Entangled Responsibilities: Food, Scale and Design Research Beyond the Human is a 90-minute Conversation for the DRS 2026 Conference in Edinburgh. The session explores how food, embodiment, and scale can be used as methodological tools in design research that moves beyond an exclusively human-centred perspective. It asks how designers and researchers might account for forms of responsibility that emerge across bodies, species, infrastructures, materials, environments, and everyday practices.

The Conversation will gather participants around a long, walkable table covered in paper and organised through scalar and thematic axes, including micro/macro and ecological/anthropological. Participants will each bring a small food item and place it within this shared mapping environment. Through annotation, discussion, and collective reflection, the group will trace how food connects personal experience to wider ecological, social, cultural, and infrastructural systems. In this way, food is treated not simply as a prompt for discussion, but as a research apparatus through which interdependence, care, accountability, and evidence can be examined.

The session contributes to debates in more-than-human design, ecological citizenship, and transdisciplinary design research by testing how situated and embodied methods can generate knowledge. It considers what forms of rigour are appropriate when design research engages with relational, ecological, and more-than-human worlds, and how such work can be made legible within academic research contexts.

The Conversation will generate visual documentation, participant annotations, facilitator notes, photographs, and a post-event reflective synthesis. These materials will be analysed thematically, with attention to recurring ideas of interdependence, responsibility, evidence, care, and scale. The outcomes will inform the development of a methodological framework for more-than-human design research and support a future journal article. By creating a structured space for dialogue and collective mapping, the session aims to advance discussion on responsibility, method, and knowledge production in design research.