Teaching for more-than-human values in design in higher education

The objectives of MOVA are: 1. Build an understanding of the current state of innovative and best practices on more-than-human design. 2. Provide teachers at technology design programmes in h...

The objectives of MOVA are: 1. Build an understanding of the current state of innovative and best practices on more-than-human design. 2. Provide teachers at technology design programmes in higher education with innovative educational resources for teaching students and future practitioners on more-than-human design. 3. Share the educational resources on teaching more-than-human perspectives in technology design as an open educational resource (OER). 4. Disseminate the results of the project to professional networks to foster cross-cultural dialogues and increased capacity to teach more-than-human perspectives in technology design in higher education to achieve sustainable development. The OER supports technology design teachers (and potential others) to create conditions for students to grow into responsible designers of future technologies. The overarching learning objective of the teaching activities offered by the OER, is to develop students’ knowledge and skills to think, perform, and act as technology designers with sensitivity to more-than-human perspectives. We particularly address the SDGs 13, 14, 15, which all concern the planetary conditions, boundaries that we must learn to pay closer attention to.

The project involved a series of interconnected activities. The initial activity was the development of two state-of-the-art reports synthesising existing research on teaching and practising more-than-human perspectives in technology design. Drawing on these reports and the pedagogical design pattern method, several workshops were conducted to identify and capture “best practices”, which were thereafter turned into shareable and adaptable teaching activities to be included in the OER. The teaching activities, along with accompanying assessment questions, were developed through an iterative process involving multiple rounds of internal peer-review, and piloting with nearly 800 students across seven countries. Parallel to this, the OER was designed, including graphical elements for navigating the teaching activities and an information structure to organise and present the educational materials. Throughout the project period, progress, insights, and findings have been disseminated through a variety of channels: conferences, seminars, special interest groups, peer-reviewed publications, and an online community of educators interested in teaching responsible perspectives in technology design.

The output of MOVA is an open OER with teaching activities for exploring more-than-human perspectives in technology design. Rather than offering a complete curriculum or courses, the OER is intended as an inspirational repository of resources for teachers to explore and adapt based on their particular needs and settings. Besides the OER, the MOVA project has reached the following results: – Two state-of-the-art reports, peer-reviewed (Eriksson et al., 2023, 2024), – 11 peer-reviewed publications (Barendregt et al., 2025; Bekker et al., 2023; Chove et al., 2025; Eriksson et al., 2023, 2024, 2024a, 2024b; Hansen et al., 2022; Jensen et al., 2025; Nilsson et al., 2024; 2024a; 2025; Yoo et al., 2023), and two forthcoming publications (Eriksson et al., forthcoming; Hansen et al., forthcoming), – Pilots with 789 students in seven countries: Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Turkey, Finland, Portugal, Indonesia, – A theoretical framework represented as a guiding visual that educators can use when planning teaching activities, – Four workshops and a Special Interest Group (SIG) session at academic conferences, – Contribution to a growing international network of educators interested in teaching responsible technology design.