Aesthetics in Designing with the Living: A Systematic Review of Critical Perspectives and Artefacts

Design aesthetics, predominantly concerned with artefact’s form and experience, has significantly shaped the evolution of design and HCI. As design practices expand to incorporate living organisms and embrace posthumanist shifts, traditional human-centered aesthetics increasingly fall short in addressing nonhuman experiences and the ethical and ecological complexities of more-than-human entanglements. Responding to the absence of overarching guidance for moving beyond traditional aesthetics, this paper systematically reviews more-than-human aesthetic perspectives within and beyond HCI and design. We first examine contemporary critical aesthetic discourse across disciplines such as art, geography, and human-animal interaction, identifying three key orientations that move away from human-centric aesthetics—phenomenologically, ontologically, and conceptually. We then review artefact-oriented publications in HCI and design venues to offer concrete examples of how these perspectives can be navigated, interpreted, combined, and applied in practice. This paper contributes a critical framework to inspire and challenge designers as they engage with aesthetics in more-than-human design.