As multifaceted concerns related to humans, nonhumans, ecologies, and technologies gain prominence within the design community, posthumanism is emerging as a key intellectual pathway for critical design theory and research. This study surveys 151 design papers published in ACM venues up to September 2024 to explore the operationalization of posthumanism in computing and design scholarship. Our findings indicate that papers incorporating posthumanism are shaping an emerging field of posthuman design. We argue that the posthuman turn in computing and design can be characterized into three phases: early encounters with the posthuman, the integration of posthuman concepts, and transformation into a material-discursive practice. To support and advance the objectives of this third phase, we propose a posthuman vocabulary — a conceptual framework composed of five guiding principles — post-humanism, post-anthropocentrism, post-dualism, post-Enlightenment, and post-technologism. These principles address issues of justice, sustainability, relationality, agency, subjectivity, and critique of technological intensification, offering a guide for future material-discursive design practices.
Dedeoğlu, Ç. & Chandra, P. (2025). Navigating the posthuman turn in computing and design: A posthuman vocabulary. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (pp. 504–529). https://doi.org/10.1145/3715335.3735487
