What if elephants ordered dinner? speculating more-than-human futures for human–elephant conflict human–elephant conflict

Abstract

More-than-human design (MTHD) has emerged as a framework that repositions nonhumans as active participants in design processes, challenging human-centred assumptions and opening space for multispecies futures. Within this orientation, speculative design provides tools to imagine alternative trajectories and provoke reflection rather than deliver immediate solutions. This paper brings these approaches together to investigate how speculative more-than-human design might reframe human–elephant conflict. Through participatory workshops in Puliyankulama, Sri Lanka, involving villagers, university students, and scientific experts, the project surfaced the insight that elephants exhibit dietary intelligence. Crop raiding was understood not as an indiscriminate intrusion but as a response to unmet nutritional needs. Building on this, the design work developed speculative outcomes that imagine futures in which humans actively respond to elephants’ nutritional agency. The project demonstrates how speculative more-than-human design can translate local insights into provocative design interventions that unsettle dominant framings of elephants as threats. Rather than offering technical fixes such as fences or buffer-zone schemes, it positions design as a means to cultivate imaginaries of coexistence and to foreground elephants as co-participants in shared landscapes. In doing so, the project aimed to rethink the dualistic framing of human–elephant conflict as separation and instead imagine futures of coexistence. Ultimately, this research contributes to the discourse on design for coexistence by evidencing how speculative and more-than-human design approaches can reconceptualize human–wildlife conflicts as generative opportunities for multispecies futures.