The future evolution of design-oriented practices in the context of human and non-human collaboration

The complexity of the social, environmental and institutional challenges facing by contemporary culture needs collaborative, multidisciplinary and intercultural actions to foster a changing process towards a more sustainable and collective future. With the acceleration of technology, the proliferation of data, approaches and digital tools has revealed multiple characteristics of relation with technical field, finding also several criticisms from a social and environmental point of view. In this context, the design space is evolving into a multi-agent and mixed-initiative system where human and non-human agents collaborate and co-perform shaping multidisciplinary and multimodal creative processes, offering practices beyond human- centric cooperation to identify more democratic and inclusive scenarios. Collaborative practices become interaction methods capable of overcoming critical issues and limitations highlighted by technological systems, with a focus in artificial intelligence models and virtual environments topics. The research aims to introduce an analysis of the collaborative aspects which allow this hybrid relationship and the definition of methods in which this cooperation can take place. These conceptual aspects will be applied to the analysis design-driven approaches developed in a series of university projects, in which the human-non-human practices contribute in observing the transformation of hybrid processes and the figure of the designer himself, who acquires the features of the transitional designer.