Irina V. Wang
Irina is a designer and researcher practicing the creative work of cross-sector translation, the strategic work of systems transition, and the ethical work of forging allyship. She grew up Taiwanese-Floridian and moved to the UK, where she started out as a student of typographic design at University of the Arts London and went on to join world-renowned studio Pentagram, leading identity design work for cultural sector clients like London Design Festival. Combining a love of letterforms, literature, and environmental philosophy, she also worked alongside linguists and various native communities to revitalize endangered languages, daydreaming on the TEDx stage about a different kind of role design might play in society. Recognizing that language/environmental/social justice are one demand arising from shared systemic issues, she pursued an Industrial Design masters at Rhode Island School of Design to interrogate the role of artefacts in transdisciplinary change-making. At the intersection of existential risk and structural injustice, Irina’s current work spans equitable carbon sequestration, Indigenous futurity, stakeholder policymaking, more-than-human infrastructure, and global security architecture. She has recently fabricated objects for peacemaking workshops with the United Nations, developed a portfolio of interventions addressing nuclear threat with the Center for Complexity, and designed participatory research tools to forefront reindeer herders’ experience of climate change during a Fulbright term in Arctic Finland.
Project
In the year 2074, marine traffic through the Bering Strait has increased due to Arctic sea ice melt. The ebb and flow of autonomous commercial shipping responds in deference to the real-time migration and activity of the region’s beluga whale populations—voluble “canaries of the sea” monitored by a network of advanced hydrophones.
Rather than portray a distant dystopia or utopia, this shipping map hints at plausible adaptations of technology and commerce as more-than-human agency is not only considered, but reinforced through logistical and regulatory infrastructure. It doesn’t make a case for the whales’ worthy intelligence or quantify their ecosystem services; it’s a window into a future where human empathy is assumed and irrelevant because it has already been systemically operationalized.
In Discursive Design (2018), Scott Klinker describes the practice of critical design as “[trying] on a new set of values embodied in a polemic design proposal. It becomes a way of visualizing how our values may evolve.” Within the subgenres of discursive, critical, and speculative design, there’s a growing exploration of more-than-human scenarios aiming to enrich interspecies understanding and expand the moral circle that shapes boundaries of both individual behavior and societal norms.
But interspecies understanding, even awe, doesn’t often translate to protective action—especially if that action introduces human inconvenience. Since the 1960s, the US Navy has closely studied echolocating odontocetes (toothed whales such as belugas and dolphins) to improve military sonar and detect buried mines. Meanwhile, since WWII, global shipping vessels began moving 10x more cargo and at higher speeds, raising low-frequency ocean noise by 32x. As Ed Yong writes in An Immense World (2022), “we are closer than ever to understanding what it is like to be another animal, but we have made it harder than ever for other animals to be […] Instead of stepping into the Umwelten of other animals, we have forced them to live in ours by barraging them with stimuli of our own making.” Noise pollution caused by shipping and military activity is well documented today, as is its disruption of whale communication and navigation.
In 2024, voluntary slow-down zones and static lane adjustments are good-faith attempts at interspecies empathy without creating meaningful friction in the anthropocentric agenda. The incremental measures are reactive and appeal to individual morality, a more-than-human equivalent of bringing your reusable bags to the grocery store. In 2074, your organic mycelium-leather shoes from Portugal won’t make it in time for Christmas because a pod of Eastern Chukchi belugas are heading south a bit earlier than expected.
Today’s underwater monitoring and AI computing can easily catch up to this vision, but will our politics? Environmental governance researcher Karen Bakker puts it this way: “Technologies make it possible to enable forms of legal personhood that were formerly not available to us. Whether or not we grant those to non-humans and extend the political or economic franchise is, of course, a political discussion.”
It’s one discussion, among many, that must start in earnest now. When we track animals with pinpoint accuracy in real time, how is that data protected from hackers and poachers? What does cross-species data sovereignty look like, and what layers of opacity might be necessary under which conditions? When we invoke the term interspecies today, it’s largely unilateral in practice. How long will the human role be limited to paternalism before non-humans can grant, retract, even request meaningful consent? Perhaps an AI-enabled feedback loop of multilateral interspecies communication transforms what is possible for biodiverse planetary governance. Would we be ready to listen?
Irina Wang’s work is displayed throughout the week on a screen in Foyer C1 at the end of the hallway on the groundfloor. For her presentation and poster, please check the links below.
