Multispecies ethnography is fieldwork in which animals, plants, and microbes appear as subjects with histories rather than as food or backdrop (Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010). Its most-read case follows the matsutake mushroom from Oregon forests to Tokyo markets and shows a fungus, loggers, foragers, and traders making a living together in logged-over ground that no one planned (Tsing, 2015). Feral Atlas (2020) catalogues 79 cases of species spreading along human infrastructure: shipping routes, plantations, drainage ditches, ballast water. Ethnography supplied a method that design lacked: attention to a specific organism in a specific place over a long time.

Companion species is the claim that humans and dogs made each other over roughly 15,000 years of shared history, and that no species is the author of itself (Haraway, 2003; 2008). Sympoiesis, making-with, names the same relation as a general principle, set against the self-organising autopoiesis of cybernetics: nothing makes itself, everything is made in company (Haraway, 2016). Two things carried over into design from this: an ethic of responsibility to particular others, and a refusal to design for "Nature" in the abstract.

Posthumanist design theory drops the assumption that the designer is the author and the human the user. A designer becomes one participant among many in the making of a thing, alongside materials, organisms, and the uses that arrive after handover (Forlano, 2017; Wakkary, 2021). The adjacent term more-than-human (Abram, 1996) is used almost interchangeably. The shift is from designing for users to designing among cohabitants, which changes who has standing in the brief.

A nonhuman persona is a profile of a species built from ecological literature and expert interviews and brought into the workshop as if it were a user; the first described the grey-headed flying fox for smart-city planning in Sydney, with its roost sites, foraging range, and heat-stress threshold in place of demographics (Tomitsch et al., 2021). A proxy goes further and appoints a person to speak for a species. The Zoöp model (2022) gives that person a title, Speaker for the Living, and a seat on the board. Both methods make explicit that a human is speaking on behalf of an animal, and both show the evidence used.

Animal-Aided Design asks for a list of what a target species needs to nest, feed, shelter, and move in each season, and checks the plan against that list before the building is drawn (Weisser and Hauck, 2017). Animal-Computer Interaction applies the same rigour to interactive systems, treating animals as users whose welfare and consent have to be designed for (Mancini, 2011). This approach relies on specification rather than empathy, which makes it easier to verify.

Long observation replaces the interview. The owl-hollow work in Melbourne combined lidar scans of old-growth trees, records of which hollows powerful owls actually used, and camera monitoring of the prosthetic structures installed afterward (Deep Design Lab). Hollows large enough for a powerful owl take more than a century to form, which is why the birds are losing them faster than forests can replace them. The knowledge involved is local and slow, a form of ecological intelligence that has to be gathered on site.