Episode 239: More-than-human design with Stanislav Roudavski

This episode's guest is Dr Stanislav Roudavski, who is a designer and academic. He leads Deep Design Lab, a research and creative collective that focuses on design for and with nonhuman beings. He is also a Senior Lecturer in Digital Architectural Design at the University of Melbourne. His research develops theories and practices that engage with nonhumans, including animals, plants, and ecosystems, but also artificial agents such as AI. In this episode, he talks about his recent article ‘From Dingoes to AI: Who Makes Decisions in More-than-Human Worlds?’, which was published in the open access journal TRACE ∴ Journal for Human-Animal Studies in 2025 and was co-authored with Douglas Brock.

In his answers to the regular questions, Stanislav mentions the following works:

• "Kholstomer", a short story by Leo Tolstoy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kholstomer)
• Vladimir Vernadsky's 1926 book The Biosphere (1998 English translation: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4612-1750-3)
• Peter Kropotkin's 1902 collection Mutual Aid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolution)
• His own 2016 presentation 'Building Like Animals: Using Autonomous Robots to Search, Evaluate and Build' (https://isea-archives.siggraph.org/presentation/building-like-animals-using-autonomous-robots-to-search-evaluate-and-build/)
• John Odling-Smee's open access 2024 book Niche Construction (https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5822/Niche-ConstructionHow-Life-Contributes-to-Its-Own)
• His own Google Scholar profile: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=4J_lRh4AAAAJ&hl=en
• His own Academia.edu profile: https://unimelb.academia.edu/StanislavRoudavski
• And the Deep Design Lab wiki: https://wiki.deepdesignlab.online/.