Textile making as a practice has historically prioritized human-based need (Colchester, 1991; Geijer, 1979), however, the era of climate emergency compels revisiting design and production traditions within the textile industry and reconnecting with cycles of a more-than-human world. A term first proposed by philosopher and ecologist David Abram (1996), the more-than-human world, has come to describe the interconnected matrix of relationships beyond isolated human understanding to include the wisdom of nature and served as the focus of many research studies ranging from Participatory Design (PD) to Ethics (Noorani & Bridgestocke, 2018; de La Bellacasa, 2017). Yet, how such approaches inform textile making practice remains an open question. This research enquired how encountering more-than-human forces might shape designer relationships to their materials of practice, by reconnecting to a material life cycle phase typically considered destructive from a human perspective and regenerative for non-human forces—decomposition. Using hentilagets, a word from the dialect of Shetland for small tufts of wool picked up and gathered from fences and fields in Scotland, and waste wool this enquiry sought to understand if decomposition was a meaningful grounding to inform textile making through engagement with design practitioners who worked with wool in Scotland and the more-than-human matter found in
Scotland’s soil.