MORE-THAN-HUMAN: AI for A Living Planet

AI is often presented as something abstract and universal, even though it depends on large planetary infrastructures, energy-intensive processes, and extractive relations with both human and non-humans. In a time of climate instability, ecological degradation, and growing awareness of planetary limits, design must face the environmental and ethical consequences of today’s AI systems.

From these reflections emerges MORE-THAN-HUMAN: AI for A Living Planet, an exhibition featuring eight projects by the students from the Final Design Studio 2, MSc Digital and Interaction Design, Politecnico di Milano. This exploration was promoted by Design Intelligences, the more-than-human collective led by Elisa Giaccardi and Francesco Vergani, in collaboration with Alessandro Masserdotti (Dotdotdot) and Matteo Martignoni (NOVA).

Each installation explores what AI might become when positioned carefully within more-than-human worlds: not as an extractive tool, but as a planetary form of intelligence, capable of fostering new modes of ecological attunement and coexistence with other intelligences. Imagining an AI that manifests through each installation to speculate on its own futures, the exhibition unfolds along three themes:

• How We Learnt to Care for the Planet Again,
• How We Learnt to Be Intelligent Together,
• How We Learnt to Live with Fragile Systems.

Teaching team

Professors: Elisa Giaccardi (course coordinator), Francesco Vergani, Salvatore Andolina

Teaching assistants: Marco Andrea Finardi, Eliška Janečková

Partners: Alessandro Masserdotti (Dotdotdot), Matteo Martignoni (NOVA)