerged from a NERC-funded project led by Larissa Pschetz with Ally Phillimore, Michelle Bastian, Maike Gebker and Susanne Wieland, and influenced SAGSAH PhD funding of Design Informatics student Keili Koppel. It also influenced aspects of Ari Beckingham’s PhD.

An edited collection with practical examples will be published by Bloomsbury in 2026.