Designing More-Than-Human Futures: Applying the DFA Method to a Mycelium–Robot–Human Ecosystem

Design has increasingly been positioned not merely as a mode of problem solving but as a speculative and anticipatory practice capable of engaging with the uncertainties, contingencies, and indeterminacies of emerging socio-technical futures. Recent scholarship in design futures (Dunne & Raby, 2013; Auger, 2013), transition design (Irwin, 2015), and more-than-human design (Tsing, 2015; Escobar, 2018) emphasises the need for approaches that foreground relationality, situatedness, and world-making over prediction or linear forecasting. Within this conceptual landscape, this paper examines how a structured art-technology collaboration, the Design Futures Art-Driven (DFA) methodology developed within the EU-funded MUSAE project, can function as a mode of exploration into the unknown and as a practice of imagining and materially exploring alternative futures, answering through future-oriented concepts. It argues that anticipatory design, when grounded in speculative, participatory, and multispecies perspectives, can unsettle dominant technological narratives and open pathways toward regenerative, counter-hegemonic imaginaries. The DFA methodology integrates four interrelated phases: horizon scanning, visioning, ideation, and prototyping, constituting an iterative framework for interdisciplinary exploration. Drawing on design futures scholarship, the methodology positions design as a form of world-making (Canina et al., 2021; Escobar, 2018) in which the creation of artefacts, scenarios, and prototypes serves to question existing socio-technical conditions and articulate alternative ways of living. Rather than treating futures as external objects to be predicted, DFA invites participants to co-construct futures through embodied, imaginative, and materially grounded practices. This shift reflects Dunne and Raby’s proposition that speculative design is less about forecasting than about provoking reflection and reconfiguring collective imaginaries. At the same time, DFA aligns with Irwin’s vision of transition design, which emphasises systemic thinking, long-term temporal horizons, and the capacity of design to navigate across scales, from everyday practices to planetary systems. Within this broader methodological and theoretical framework, the paper presents a case study, Growing Futures (Amandolese et al., 2025), developed within the MUSAE residency program. This speculative design concept and prototype envisions a mycelium-robot-human ecosystem for biodegradable and adaptive habitats. The project arises in response to the accelerating depletion of natural resources and the urgent need for regenerative, circular approaches to material production. It investigates mycelium-based materials, the root-like structure of fungi, which has gained increasing attention within both artistic and scientific communities as a living, biodegradable, and locally sourced material capable of transforming organic waste into structurally robust composites. When combined with advances in robotics and sensing technologies, mycelium’s responsive material qualities invite imaginaries of hybrid ecosystems in which autonomous agents collaborate with biological processes to cultivate new spatial and material forms. The design concept is situated within theoretical conversations about more-than-human world-making. Haraway (2016) famously argues for “sympoiesis”, the idea that worlds are made through ongoing, mutual, entwined processes of becoming across species and technologies. Similarly, Tsing (2015) foregrounds the ecological and cultural significance of multispecies assemblages in the Anthropocene. By envisioning a speculative environment in which robots and mycelial organisms co-produce habitats alongside human actors, the project engages with these theoretical approaches, exploring how design can facilitate forms of collaboration that decenter human agency and resist extractive logics of control and domination. The concept evolved through the four core phases of the DFA method to explore speculative, multispecies futures. Challenge exploration identified environmental and technological tensions while critiquing dominant innovation narratives, drawing on Escobar’s pluriversal design. Inspirational research combined precedents in mycelium, robotics, and living materials with interdisciplinary exchanges, highlighting knowledge translation issues central to decolonial design. Idea generation produced speculative scenarios and probes that examined possibilities and frictions across scales. Finally, iterative prototyping involved experiments that included unconstrained mycelium growth (attuning designers to biological autonomy), controlled casting (negotiating between predictability and emergence), robotic nutrient dispensing (activating symbiotic and non-anthropocentric modes of making), and integrated ecosystem settings where biological and mechanical agents co-evolved. Each phase generated new questions rather than linear outcomes, illustrating the anticipatory nature of the DFA method, which treats prototypes not as final solutions but as epistemic artefacts that reveal latent possibilities, constraints, and relational configurations, thereby exploring new forms of co-creation between living organisms and autonomous machines. By integrating biological intelligence, robotics, and material science, the project illustrates how anticipatory design can foreground situated, embodied, and more-than-human futures. It proposes a shift away from dominant technological imaginaries rooted in control, extraction, and universality toward regenerative, relational modes of making. The paper argues that art-technology collaborations such as DFA expand the methodological repertoire of design futures by combining critical, speculative, and hands-on experimentation. Ultimately, the study positions design as a powerful medium for anticipatory world-making. Through speculative experimentation, iterative prototyping, and multispecies collaboration, design can expose systemic constraints, challenge hegemonic narratives, and open space for plural, ecologically attuned futures. By tracing the development of a Growing Futures ecosystem through the DFA methodology, the paper demonstrates how design futures can operate not simply as a site of conceptual exploration but as a generative practice capable of shaping how futures are collectively imagined, negotiated, and brought into being. By applying the DFA methodology to the speculative development of a mycelium–robot–human ecosystem, this paper directly engages with the conference theme “Futuring by Designing”, positioning design as an embodied and relational practice of anticipatory world-making rather than a predictive tool. Instead of seeking to stabilise uncertainty, the research works through it, using multispecies experimentation to make visible the tensions, dependencies, and value systems embedded in emerging futures. In doing so, the study highlights how design can function as a situated practice for negotiating futures as they are enacted, revealing what becomes possible and what is put at risk when visions are translated into material and systemic configurations.